The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
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When Churchill first came to American shores, Henry Ford had yet to successfully propel his quadricycle by means of a gasoline engine, and the Dodge brothers were still building bicycles in Ontario, Canada. So, too, in Sheffield, England, was Thomas Humber, whose armored motorcars Churchill relied on during the Blitz, though he would rarely actually operate one in his lifetime—not because he was an aging Victorian man who did not understand the mechanics of automobiles but because he was a Victorian man who believed it only proper that liveried drivers drove carriages, including motorized carriages. Churchill was approaching early middle age when Orville Wright, at Kitty Hawk, took aloft the spruce-and-wire flying machine that he and his brother Wilbur had built. By then the earliest infernal contraptions built by Thomas Humber and Henry Ford were petrifying cows and horses and old women on both sides of the Atlantic. In the motorcar Churchill saw the genesis of the tank; in the airplane, the fighter plane and the bomber. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he mused in magazine articles on the nature of rockets, atomic power, and television. He analyzed the moral and political implications of every new technology brought forth in the first half of the twentieth century. The Etruria had carried sail on the 1895 voyage lest its steam engines fail during the ten-day Atlantic crossing. Churchill departed his other country for the final time on April 14, 1961, on board a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 that, pushed along by the jet stream seven miles high, carried him home across the Atlantic at more than five hundred miles per hour.
Moran’s memoir is correct in one regard; after Churchill suffered a serious bout of pneumonia in 1958, his ailments became more frequent and more serious—the 1959 strokes followed in 1960 by a hairline spinal fracture from a fall in his bedroom. Moran ordered bed rest on that occasion. Churchill refused. Caring for Churchill resulted in “open warfare” between the nurses and the patient, nurse Roy Howells recalled. A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not—Churchill’s state funeral—in motion. On the flight to London, Churchill, heavily sedated, awoke, and muttered to Montague Browne: “I don’t think I’ll go back to that place, it’s unlucky. First Toby, and then this.” Montague Browne had forgotten Toby, the budgerigar, but Churchill had not. The body was frail, but not the wit. On his arrival in London, he flashed the “V” sign from his stretcher. He underwent surgery to insert a pin in his hip. After three weeks in the hospital, he left for 28 Hyde Park Gate, where within three months he could stroll unaided to the little gardens behind the house.22
He told Moran he felt he was “lingering,” and by 1962 he was. Prof—Lord Cherwell—had died in 1957, at seventy-one. He had served Churchill as science adviser and loyal friend since 1920. Brendan Bracken, fifty-seven, followed Cherwell in 1958 after suffering the horrific effects of throat cancer and botched cobalt radiation therapy. During his 1959 trip to America, Churchill visited Foster Dulles and George Marshall in the hospital, the former dying of cancer, the latter of the effects of two strokes and kidney failure. Two weeks later, Dulles—whom Churchill once described as “the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet with him”—was dead. Marshall went in October. Alanbrooke went in 1963, but not before publishing his wartime diaries, which hurt Churchill deeply. Another, though lesser, link to the past was broken in 1964 when Montague Phippen Porch, three years Churchill’s junior, died. Porch had been Jennie Churchill’s third and last husband, and therefore Sir Winston’s stepfather. The hardest blow—after Diana’s death—came on June 9, 1964, when his friend of nearly six decades, Max Beaverbrook, died of cancer, at eighty-five. Montague Browne began his narrative of these final years: “This is a story of decline.” The decline came in 1963 and 1964 in fits and starts, relapses and recoveries, but it came, relentless and unyielding.23
Churchill would much prefer to have someone put an old dance hall tune or martial march on the gramophone than turn on the television. He did enjoy an occasional episode of Sea Hunt, starring Lloyd Bridges, but otherwise believed, as he told Moran, that “this bloody invention will do harm to the society and to the race.” But on April 9, 1963, he watched with satisfaction as a live satellite feed from the Rose Garden of the White House brought him images of President Kennedy bestowing upon him, by Act of Congress, honorary U.S. citizenship. Churchill became the first person to be accorded the honor. The Old Man, too ill to attend the ceremony, was represented by Randolph and young Winston. Seven weeks later, he embarked on his eighth and final voyage aboard Christina, a tour of the Aegean. On July 4 he left Athens for London by air; Christina was then made ready for its next guest, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who sought a peaceful autumn interlude after the death that summer of her infant son, Patrick. She also sought rest and relaxation in order to prepare herself for the fall campaign season in the United States, which would include a trip to Texas in November. And so it came to pass that Churchill’s television again saw use late in the evening of Friday, November 22. That night Churchill sat in silence for a long time before the fire. Yet, as with Diana’s death a month earlier, the full impact of the president’s murder was dulled by Churchill’s advanced age.24
As 1964 came on, Churchill still served as the member of Parliament from Woodford, but only infrequently took his place on the front bench, below the gangway, where he had sat during the Wilderness Years of the 1930s. He visited the House of Commons for the last time on July 27, and soon thereafter announced that he would not stand for Woodford in that October’s general election. He left Chartwell for the last time in October, taking up residence at 27–28 Hyde Park Gate, where a ground-floor bedroom had been prepared for him. On November 30, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday in the company of his family, the Colvilles, and the Montague Brownes. Champagne flowed all day; a basket of Whitstable oysters was hauled in. Cakes arrived all day from well-wishers, and 70,000 cards and telegrams from around the world. By midafternoon, hundreds of Londoners crowded the street in front of the house. A news photographer snapped a shot of a smiling Sir Winston, attired in a siren suit, peering from behind a parted curtain. Dinner—and brandy and cigars—carried into the early hours of December 1. Ten days later Churchill made an appearance at the Other Club; it was to be his last.
