Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

  8. David McCullough, Truman, p. 406

  9. Bright, The Inner Circle, p. 210

  10. Cadogan, Diary, p. 763

  11. Bright, Circle, p. 214

  12. Mee, Meeting at Potsdam, p. 43. Also in Bright, p. 214

  13. Moran, p. 267

  14. McCullough, Truman, pp. 406-7

  15. Telegraph, 5 May 2006

  16. Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Stalin, p. 507

  17. Moran, p. 281

  18. Garrison, Gary, “Berlin 1945-2006: Historical Epilogue”, Finest Hour, No.132, p. 18

  19. Ferrell (ed.), Robert H., Off The Record: The Private Papers of Harry S Truman, p. 51. Bohlen notes, “Where Roosevelt was warmly friendly with Churchill and Stalin, Truman was pleasantly distant.” Bohlen, p. 228

  20. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 1, p. 340

  21. Donovan, Robert J. Conflict and Crisis, p. 75

  22. Bohlen, Charles, Log of the President’s trip to the Berlin Conference”, Box 30, p. 24

  23. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Never Despair, 1945-1965, Volume VIII, p. 70

  24. Bohlen, Charles, Log of the President’s Trip to the Berlin Conference, p. 25

  25. McCullough, Truman, p. 427

  26. Ibid.

  27. Dilks (ed.), p. 767

  28. Rayfield, Donald, Times Literary Supplement Review of Molotov’s Magic Lantern, 23 April 2010

  29. Mee p. 166

  30. ed., Ferrell, Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, p. 521

  31. Mee p. 166

  32. Ibid. But the official Programme of Music lists it as The String Orchestra of the Royal Air Force.

  33. Moran, p. 281

  34. Ibid.

  35. Truman, Memoirs, Vol.1, pp. 340 and 361

  36. Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey, p. 647

  37. Broadbent, Michael, Wine Vintages, p. 28

  38. Pawle, p. 396

  39. Churchill, Volume VI, p. 579

  40. Moran, p. 282

  41. Moran p. 283

  42. Churchill, Volume VI, p. 579

  43. Ulam, Adam B., Stalin: The Man And His Era, p. 626

  CHAPTER 9

  From Fulton to Bermuda: The Limits of Dinner-table Diplomacy

  “This pig has reached the highest state of evolution.”1

  “I will be host at the banquets and elsewhere but you will preside at any formal conference.”2

  To the surprise of most of his close associates, but not to him, Churchill’s short-lived Conservative caretaker government had been voted out of power on 26 July 1945 and he had to resign as Prime Minister. According to Lord Moran’s published diary, the former Prime Minister, aged seventy, was weary in body ands mind after five tense and hectic years as a wartime leader travelling the world to deploy his personal skills on behalf of the British people. Perhaps. But after a few months of recuperation at Lake Como and the French Riviera, he went back to work as Leader of the Opposition, as a working historian, and as a speaker on the world stage, full of zeal to help reshape the post-war world and strengthen the Western democracies.

  President Truman had personally invited Churchill, the man about whom he noted in his memoirs: “I like to listen to him talk”, to give a speech in March 1946 at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, Truman’s home state. Churchill accepted. He would spend two nights on the presidential train, play poker late into the night with Truman, and once again use the dinner table – in this instance also a card table – to persuade an American President to share his views on foreign policy, which were realistic but focused hopefully on the “seeds of peace” as the Soviets tightened their grip upon the countries they had liberated from Nazi Germany.

