Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  When the Prime Minister finally strode in to face the legislators on V-E Day, he was given the most tumultuous ovation in the history of the assembly. Members forsook all attempts to observe the rituals and leaped up on the benches, shouting and waving order papers. Churchill stood at his accustomed place beside the dispatch box. Tears were running down his face, and he was nodding his head, while he waited to exercise his priceless privilege of making the formal announcement of victory.

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  Two months later, on July 26, the British admirably concealed their enthusiasm for their hero when they went to the polls and voted him out of office. The returns of the general election of 1945, midway between the two surrender dates, gave the Labor Party a majority of 146 votes over all other parties. Clement Attlee, the former Lord Privy Seal, succeeded to Britain’s highest political post. A great many reasons have been advanced, both in England and in America, for this seeming act of ingratitude. As might be expected, nearly everything recorded on the subject is tinted with each writer’s political point of view. In the eyes of the left, Churchill was deposed because he was incapable, by heredity and preference, of correcting the social ills of the underprivileged. According to the right, the British anti-capitalists under the spiritual leadership of the sly and poisonous Harold Laski had fought a hard war undermining the existing form of English society by the propaganda of collectivism. Somewhere between these versions were a few other reasons: the natural wish for change at war’s end of a people long chafed by restrictions; the fear of a war government by soldiers and sailors anxious to muster out quickly, and, perhaps of supreme importance, a subconscious desire to obliterate everything closely connected with the memory of the past six years.

  As to the claims of the left and right, certain conclusions are now possible in the light of the seven years since 1945. Collectivism has had several bad seasons. The Russian system has become at least ostensibly (and even noisily) unpopular with Americans who formerly cherished it deeply; also, British Socialism has demonstrated its incapacity to survive without fiscal support from the hated capitalists whom it hopes eventually to socialize. This gives rise to an interesting question. In the words of the unpartisan Viennese economist, Dr. Karl Fuerbringer (translated by H. Howard Thurston), “If socialism, a scheme of mediocrities rather than men of proven ability, is financially unworkable, what happens when the United States is at last socialized by confiscatory income taxes and strangulation of industry in the British manner? Without a capitalist nation to produce wealth, civilization may expect chaos [urgemisch].”

  More decisively in the British case, it was apparently decided in the general election of 1951 that Socialism did not, after all, provide just that rosy degree of Utopia which had been promised by the advocates of “limited regimentation.” There was less food than ever, prices were rising, restrictions hung over the land like spiderwebs, the state-owned railroads stank with filth, money by the hundreds of millions was thrown away in desperation ventures like the one to convert Africa into a peanut farm, the pound was a shrunken and despised currency in the foreign exchange, class hatreds had risen to new heights, the Empire had come apart at the seams, once friendly nations were being exploited by Russia to break off treaties and grab British property, the great and good ally of America was sorely tried by Socialist dealings with enemy Communists, and, through it all, men of enormous incompetence made ignorant and ungrammatical speeches promising sterner times ahead.

  The elections of October cast serious reflections on Socialism and its leadership. The British majority decided, as it will always decide in a crisis, that brains are required even to run a government.

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  As before, Churchill wasted little time in mourning his abrupt repudiation. He had been kicked out so often and so unceremoniously that he had developed an independent set of reflexes to accommodate the shocks. Too, his situation was now subtly different. The hot pangs of ambition were appeased; having been Prime Minister, he had ascended to the topmost rung of the ladder and there was no place else to climb unless he aspired to be King, which situation was already filled. He was content to resume making a living and to settle into a revered but, he hoped, impermanent niche as leader of the Opposition. The government was manned by boobs, and he planned to remove them; in the meantime, his position in British history was secure. To a female Balkan visitor who said, with honest naivete, “It is terrible — now they will shoot you,” he replied, “I have hopes, Madam, that the sentence will be mitigated to a life-term at various forms of hard labor.”