Christmas was a subdued affair. Churchill’s gift to Montague Browne was his six-volume war memoir. A few days later, Montague Browne asked the Old Man to sign the books. Churchill managed to sign his full name in the first volume; by the sixth he could only scrawl “W.” They were the last papers he signed. Now the Great Man did indeed spend long hours staring into the fireplace. Yet he still took lunch with Clementine, and he still took his cigar and brandy after dinner.25
But on January 9 he refused both.
His nurses helped him to bed that night. He was not to leave it again.
On the twelfth—Churchill was by then unconscious—doctors Moran and Brain diagnosed a stroke, and informed the family to prepare for the worst, which the doctors believed would likely come very soon. But they underestimated the strength of their patient. Days passed, and then a week. Old friends and colleagues came by to pay their respects. Violet Bonham Carter stopped in, but only for the briefest of moments: “Good-bye, Winston,” she said, standing at the foot of his bed. Then she turned and walked out.
Early on a January day about a dozen years earlier, Jock Colville brought a minor matter of state to Churchill’s attention, as the Old Man shaved. Churchill turned to Colville, and said: “Today is the twenty-fourth of January. It is the day my father died. It is the day that I shall die too.”
And on January 24, 1965, he did.26
Churchill’s coffin lay in state at Westminster Hall for three days and three nights
. More than 320,000 people filed past the catafalque, the silent queue of men and women and children threading through Parliament Square and on across Westminster Bridge. On the bleak, cold morning of Sunday, January 30, the coffin, covered by the Union Jack, was borne from the hall on the shoulders of eight Grenadier Guards. It was placed on a gun carriage drawn by one hundred Royal Navy seamen and flanked by the guard of honor nearly one hundred strong, in bearskins and greatcoats. Randolph and eight young Churchill men took their places behind the gun carriage. Before and behind, companies of troops from storied regiments—from the Hussars, from the RAF, from the army, in khaki, and the Royal Marines, in blue—stood at attention awaiting the order to march. The Horse Guard in their red jackets waited on their impatient steeds. Hundreds of thousands of Britons lined the Strand and Fleet Street and the roads to Ludgate Hill and to St. Paul’s, where the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his purple robes, stood atop the steps and awaited the procession. Shortly after 9:45 the first of ninety cannons in Hyde Park fired its salute. The Earl Marshal of England, in greatcoat and cocked hat, raised his baton.
Then, to the haunting beat of a single drum, the procession began the journey to St Paul’s. Only twice in the past 112 years had a nonroyal personage been so honored with a state funeral: the Duke of Wellington in 1852 and Gladstone in 1898. Queen Victoria attended neither funeral, but Queen Elizabeth II honored Churchill by her presence in St. Paul’s. She was joined by representatives from more than 110 nations, including four kings, a queen, five heads of state, and sixteen prime ministers. Charles de Gaulle, wearing a plain kepi and simple uniform, unadorned with insignia, medals, or ribbons, stood a head taller than all present as the great imperial ceremony began.27
From St. Paul’s, the coffin was taken by motor launch up the Thames to Waterloo Station. There it was put aboard one of five Pullman coaches hauled by the Battle of Britain–class locomotive Winston S. Churchill for the sixty-mile journey to the Oxfordshire village of Bladon and the little churchyard of St. Martin’s, within sight of the spires of Blenheim Palace, where the story had begun. Lord Moran, finding in the end his literary voice, wrote:
And at Bladon, in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to the English earth, which in his finest hour, he had held inviolate.28
Eight months later, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, at the request of the Queen and Parliament, placed a sixty-by-seventy-six-inch polished green-marble slab in the floor of that thousand-year-old monument to English history. All who enter cannot help but to see it there, in the nave, just a few feet inside the great west doors. Engraved upon it are the words:
REMEMBER
WINSTON
CHURCHILL
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Alan Brooke, Viscount Alanbrooke, excerpts from War Diaries 1939–1945, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (Berkeley: University of California Press and London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.