  In 1933, Churchill wrote: “Nowhere in the world have I seen such gargantuan meals as are provided upon American trains. I have always been amazed at the immense variety of foodstuffs which are carried in the dining-cars, and the skill and delicacy with which they are cooked, even on the longest journey …” We have to assume the presidential dining car, some thirteen years later, provided just such meals.3

  Churchill’s arrival in the small Midwestern town was eagerly anticipated. At Fulton, the chef of the Fulton Country Club prepared a typical American, country-style lunch. The “meal was served family-style to the distinguished guests at small tables of four to six people. Churchill and Truman were seated together. The cook ensured that each of her assistants would be able to say that they had served Churchill and Truman personally by allowing each of them to offer second helpings of one of the dishes to the two visiting dignitaries”.4

  En route to Fulton with President Truman

  That day’s lunch included the not-yet-world-famous Callaway ham, fried chicken, buttered corn, rolls with cherry preserves (no butter) and angel food cake with strawberry topping – all many cuts above the dishes Churchill had endured from Mrs. Nesbitt’s kitchen during his stay at the White House in 1941. And a contrast with the fare in Britain, where rationing remained in force.

  Churchill’s gallant description of his portion of the Callaway ham – “This pig has reached the highest state of evolution” – was not his typical response to foreign foods, especially those in which one of the courses required the slaughter of one of his favourite animals. The compliment was heart-felt; he spoke fondly about the Callaway hams years later. The company was quick to trade on his comments.

  Fifty years later, when Lady Thatcher spoke at Westminster College on the anniversary of her predecessor’s “Sinews of Peace” speech, she was served the same lunch, including the Callaway ham.

  It has become fashionable to honour Churchill at commemorative events by duplicating the meals he was served. In April 1999, the US Navy, after commissioning a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Winston S. Churchill, invited guests to a lunch including, as far as possible, Churchill’s favourite foods, “worthy of Chartwell’s Mrs. Landemare”.5 In 2003, at the 50th celebration of the 1953 Bermuda Summit, the main meal served at that conference was duplicated. And the meal served first to Churchill and 50 years later to Lady Thatcher at Fulton was replicated in 2006 as a fund-raiser for Westminster College.

  In his Fulton speech Churchill famously warned that an “iron curtain” had fallen across Europe “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. The interests of the members of the wartime alliance no longer being compatible, he called for the formation of a new Western alliance to oppose Soviet expansion in territory and influence. At the urging of the State Department, which feared that Stalin would be offended if America did as Churchill was pressing it to do, Truman – after encouraging him to toughen it in several places – carefully distanced himself from what has come to be known as Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.

  The lack of initial success at Fulton was duplicated some seven years later in Bermuda, at a conference proposed by Churchill, two years after he became Prime Minister for the second time. By then the effects of age, including increased deafness, and a stroke suffered in June 1953, from which it took him several months to recover (rereading Phineas Finn while doing so), were taking their toll. But he was full of enthusiasm to work on setting a course for what would later become détente.

  After his stroke, Churchill immediately advised President Eisenhower that the planned Bermuda Conference would have to be postponed, attaching a full medical report to his telegram. The nation’s newspaper publishers agreed not to report the nature and extent of the Prime Minister’s illness.

  By November 1953, a mere five months after his severe stroke, Churchill was very much on the mend. He celebrated his 79th birthday in the Cabinet Room with a party that featured a most unusual cake created by a London baker: a single tall layer with the spines of all the many books he had written replicated around the outside of it, as if it were a small circular library. A ribbon was tied around the cake, which was topped by a single tall candle, while a black confectionery dog, meant to be Rufus, Churchill’s beloved poodle, tried to clamber up the candle to reach a tiny cat at the top. This set a p
attern for some of Churchill’s later birthdays when English bakers competed to bake the most original, even outlandish, cake, hoping for some publicity for themselves in addition to celebrating birthdays.

  Immediately after his birthday celebration, Churchill left London for Bermuda. He had suggested this venue for the meeting, in part because in the British Crown colony he could act as host and lay on the pomp and ceremony he felt the arriving President deserved. Churchill went to considerable lengths to make the conference attractive to the President, including selecting what he called the Mid-Ocean Golf Club as the site.

  Churchill’s 79th birthday cake

  Churchill thought that adding the word Golf to the name of the Club would be an inducement for the President to accept. But Eisenhower, sensitive to press criticism at home of the amount of time he spent on the links, said he could not agree to meet at a golf club. The Prime Minister was forced to admit his fib: he had inserted the word golf in the club’s name to entice the President.

  On 8 November, Churchill promised the President warm Caribbean seas, writing:

  My dear friend,

  I am so glad that it is all fixed … I will be host at the banquets and elsewhere but you must preside at the conference. I am bringing my paint box with me as I cannot take you on at golf.6

  The seventeen-hour flight in the stratocruiser (two refuelling stops were necessary, at Shannon in Ireland and at Gander in Newfoundland) allowed Churchill time to dip into one of his favourite authors. As he had done on his 1941 sea voyage to meet another American president, the Prime Minister read a C.S. Forester novel, this time Death to the French, perhaps an ironic reflection of his disappointment that Eisenhower had insisted France be represented by its Prime Minister, Joseph Laniel, ending Churchill’s hopes for a one-on-one meeting with him.

  Mid Ocean Club, Bermuda

  Churchill was eager to obtain Eisenhower’s approval for a new approach to Moscow, including a summit meeting with the new Soviet leaders, Stalin having died in March. But Eisenhower had warned him earlier that he was not eager for the new multilateral meeting with the Soviets that Churchill so desired. He wrote to Churchill:

  … even now I tend to doubt the wisdom of a formal multilateral meeting since this would give our opponent the same opportunity … to balk every reasonable effort of ourselves …7

  The first plenary session at the Bermuda Conference was held in the late afternoon of 4 December, continuing the tradition of late-afternoon meetings established at wartime summits. The Prime Minister officially requested that the President preside and Eisenhower quickly agreed.

  A photograph now hanging on the wall of the Mid Ocean Club shows Eisenhower telling the British and French prime ministers where to sit.

  Less officially, Churchill requested permission to smoke his cigars. The President quickly agreed, knowing he could then smoke his own cigarettes.

  The meetings covered many issues of joint concern, but on the issue that had brought the Prime Minister to Bermuda – restarting negotiations with the Soviets – Churchill, despite the tremendous efforts he made, had to accept failure. He attributed his lack of success to two things: the intransigence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his own failing health. He told Lord Moran: “Dulles is a terrible handicap … Even as it is I have not been defeated by the bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.”8 There might have been an additional factor: President Eisenhower might have remembered that Churchill had fought to have General George C. Marshall appointed chief of operation for Overlord (the 1944 invasion of Europe), rather than then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  On 8 December the summit concluded and the conference room at the Mid Ocean Club was hastily converted into a formal dining room.9 The Speaker of the Bermuda Assembly gave a dinner to celebrate “The Three Power Talks”. But since both the President and the French representatives had left that morning before the official banquet, so only the British delegation was present. As was the custom, the Speaker proposed the first toast to the Queen. After other toasts, Churchill replied “as principal speaker, and did it very well”, in John Colville’s opinion.10

  The Big Two and the French Premier, Laniel

  Fifty years later, on 8 November, 2003, the Churchill Centre gave an anniversary lunch at the Mid Ocean Club. The menu for the buffet lunch was contemporary, more varied than the December 1953 original, with lighter foods more appropriate to Bermuda’s summery weather. The drinks offered were certainly different: hard liquor (only on a “cash basis”) and “bottles of wine on tables, mostly white, $30.00”. Rather different from the elegant wines served at the 1953 dinner. Flowers were “to be inexpensive”.11 Guests arrived by bus. It is difficult to imagine the Prime Minister and the President, after a hard day of bargaining, queuing up for a self-service meal, although Churchill was no stranger to the trying venues of wartime Europe and willingly consumed sandwiches while on the campaign trail.

  Menu for the Bermudians’ dinner honouring the British Delegation

  It should come as no surprise that Churchill left Bermuda still determined to arrange one more Big Three summit, a dream unrealised.

