Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

  A decade later, President Roosevelt’s adviser, Rexford Tugwell, reported that during long evening conversations between Churchill and the President, “quantities of spirits disappeared … although Churchill thrived on them.”8 Another Roosevelt speech writer, Robert Sherwood, noted that “the wine flowed more freely” when Churchill was in the White House.9

  It is, however, a long way from enjoying whisky – and other alcoholic beverages – to doing so to excess. The evidence on Churchill’s alcohol consumption is not straightforward, since many contemporary observers have left us differing accounts, and Churchill himself was no stranger to myth-weaving. Like the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who knew the value of her image as a no-nonsense gin-and-tonic-drinking woman, Churchill saw political profit in portraying himself as a whisky, champagne and brandy lover. Captain Butcher, one of Eisenhower’s top aides, wrote after the war: “Ike had the impression that the PM rather relishes his reputation as a heavy smoker and drinker, but actually is much more moderate than rumour would indicate.”10 Unfortunately, there were times when the myth was not useful: before he met Churchill, Roosevelt had heard tales of his later-to-be comrade-in-arms’ fondness for alcohol, and felt constrained to ask Wendell Willkie, his Republican presidential rival who later became his emissary, on the latter’s return from a visit to Britain in 1941: “Is he a drunk?”11

  The short answer to that question should have been “No”. For one thing, to use the vernacular, Churchill could hold his liquor, Tugwell’s comment that he “thrived” on quantities of spirits being only one of several such observations. Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Churchill’s host during his 1932 visit to Chicago, told his own doctor: “The only man I know who can drink more liquor and hold it better than I is Winston Churchill.”12 And after a meeting at Chequers in the summer of 1941, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, wrote in his diary:

  Churchill talked very freely to me at dinner about many topics and also fully with respect to any that I brought up. He took a good deal of wine to drink at dinner. It did not seem to affect him beyond quickening his intellect and intensifying his facility of expression.”13

  Roosevelt’s speech writer, Robert Sherwood, noticed that Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours without visible effect”.14 And Michael Reilly, head of presidential security, was “open mouthed in awe” at “the complete sobriety that went hand in hand with his drinking”.15

  One of Churchill’s wartime private secretaries, John Peck, writing to Sir Martin Gilbert, reported: “Personally, throughout the time I knew him I never saw him the worse for drink.”16

  Another reason for disbelieving reports that Churchill drank to excess is that many come from political opponents or unhappy political allies, or are simply implausible. In the former category we have comments from a diverse group: Adolf Hitler, Lord Reith, supporters of Neville Chamberlain, and Oliver Harvey.

  HITLER: A report, cited by A.N. Wilson, states that Hitler referred to Churchill as that “super-annuated drunkard supported by Jewish gold”.17 Whether Hitler was the victim of over-zealous intelligence reports or wishful thinking, or both, we do not know. That it was not based on first-hand evidence we do know: the German Führer and the British Prime Minister never met.

  REITH: No fan of Churchill, the ill-humoured Lord Reith, former head of the BBC, wrote in his diary for 14 April 1940, after a lunch with Churchill at the Admiralty, that he “looked as if he had been drinking too much – as he did last Wednesday”. Reith’s report was undoubtedly coloured by Churchill’s barrage of criticisms of the BBC, perhaps best summarised by these remarks to Lord Moran:

  I am against the monopoly enjoyed by the BBC. For eleven years they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views which have proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialists – probably with Communists.18

  CHAMBERLAIN: It obviously suited Churchill’s political opponents, and he of course accumulated many over his long career in politics, to engage in a bit of character assassination. Andrew Roberts’ research reveals one such instance: Chamberlain’s supporters played up Churchill’s drinking as “part of their general air of moral superiority”.19

  HARVEY: Churchill’s relations with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, were always fraught, in part because of Eden’s impatience to move into No. 10. Which might explain why, in December 1944, Oliver Harvey, then Private Secretary to Eden, wrote in his own war diaries, “at 10:30 last night Churchill, Eden and others met in the bowels of the earth. P.M. in his boiler suit and rather sozzled, A.E. in his bottled green smoking coat … P.M. bellicose and repetitive, repeating snatches from the long speeches to the Poles we heard in Moscow.”20