  He was cool to suggestions of honors. It was generally understood in England that he declined a dukedom. The story was told in the clubs of his answer to an offer of the Garter. “Why should I accept the Garter from His Majesty [it went] when his people have just given me the boot?” When his old constituency of Dundee (which had embraced the waterlogged Scrymgeour) offered to confer on him the freedom of the city, he refused without comment. And he ignored an invitation to speak at Oxford, whose students, before the war, had passed a notorious resolution never to fight for their country. “A curious set of young gentlemen,” observed Churchill. “They will not fight and they cannot row.”

  Certain unofficial honors were pressed on him in the form of gifts. Indeed, a good part of the world-wide indignation at his dismissal was expressed in packages that began arriving at Chartwell soon after the Japanese surrender. Spain led off with a number that stood up well even among the elegant company that followed. It consisted of the stuffed head of a bull that had been born with a startling white “V” on its forehead; the torero Manolete had dedicated the bull to Churchill on D-Day and killed it in his quick, clean style. Jamaica came through with 500 cigars “as a token of appreciation for his services to society,” and New Zealand made him a gift of money raised in a “shilling fund.” Churchill handed it over to St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, saying, “They helped everybody — including me — during the war.” King Ibn Saud gave him a gold and jeweled sword and dagger and a set of ceremonial robes in a hide case. A man in Portugal got special permission to ship him 116 gallons of a very old port wine, the Stockowners Association of Australia sent him a kangaroo, and a group of Maoris inquired whether he would like a male or female kiwi. An elderly woman living at the Cumberland Hotel mailed him her prize Admiral de Ruyter chair, and, to balance things off, added a dessert service for Mrs. Churchill. Some African farmers sent up a beautiful ebony walking stick because “He was the man who won the war,” and Switzerland stepped forward with a rather mysterious “perpetual-motion” clock, bound all around in brass and impossible to wind but “guaranteed to run forever.” The French town of Aix-en-Provence, in solemn conclave, officially changed its name to “La Ville Churchill,” and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the helpful volume upon which he had leaned so heavily, came out with a new edition in which there were 60 samples from Churchill himself.

  The only mildly sour notes in this orgy of tribute involved a couple of demands that were made on the retiring Premier. Theresa Garnett, the now elderly suffragette, announced that she was opening a Suffragette Museum and asked him if he would mind returning the whip with which she had once socked him. And, in Pretoria, a man who had been the prison barber detailed General Smuts to collect five shillings he said Churchill owed him for a haircut. Churchill had escaped before paying up, the barber related, and he would like to get the account off the books.

  Immediately after the election, Churchill and his wife went to southern France for a rest. They occupied the Château Bordaberry, lent him by a Canadian, General Raymond Brutinel, who for the ten-day visit brought out the furniture that had been hidden during the German occupation, repaired all damage to the grounds and gardens, rigged telephone lines, and installed a new pelota court. Notwithstanding the lavish surroundings, the Churchills were obliged to subsist on army rations for most of their stay. Once the war was over, Churchill elected to space out his work with numerous vacations, most of which were comb
ined with business in some way. In 1946 he made another trip to the United States, where he accepted an honorary degree from several colleges, including Columbia and Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He chose the latter place as the locale of a political blockbuster he dropped with President Truman sitting on the platform beside him. It was time for a new alliance, Churchill blandly announced, cementing together England and America, as an implied buffer against the growing hostility of Russia. Being the first overt statement against Russia by a responsible leader of Western Powers, the speech caused a sensation. Churchill foresaw trouble with Russia, and said so openly, adding a warning note that should have been more widely attended: “I have not always been wrong!” But Russia was, at the moment, the darling of the intellectuals, and the former Prime Minister’s words were regarded as heresy of a very reactionary order.