Alexander Cadogan, excerpts from The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M., 1938–1945, edited by Donald Dilks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.
Clementine Churchill and Winston S. Churchill, excerpts from letters from Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills, edited by Mary Soames. Copyright © Clementine Churchill. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Master and Fellows of Churchill College Cambridge, the Estate of Lady Clementine Churchill, and the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill, excerpts from The Second World War, Volume 2: Their Finest Hour; The Second World War, Volume 3: The Grand Alliance; The Second World War, Volume 4: The Hinge of Fate; The Second World War, Volume 5: Closing the Ring; and The Second World War, Volume 6: Triumph and Tragedy. Copyright 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953 by Houghton Mifflin Company, renewed © 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981 by the Honourable Lady Sarah Audley and the Honourable Lady Soames. Copyright © by Winston S. Churchill. All reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill. All rights reserved.
John Colville, excerpts from The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955. Copyright © 1985 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.
Josef Goebbels, excerpts from The Goebbels Diaries, translated and edited by Louis P. Lochner. Copyright 1948 by The Fireside Press. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
William Averill Harriman and Elie Able, excerpts from Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941–1946. Copyright © 1975 by William Averill Harriman and Elie Able. Used by permission of Random House, Inc., and Hutchinson Publishing Group, Ltd./The Random House Group Limited.
Hastings Ismay, excerpts from The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay. Published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Harold Macmillan, excerpts from Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950–1957. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan.
Harold Nicolson, excerpts from The War Years: Diaries and Letters 1939–1945. Reprinted with permission of Juliet Nicolson.
Mollie Panter-Downes, excerpts from London War Notes, 1939–1945. Copyright © 1971 by Mollie Panter-Downes. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, LLC.
Seneca, excerpt from “Hercules Furens” from Six Tragedies, translated by Emily Wilson. Translation © 2010 by Emily Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.
Robert E. Sherwood, excerpts from Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. Copyright 1948, 1950 and renewed © 1976, 1978 by Robert E. Sherwood. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
William L. Shirer, excerpts from Berlin Diary: The Diary of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941. Copyright 1941, renewed © 1968 by William L. Shirer. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Excerpts from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Copyright © 1960 by William L. Shirer. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Walter Thompson, excerpts from Assignment: Churchill. Copyright © 1955 by Walter Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, LLC.
Charles Wilson, Baron Moran, excerpts from Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965; Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. Copyright © 1966 by Trustees of Lord Moran. Reprinted with permission of Constable Robinson Publishers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Reid is an award-winning journalist. In late 2003, Manchester, in failing health, asked him to complete The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. A Boston native, Reid now lives in western North Carolina.
Books by William Manchester
Disturber of the Peace (1951)
The City of Anger (1953)
Shadow of the Monsoon (1956)
Beard the Lion (1958)
A Rockefeller Family Portrait (1959)
The Long Gainer (1961)
Portrait of a President (1962)
The Death of a President (1967)
The Arms of Krupp (1968)
The Glory and the Dream (1974)
Controversy (1976)
American Caesar (1978)
Goodbye, Darkness (1980)
The Last Lion: Visions of Glory (1983)
One Brief Shining Moment (1983)
In Our Time (1985)
The Last Lion: Alone (1988)
A World Lit Only by Fire (1992)
The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm (co-author Paul Reid) (2012)
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SOURCE NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES USED IN THESE NOTES
C&R-TCC Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols., edited by Warren F. Kimball. Princeton, 1984.
CAB British Cabinet Documents, Public Record Office, Kew.
ChP Churchill Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, U.K.
Hansard Record of Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).
NYT New York Times.
Times The Times of London.
TWY Harold Nicolson: The War Years 1939–1945, vol. 2 of Diaries and Letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson. New York, 1967.
W&C-TPL Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills, edited by Mary Soames. New York, 2001.
WM/[name]; PFR/ [name] Author interviews.
WSCHCS Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, edited by Robert Rhodes James, vols. VI (1935–1942), VII (1943–1949), and VIII (1950–1963). London, 1974.
The Official Biography of Winston Spencer Churchill, by Martin Gilbert (Boston, 1966–1988), is cited as follows:
GILBERT 6 Volume 6. Finest Hour 1939–1941