  Then we have the implausible tales. One such comes to us from Stalin’s Marshal of the Air Forces, A.E. Golovanov, who described Churchill’s behaviour at a dinner with the Soviet leader on 14 or 15 August 1942:

  Churchill takes up a bottle of Armenian cognac, examines the label and pours Stalin a glass. Toasts follow toasts. Churchill was getting visibly inebriated. Walks out unsteadily. Stalin to Golovanov after Churchill is gone: “Don’t worry. I will not lose Russia in my cups. But Churchill, he’ll hit the roof when they tell him what he blabbered out today.”21

  It is quite possible that Stalin was boasting to his colleagues of his ability to out-drink Britain’s Prime Minister. Other reports of the same meeting suggest that Churchill avoided excessive consumption of alcohol even on that very liquid occasion. “Every five minutes throughout the dinner,” Lord Moran wrote, “we were drinking somebody’s health.”22 The “list of toasts appeared interminable”,23 but even after an added round of post-dinner liqueurs with Stalin, Churchill took his leave at such a pace down the Kremlin’s long corridors that, according to Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (then British Ambassador to the Soviet Union), Stalin had to “trot, for he had to be brisk in order to keep pace with Mr. Churchill …”24 That report is separately confirmed by Lord Moran, and is hardly consistent with the description of Churchill walking out “unsteadily”.

  It does seem that Churchill meant it when he wrote that excessive drink “causes a comatose insensibility”.25 “Whatever Churchill’s consumption of alcohol”, writes one Churchill historian, “it was a lifetime habit, not a temporary response to the pressure and tension of wartime leadership. There is no credible evidence that Churchill’s drinking persistently affected his policies during the war, or, for that matter, his policies before the war.”26 A careful study of the minutes of the various international meetings he attended, and of diaries of those who dined with him, furnishes no reliable evidence that he ever became what is now called “impaired” in circumstances where that would be dangerous to the interests of his nation or interfere with the performance of his various jobs. My own interviews with people who knew Churchill well confirm historian Robert Rhodes James’s conclusion that Churchill’s drinking has been “grossly exaggerated”,27 a view borne out by Lord Alanbrooke.

  In his diaries, the Field Marshal was quick to condemn some of Churchill’s friends and colleagues for drinking more than they should have, but only once suggests that Churchill over-indulged. Alanbrooke writes on 6 July 1944 that the Prime Minister “was very tired … and had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offense at anything, suspicious of everybody and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans”. If correct, and it is not impossible that such instances occurred, but rarely, it should be remembered that this was only a month after D-Day, on a day during which he had already given a speech in the House on the “flying bombs, and had a meeting that lasted from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m.”28 One can easily imagine that he would have been exhausted. “It is surprising that there are only three or four places where the [Alanbrooke] diary criticizes [Churchill’s] practice [of drinking daily] while three other per
sonages are labelled outright drunks: the American Admiral King, Australian Commander in Chief General Blamey, and senior Soviet General Voroshilov.”29

  Despite the weight of the evidence, the myth of Churchill regularly drinking to excess persists. Even the voluntary docents at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park residence in New York perpetuate the myth, telling visitors that Churchill used to walk around “all day with a drink in his hand”. Not so. When I visited Hyde Park with Lady Williams, she corrected the guide in no uncertain terms. “This tale is false,” she said. “The Prime Minister would not have walked around throughout the day with a glass in his hand. It was not his style.”

  Then there are the anecdotes, as colourful as they are contradictory. Even the most casual student of Churchill is familiar with the never-confirmed tale of Bessie Braddock’s charge, “Winston, you are drunk,” to which Churchill is alleged to have responded: “Bessie, you are ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.”30 The popularity of this anecdote, in which Churchill seems to acknowledge inebriation, adds to the myth of his alcoholic excesses, a myth he did nothing to dispel. Note that even on this occasion – assuming there had been such an occasion – Churchill was quite capable of a lucid and cutting answer to a critic.

