Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table
Page 1
DINNER WITH
CHURCHILL
POLICY-MAKING
AT THE DINNER TABLE
CITA STELZER
ENDPAPER PICTURE CREDITS (numbered clockwise from top left)
1. and 6. Menu for FDR’s dinner for WSC
9 August ’41, Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park.
2. and 4. Claridges bill and guest list re India Bill
Reproduced with kind permission of Claridges, London and of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
3. Churchill dinner at Potsdam
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
5. “With best wishes” menu card sketched by WSC
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
7. Letter to Savoy re overcharging
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
8. Labels for game from the King to Downing Street
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, and the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill.
For Irwin,
for everything
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW ROBERTS
Prologue
SECTION 1
CHAPTER 1. The Importance of Dinners
CHAPTER 2. Meeting off Newfoundland August 1941
CHAPTER 3. Christmas in the White House December 1941–January 1942
CHAPTER 4. Dinners in Moscow August 1942
CHAPTER 5. Adana January 1943
CHAPTER 6. Teheran November 1943
CHAPTER 7. Yalta February 1945
CHAPTER 8. Meeting at Potsdam July 1945
CHAPTER 9. From Fulton to Bermuda: The Limits of Dinner-table Diplomacy
SECTION 2
CHAPTER 10. Food
CHAPTER 11. Champagne, Whisky and Brandy
CHAPTER 12. Cigars
CHAPTER 13. Rationing
Epilogue
Diners
Endnotes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
On 27 October 1953 a Labour MP asked Winston Churchill during Prime Minister’s Questions whether he would “indicate if he will take the precaution of consulting the consuming public before he decides to abolish the Food Ministry?” Churchill replied, to gales of laughter, “On the whole, I have always found myself on the side of the consumer.” It was true; Churchill always was a great consumer when it came to food, but also when it came to drink and cigars. As this well written, meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book shows, Churchill’s appetites were enormous, and not least his appetite for life.
Nobody could be better qualified to have written this book than Cita Stelzer, an assured political and society hostess around whose own dinner tables on both sides of the Atlantic well-informed conversation sparkles, but it is nonetheless astonishing that the subject of Churchill’s dinner diplomacy has not been written about before. For as the author authoritatively proves in her first chapter, Churchill used mealtimes – and primarily dinners – almost as political weapons.
Dinner parties provided the ideal opportunity for Churchill to establish a personal dominance that allowed him to get his way so often that Stelzer’s scholarship counts as ground-breaking in identifying the phenomenon. His great gifts of conviviality, intelligence, humour, memory, anecdotal ability, wit, hospitality and – not least – alcoholic hard-headheadness, all helped him to charm and ultimately to persuade all but his most intellectually prosaic of guests. The fact that his daily afternoon nap meant that he rarely flagged even into the early hours of morning helped a good deal too, especially when surrounded in wartime by busy men who could not indulge in the same luxury.
Yet as Stelzer acutely observes, the social etiquette of dinner parties also provided an opportunity to discuss great matters of state with powerful decision-makers in an environment where there were no agendas, civil servants, stenographers or private secretaries to formalise things. Conversation could be directed towards the most important issues of the day without the impedimenta of official records, committee minutes or any of the other barriers to open expression that so often tend to inhibit free exchanges of view.
When Churchill went to war he fought with every weapon in his formidable personal arsenal, and Stelzer brilliantly shows how one of these was undoubtedly the dinner party. During the course of a life devoted to persuasion, Churchill employed argument, eloquence, anger (both real and feigned), occasional threats, charm and even sometimes tears, but here we also see his deployment of the dinner party as a means of getting his way. How much better his methods than those of Hitler and Stalin …
Now that we already have biographies of Churchill’s grandmother, his bodyguard and his (wholly obscure) constituency association chairman, it is high time that we have one of his stomach. It helps that good food and drink and cigars mattered to Churchill, and that he had a late-Victorian aristocrat’s taste for the best in all three. Stelzer’s meticulous research proves conclusively that if he had not been the greatest world statesman of the twentieth century – perhaps of any century – he would have made a very fine sommelier or maitre d’hôtel at the Savoy or the Ritz hotels.
However, this book is not simply a paean to all things Churchillian: Stelzer also acknowledges the great man’s chronic unpunctuality at mealtimes, the fact that he would practise his seemingly impromptu aperçus, and of course the way that he was able to supplement the rationing rules that made life difficult for so many of his countrymen for six long years of war (and several more of peace too). Yet if, as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach, Winston Churchill certainly marched to victory in the Second World War on his stomach, and no one in their right mind would begrudge him a mouthful of Beef Wellington or a drop of 1870 brandy as he did so.