  Continuing his travels, he returned to Monte Carlo, the scene of his former disasters, but this time confined himself largely to swimming. Churchill seldom packs a bathing suit for his trips; somebody has to go out and buy him one. Functionaries were sent through the best shops of the principality in a sort of treasure hunt to obtain “the largest pair of trunks in Monte Carlo.” Somebody turned up with some crimson ones that had ample material for a good-sized awning. In them he took to the beach. A fair crowd collected, not so much to see Churchill, it was thought, as to have a look at the trunks. He climbed up out of the water, scowled at the onlookers, and was heard to growl, “I’m no bathing beauty.” In Switzerland he was lent a house on Lake Geneva by Alfred Kern, the director of the Swiss Bank Corporation. When the mayor of the local village volunteered to serve as butler, Churchill casually signed him on. It made an interesting master-servant relationship: the mayor addressed Churchill as “Your Highness,” and Churchill referred to the mayor as “Your Honor.” The mayoress came up to fill in as laundrywoman. It was noted, somewhat later in Luxembourg, that Churchill had at last taken cognizance of his faulty French. Preparing to deliver a speech in the Opera House, he led off with, “Gardez-vous bien — je vous addresse ert français.” En route to the city, he had been delayed repeatedly by people who lay down in front of his automobile, to halt the procession and have a look at England’s wartime Prime Minister.

  Part of the Churchills’ reason for wandering at this time was their lack of living quarters at home. Chartwell was being evacuated by the government, and a town house they bought, at 28 Hyde Park Gate, was in the hands of the decorators. When the two establishments were ready for their distinguished occupants, the Churchills returned to England and settled into the pattern of life that they lead today. Twenty-eight Hyde Park Gate is a low, red brick, ivy-covered structure of twenty-five rooms, on a quiet street near the exclusive Park Lane district of London. It has a library and a drawing room and three reception (or living) rooms on the ground floor, and there are ten bedrooms, each with a sitting room, upstairs. The décor of the small reception room nearest the street is built around the handsome, tinted, life-size photograph of his mother. Hyde Park, where Churchill sometimes strolls when it is sufficiently dark so that he cannot be recognized, is only a few squares away. The other residents of his street are wealthy (or as wealthy as one can be in present-day England) businessmen and a couple of high government officials with tax-exempt expense accounts. Recently, for “office space,” he also bought the house next door — at 27 Hyde Park Gate. It was badly blitzed during the war but has several usable rooms. Churchill’s neighbors, who almost never see him, were surprised on moving day when he turned up at the curb in a green baize apron and oversaw the uncrating of his books and their removal to the library of his new workshop. He employs six secretaries, most of whom occupy rooms at 28 Hyde Park Gate; various of these accompany him as he moves back and forth between the London house and his Kentish farm home of Chartwell, which is his favorite place on earth.

  In a socialized and impoverished country, Chartwell ranks as a magnificent estate. And it is conducted in the baronial manner of the Marlboroughs in their heyday. Besides two hundred acres of farm land, it has eighty acres of garden; in the main residence there are five reception rooms, a great hall, nineteen bedrooms and eight baths, and on the grounds are three separate garages, three cottages, stables, two lakes and the heated, floodlit swimming pool that Churchill built with his own hands. In 1946, a group of his friends bought Chartwell under a financial arrangement whereby he and his family can live in it tax-free for the rest of his life, after which it will go to the National Trust as a memorial of his services to the commonwealth. At the end of the war, too, a London hotel man jubilantly presented Churchill with a mansion at Sevenoaks, near Chartwell, in gratitude for what he had done for the British people. Churchill thanked him and gave it to the British Legion to be used as a convalescent center for wounded veterans.

  The tax-free status of Chartwell is handy for Churchill, whose living was for years so luxurious that, despite his large earnings, the outgo threatened his income, a dangerous state of imbalance that Micawber decried eloquently. The servant staffs of both Hyde Park and Chartwell fluctuate, but neither ever has less than a cook, a valet-butler, and two maids. At Chartwell there are, in addition, two gardeners and varying numbers of farm hands and other workmen, and when the six secretaries and Churchill’s team of writing experts are added to these, the weekly pay roll is staggering. Expenses are cut down slightly by family contributions of labor. Notwithstanding the leisurely home of her grandmother, the Countess of Airlie, Mrs. Churchill likes to help in the preparation of meals and in general ably fills the position of household steward, while her husband has been known to do the work of two or three laborers. A couple of years ago, he bought some secondhand chicken runs and undertook to repair them himself, climbing up on the roofs and slapping on tar with a big brush. Finished with these, he dug several fishponds and stocked them with carp. A visitor to the farm, several weeks later, thought there was something emphatically ducal about the sight of Churchill sitting on a camp stool beside one of the pools and summoning the fish with imperious gestures and bits of yesterday’s spongecake. The husband of Churchill’s daughter Mary, Captain Christopher Soames, acts as supervisor of agricultural Chart-well. “He hasn’t quite put the farm on a pay-as-you-go basis,” says one of his friends, “but he does as well as can be expected with his father-in-law so frequently on the scene to give advice.” Churchill has a jeep, which he drives himself, and he likes to dash out to the fields and take charge. “He sees himself as a kind of headquarters general co-ordinating his officers in action,” believes one of his neighbors. Soames recently acquired a bulldozer, and Churchill was on hand a few minutes after he heard the news. It developed that he was a master tactician with the bulldozer — one of the craftiest bulldozer men on record — and he began to boss Soames and a crew of laborers around with the confidence of his long experience. “Blade up!” he would cry. “Smartly there, my lad — now lower away and assault that bank. Well done, well done — I couldn’t have improved on it myself.” “I do not think that Mr. Churchill knows a great deal about bulldozers,” says his head secretary, Miss Sturdee, “but he gave that impression.” Off a little distance, Soames leaned wistfully on a hayrick, perhaps lost in reflections of the great war, when he had often enjoyed uninterrupted command for several hours at a stretch.

  All of the Churchills’ daughters and their son are, or have been, married. Their first daughter, Diana, was married in 1932 to John Milner Bailey, the eldest son of Sir Abe Bailey, Bt., and was divorced from him three years later. Shortly afterward she married Duncan Sandys, a young Conservative M.P. As a lieutenant early in the war, Sandys received a lot of unfair publicity by asking a parliamentary question that allegedly violated military security. He was nearly court-martialed but was finally cleared to everybody’s satisfaction. Before the armistice, Sandys performed valuable services as Financial Secretary to the War Office. He and Churchill have an area of compatibility which unfortunately was not the case with the great man and another
son-in-law, the first husband of daughter Sarah. From early childhood, Sarah Churchill has displayed a warm affection for the theater and nearly everything in it. This included, in 1936, the well-known and much beloved English comedian, Vic Oliver, to whom she was married on December 25 of that year. The two had become secretly engaged when they were appearing together in a Cochran revue. After Sarah’s twenty-first birthday, she left by ship for America, to “think things over,” and Randolph, sailing the next day on the Queen Mary, is supposed to have telephoned her in midocean on instructions from his father. It is generally understood among Churchill’s friends that he was opposed to the union, on several grounds. There was nothing whatever against Oliver’s character, but a ripe, identifying fragrance lingers over the music halls and their folk, in the minds of many persons of traceable lineage. It is possible that Churchill, as he gazed un-benignly upon Oliver, harked back to the days when sovereigns kept a court jester on a leash, and when the Marlboroughs called in troupes of wandering players and tossed them coppers and cold biscuits. In family gatherings, after the wedding, there was at least an undercurrent of collision. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Autocrat of the Breakfast Table was a strangled lamb compared to Churchill, who, as noted, prefers to monopolize any conversation in which he participates. Ostensibly, Oliver was a pattern of decorum, but it is in the nature of a comedian to essay levity, or make funny, as the trade term goes. If, midway in a long Churchillian discourse on the probable effects of Phoenician navigation on Cornwall tin mining, Oliver’s cheek began to twitch, or he dropped his teaspoon into a bowl of petunias, it was probably involuntary, but Churchill interpreted it as fly-catching, or attempting to steal the audience. There was a sigh of relief all around when Sarah and her husband were divorced, in 1945.