  Churchill must be considered culpable for contributing to the myth-making, for reasons mentioned earlier. He enjoyed entertaining his guests with comments on his drinking habits. At a dinner given by Roosevelt on his yacht, Williamsburg, in 1942, Churchill asked his scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, whom he called “Prof”, to whip out his ever-present slide rule and do a calculation. The Prime Minister estimated that in 62 years he had on average consumed a quart of wine and spirits a day. Question: if all of those drinks were poured into the salon in which they were dining, how deep would they be? The response from the teetotaller Prof was: “Just under two-and-a-half feet.” This, the future US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, reported, was “very disappointing to the Old Man. He had expected that we would all be swimming like goldfish in a bowl, whereas it would hardly come up to our knees”.31

  Set aside self-interested tales of contemporaries, the American tendency to judge Churchill’s consumption by the standards of their own country’s customs and the rather romantic view Churchill seems to have had of himself as a prodigious consumer of alcohol, and consider the reports of the many people who observed his habits close up. There is agreement on several points:

  He had no use for cocktails, pre-dinner or otherwise. Churchill disliked mixed drinks of the sort that appealed to many Americans. After a meeting with Roosevelt and their military staffs at Quebec in August 1943, Churchill joined Roosevelt and several others at Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s Fishkill Farms estate. Morgenthau’s son, Robert, mixed mint juleps. “Knowing of Churchill’s intemperance, he was surprised when the Prime Minister had just one.”32 It is likely that any inclination the Prime Minister had for a second round disappeared with the taste of a mint julep, not the sort of drink on which he had been reared. Indeed, years later, when celebrating Christmas with, among others, one of his secretaries, Jo Sturdee, he snatched from her hand a “fiery cocktail which knocked me back at the first gulp”, and advised her: “No, no, if you want to get drunk, do get drunk on something decent,” and “then got down to champagne”.33

  In spite of this, Joe Gilmour, head barman at the Savoy Hotel from 1940 to 1976, is said to have invented a Blenheim cocktail – also known as the four score and ten – in honour of Churchill’s 90th birthday. It consisted of 3 parts brandy, 2 parts yellow Chartreuse, 1 part Lillet, 1 part orange juice, and 1 part Dubonnet.34

  He drank Johnnie Walker Black Label – some sources say Red – which, interestingly, is a blend, not a single malt. In 1946, Berry Brothers apologised for the fact that Churchill’s requested Johnnie Walker Black Label was unavailable and that the Berry’s Best Whisky had proved “not suitable to his palate”, recommending instead Cutty Sark. Berry Brothers refunded the payment for the unacceptable six bottles of the shop’s brand which were returned.35

  The whisky that seemed to some observers to be omnipresent was most often diluted with water or with soda, to the point where “It was really a mouthwash”, Jock Colville told Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert. “He used to get frightfully cross if it was too strong.”36 Colville’s observation is shared by John Peck who told Sir Martin, “The glass of weak whisky … was more a symbol than anything else, and one glass lasted him for hours.”37 Harry Hopkins, and several others whom I interviewed, including Lady Williams, uniformly support the Colville and Peck reports.38

  At times, when Churchill was feeling “sorry for himself … he had a stiff whisky and soda”, once at a quarter to nine in the morning during a stopover on his journey to the Teheran Conference.39 Of course, he had crossed several time zones so his tummy-time would have told him it was late in the day.

  Champagne topped the list of Churchill’s favourite drinks, followed by brandy.

  Churchill also had a favourite wine merchant, Randolph Payne in Pall Mall, whose telegraphic address was LUSCIOUS, PICCY, LONDON.40 Some say the favoured merchant was Hatch Mansfield from whom Churchill did buy wines and spirits. As noted earlier, in 1899, Churchill ordered from Randolph Payne:

  6 bottles 1889 Vin d’Ay Sec

  18 bottles St. Emilion

  6 bottles light port

  6 bottles French vermouth

  18 bottles Scotch whisky (10 year old)

  6 bottles Very Old Eau de Vie landed 1866

  12 Rose’s Cordial Lime Juice

  6 x 1 dozen cases for same, packing, marking etc.