One area in which Stelzer’s scholarship makes an invaluable contribution to the protection of Churchill’s reputation lies in her demolition of the arguments of those who accuse him of chronic alcoholism. Adolf Hitler was obsessed by Churchill’s drinking, describing him on various occasions as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard” and as “whisky-happy”. Similar accusations were regularly made by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machine, and have since been made by the revisionist historians John Charmley and Clive Ponting and the former historian David Irving. In a sense, Churchill helped his enemies enormously in this, because of the great number of jokes he made himself about his own drinking, never for a moment considering it something which he needed to apologise for or explain. Stelzer’s explosion of the myth, and her careful estimation of the true level of Churchill’s drinking, is wholly convincing, and will hopefully set the record straight for good. Churchill enjoyed his drink, but had a constitution that could easily take it.
Stelzer’s discovery and publishing of many nev
er-before-seen photographs of people* and places connected with Churchill and his dinners is another useful contribution to our understanding of the period, the result of her diligent research in private and public archives and her acquaintanceship with so many people – now sadly a dwindling band – who knew and worked with the great man. At breakfasts, luncheons, picnics and dinners Churchill never conformed to the Regency rules regarding the banning of politics as a proper conversational topic over meals. Instead, he would turn mealtimes into information-exchange seminars, international summits, intelligence-gathering operations, gossip-fests, speech-practice sessions and even semi-theatrical performances. It must have been thrilling to have been present.
The visitors’ book at Chartwell is testament to the way in which Churchill would invite top experts in their fields to brief him during his “wilderness years” of the 1930s, almost always during mealtimes. His questing mind is just as evident in Stelzer’s wartime and post-war pages. When Churchill travelled – which he did an astonishing amount during the Second World War, despite the obvious and terrifying dangers involved – he defeated the ravages of jet-lag by obeying the dictates of his hunger, and living not on Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time or the date-line time where he was, but instead on what he dubbed his “tummy-time”, eating and sleeping when his stomach told him to. It was part of his special genius that he was able to harness even his intestines to the service of his country, and to ally his own alimentary canal to the cause of victory over barbarism.
On reading this delightful and fascinating book, we are reminded that an evening dining with Winston Churchill must have been one of the most memorable and enjoyable occasions one could have hoped for, almost whatever mood he was in. (Even the black ones rarely lasted that long.) In recapturing so many of them so acutely, and placing them all in their proper historical context – complete with scores of menus – Cita Stelzer has rendered Churchillian scholarship a signal service. Bon appetit!
Andrew Roberts
*Photos of Churchill “with food and drink are extremely uncommon” writes Warren F. Kimball, Finest Hour, The Alcohol Quotient, p 31*
PROLOGUE
This is a book about an extraordinary man deploying an extraordinary method of representing his nation’s interests and, in his view, those of the English-speaking peoples. Winston Churchill was one of those rare men who made history, most notably in his decision in 1940 that Britain would not strike a deal with Hitler but would fight on.
Churchill’s definitive biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, and others have chronicled the techniques used by Churchill to develop and persuade others to accept his strategic vision for fighting the war. This book focuses on just one: his use of dinner parties and meals to accomplish what he believed could not always be accomplished in the more formal setting of a conference room.
Downing Street dining room
It is a story of both successes and failures: success in persuading the President of the United States after Pearl Harbor to adopt a “Europe first” strategy despite the fact that America had been attacked not by Germany but by Japan, and that public opinion favoured retaliation across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic; failure in his inability to persuade another American president to meet with the Soviet Union’s leaders in an effort to resolve differences that resulted in the Cold War.
Churchill had no illusions about the limits of personal diplomacy. As he told the House of Commons:
It certainly would be most foolish to imagine that there is any chance of making straightaway a general settlement of all the cruel problems that exist in the East as well as the West … by personal meetings, however friendly.1
Churchill was also well aware that his success depended not only on the detailed planning that went into his dinner parties, or on his ability to make a case for his strategy of the moment. It depended, also, on facts on the ground. In late December 1941, when he visited Franklin Roosevelt for an extended round of informal and formal meetings, British troops were carrying the burden of the fight against Hitler, while the United States, so soon after Pearl Harbor, had yet to deploy a single soldier in Europe. But in the final phases of the war, by the time of the meetings of the Allies in Yalta and Potsdam, the Soviet Union and the United States were clearly the dominant powers, and there was little Churchill could do to affect the future of Europe. When he met with President Dwight Eisenhower and his implacable Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in 1953 in Bermuda, Britain was as close to financial ruin as any nation could be, struggling to sustain its contribution to the battle against communism and the maintenance of world order.