  Churchill alone, Bermuda

  Notes

  1. Westminster College Archives Press Release, 14 February 2006

  2. PREM 11/418. Full text of telegram in Churchill and Bermuda 20th International Conference November 2003.

  3. Churchill, “Land of Corn and Lobsters”, Colliers magazine, August 1933, p.133

  4. Westminster College, Fulton. Missouri, Press Release 14 February 2006

  5. Richards, Michael, “Commissioning Day”, Finest Hour 110, p.15

  6. PREM 11/418

  7. Gilbert, Volume VIII, p. 807

  8. Ibid., p.936

  9. Colville, Fringes, p. 688

  10. Ibid.

  11. Mid-Ocean Club, 8 November 2003

  SECTION 2

  CHAPTER 10

  Food

  “When I dine after a hard day’s work, I like serenity, calm, good food, cold beverages.”1

  “Give me a few well-cooked dishes I can really enjoy.”2

  “It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world,” wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.3 His stomach was often on his mind, perhaps because of his intermittent struggle with indigestion, which he called “indy”, and about which he consulted the eminent gastroenterologist, Dr. Thomas Hunt.

  Dr Thomas Hunt, of 49 Wimpole Street, in addition to certain dietary suggestions, offered Churchill the wise advice to exercise “not more than twice a day – and no longer than 15 minutes.”4

  Many years later, in 1954, after a discussion about which scales were in fact accurate in showing his true weight, a tomato diet had been suggested to Churchill. He wrote to his wife that he “had no grievance against the tomato but I think I should eat other things as well.”5

  Churchill at dinner, cartoon by Vicky

  Over the years, his aides came to understand the imperative of “tummy-time”. Flying to Washington in June 1942, Churchill referred to his “tummy-time” as determining when meals should be served in flight, saying that he “didn’t go by sun time … but by ‘tummy-time’ and I want my dinner.”6 (When he landed, he went on to the British embassy for a second dinner.) In 1943, he left Washington, flying to Newfoundland, thence to Gibraltar and on to Algiers. He slept in his flying boat but insisted that his meals be served at his “‘stomach-time’ without regard to changing time zones.”7

  In 1944, Churchill sardonically suggested that there be a “series of Cabinet banquets, a sort of Salute The Stomach Week”.8

  We have many menus covering much of Churchill’s long life. They reveal a preference for fine, well-prepared meals, consisting of plain food as that term was understood by his class in his day. Here are two such meals. On 5 May 1914, three months before the outbreak of the First World War, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchi
ll dined at the Ritz in Paris, with one guest, and had the bill sent straight back to London to Admiralty House. Alas, the stamped receipt from the Ritz blots out the main courses but we can see that he drank a Paulliac and ate pommes and petit pois.9 And, a year later, in May 1915, Churchill and one guest dined at the Carlton Hotel on truites, roast beef, salade, pommes and compote (the Carlton Hotel was badly damaged by German bombs in 1940).

  Minutes and other chronicles also show Churchill’s willingness to make do with less when the circumstances required it. During the “Black Dog” days – as Churchill called his depression – after his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915 following the Dardanelles setback, he tried to console himself as he wrote to his brother, Jack, from Hoe Farm where the family was living: “We live very simply – but with all the essentials of life well understood and well provided for – hot baths, cold champagne, new peas and old brandy.”10 New peas were a lifelong favourite and featured three decades later in the menu for the dinner party given by him at the Potsdam Conference.

  Bill of fare, Paris Ritz, 1914

  Of course, Churchill had his own definition of plain food, even under the trying circumstances of life at the front. In November 1915, Churchill wrote to Clementine from the trenches of the Western Front asking her to send him every week “a small box of food to supplement the rations. Sardines, chocolate, potted meats, and other things which may strike your fancy”.11 Two months later, he reminded her to send him “large slabs of corned beef: Stilton cheeses: cream: hams: sardines – dried fruits: you might almost try a big beef steak pie: but not tinned grouse or fancy tinned things. The simpler the better: & substantial too; for our ration meat is tough and tasteless …”12 A month later he reported to Mrs. Churchill that during an attack “we hastily seized our eggs & bacon, bread & marmalade and took refuge”.13