  All to be shipped aboard the SS Dunottar Castle to Churchill in South Africa.41

  Pop!

  In 1947, Churchill told Odette Pol Roger that 44 Avenue de Champagne, Epernay, is the world’s most drinkable address”42. Dean Acheson recalled Clementine telling him that the Churchill “always had his own bottle of champagne by his place at the table, to be independent of the vagaries of butlers”.43 It is reasonable to assume that the bottle was of the since-discontinued 50 cl size, which Churchill preferred to the 75 cl bottle now commonly sold:44 “A single glass of champagne,” Churchill wrote in 1898, “imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced: the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble.” He quickly added, “A bottle produces the opposite effect”.45 Lady Halifax’s memoirs describe Churchill at one dinner as “grumpy and remote … But mellowed by champagne and good food he became a different man, and a delightful and amusing companion”.46

  In 1898, just before the battle of Omdurman, Churchill was strolling along the banks of the Nile with his fellow officers. British officers hailed him from gunboats afloat on the river, and asked: “How are you for drinks? We have got everything in the world on board here. Can you catch? And almost immediately a bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat to the shore. It fell into the waters of the Nile, but happily where a gracious Providence decreed them to be shallow and the bottom soft. I slipped into the waters up to my knees, and reaching down seized the precious gift.”47

  Every celebratory event in Churchill’s long life was marked with champagne. On 8 May 1945, standing on balconies both at Buckingham Palace and at the Ministry of Health, he received the appreciative thunderous applause of the British public. Later that night, he told his staff that he would visit the American and Soviet embassies to celebrate VE Day with them. At the Soviet embassy, the champagne did not seem to work its usual magic. The Prime Minister raised a glass of champagne with Ambassador Gusev, Mrs. Gusev and Churchill’s daughter Mary. But they were not a happy-looking group, for reasons that were becoming apparent.

  A victory toast with the Soviet Ambassador Gusev, May 1945

  Not just any champagne would do. Churchill was “one of the world’s most expert connoisseurs of champagne”.48 He sometimes drank older and stronger vintages or varieties such as the Krug 1920, 1926, and the 1937 that he served at Potsdam. But his favourite of favourites w
as Pol Roger, either the 1921 vintage, a dozen bottles of which Victor Rothschild provided “from his dwindling stock at Merton Hall” when Churchill’s supply was exhausted,49 or his ultimate favourite, the 1928 vintage, a case of which Odette Pol Roger sent him on each of his birthdays until supplies ran out in 1953. “Thereafter she reserved the choicest vintages for him; by 1965 he had only worked his way through the harvest of 1934.”50

  Odette Pol Roger with Churchill

  Odette Pol Roger was a clever businesswoman. Smart Parisian tastes “had run towards Pommery and Clicquot”,51 but she made her brand world famous, helped certainly by Churchill’s favouring it so publicly. It is a mystery how he first became such a fan of Pol Roger. We do know he had ordered a case of the 1895 vintage when a Cabinet Minister and President of the Board of Trade.52 It was only years later, in 1944, that he met Odette Pol Roger at the Armistice Day party at the British embassy in Paris, introduced by the Ambassador, Duff Cooper. They quickly became life-long friends. In return for Madame Pol Roger sending him regular shipments, Churchill sent her a copy of his memoirs inscribed “Cuvee de Reserve. Mise en bouteille au Chateau Chartwell”.53 He also named one of his racehorses Pol Roger; it won the Black Prince Stakes on 2 June 1953, the very day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

  Commemorative bottle

  After Churchill’s death, Mme. Pol Roger ordered that the labels on all bottles of champagne exported to Britain be given a black mourning band, a practice discontinued only in 1990 when the house switched to a blue border to emphasise Churchill’s naval connections and “his loyalties to the Senior Service” as First Lord of the Admiralty.54