Sadly, it is also the case that the man who became Prime Minister in May 1940 at the age of 65, and had seen his nation through the most desperate period in its history, was by the time he attempted to appeal to President Eisenhower no longer as acute as he had been a decade earlier. The physical strain of wartime leadership as Churchill practised it – hands-on control of all details, numerous gruelling trips – the inevitable effects of age and the diminished condition of Britain combined to reduce the effectiveness of such persuasive powers as Churchill clearly retained.
Any reasonable assessment of Winston Churchill’s dinner-table diplomacy must conclude that he won more than he lost. At numerous dinners at the White House he did help to persuade the Americans to throw their massive industrial and military power against Hitler, leaving Japan for later. He did use the occasion of a private meeting with Joseph Stalin to suggest a division of spheres of influence in Europe which saved Greece from communism. He accepted that he could not persuade Stalin to cede what his armies had conquered in Eastern Europe, but then again, neither could Franklin Roosevelt nor Harry S Truman. And he could not persuade Eisenhower, after Stalin’s death, to seek a settlement with the Soviets, or at least to see if one might be within the reach of the West. Even so, his personal diplomacy, deployed en route to Fulton, Missouri in 1946, combined with Truman’s secret information eventually contributed to Truman’s willingness to adopt policies that reflected Churchill’s definition of the post-war geopolitical situation after the Iron Curtain descended on Europe.
It is clear that Churchill used the informal setting of dinner parties to enhance his efforts to shape the future of Europe and the post-war world. The eminent military historian Carlo D’Este sums up Churchill’s efforts:
Not a single moment of his day was ever wasted. When not sleeping he was working, and whether over a meal or traveling someplace, he utilized every waking moment to the fullest.2
It occurred to me that it might be interesting to look into the details of the many dinners that Churchill organised and attended. His curiosity led him to want to know, first-hand, what his negotiating partners were like; his self-confidence led him to believe that face-to-face meetings, the less formal the better, were the perfect occasions in which to deploy his skills. And his fame enabled him to bring together the best, brightest and most important players of his day.
Where better to get to know an ally or opponent, where better to display his charm and breadth of knowledge than at a dinner table? Where better could Churchill rally political supporters, and plan strategy and tactics, than at a working dinner?
In the spring of 1935, Churchill, who was then “in the wilderness”, having been out of ministerial office for six years, planned a dinner for those, like himself, who opposed the contentious India Bill then making its way through Parliament. Fifty-five MPs and Lords attended. One thank-you letter to Churchill pointed out that the dinner, held a week before the forthcoming vote, had helped “not only to steady the troops for next week but to form a rallying point for our Conservative and Imperial thought”.3 Churchill paid the £125 11 shillings and 6 pence bill from Claridge’s personally.
After losing this legislative battle, Churchill resorted to dinner-table diplomacy to make the best of a losing hand. He invited one of Gandhi’s supporters, G.D. Birla, to lunch at Chartwell, his beloved country house, “as a gesture of
reconciliation”, greeting him in the garden in a workman’s apron and sitting down to lunch, very informally, without removing the apron. Birla was charmed, reporting back to Gandhi that it “had been one of my most pleasant experiences in Britain”.4
At his dinners and lunches Churchill sought to convey information as well as to receive it and, in the case of the King, to discharge his obligation as the King’s First Minister. Churchill established a regular lunch, called his Tuesdays, to report all the details in the progress of the war to King George at Buckingham Palace. The first such lunch was on 10 June 1940, exactly a month after he became Prime Minister. Churchill shared with the King the results of the Enigma intelligence he made known to very few people, and the military details of the war and discussed military and staff appointments with his sovereign. The lunches were private, just the two men – no servants – serving themselves, buffet-style from a sideboard.
Digesting the India Bill
During the war, the Prime Minister also invited the King to Downing Street for dinners in the basement dining room, introducing him to British and American military personnel, and to members of the Coalition Cabinet. At Churchill’s suggestion, these dinners are commemorated on an impressively large plaque still set into the wall in the Downing Street basement, now used to house the secretarial staff: