Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

  There were few aspects of the nation’s consumption with which Churchill did not concern himself. He always had time for matters relating to British well-being and morale, finding the time to:

  ask why banana imports had been suspended. (Because, responded Lord Woolton, the Admiralty had requisitioned “a large number of refrigerated boats … for other war purposes … without any consultation with me37);

  ask whether whisky distilling, to which no grain had been allocated since 1941, could be resumed in 1944. (It could, allowing sufficient time for it to mature for the eight years required by “the U.S.A. market … which earns us dollars);38

  demand a full report to Cabinet on raw material and distribution problems that brewers claimed would produce “a very serious shortage of beer in the near future”;39

  suggest to the ministers of War and Transport that “we should certainly use some of the shipping space in vessels returning from N. Africa for bringing over oranges and lemons from the Mediterranean area to this country …”40

  remonstrate with Llewellin about press reports of shortages of salt and vinegar;41

  ensure that there were adequate supplies of sugar for bee keepers, including his own hives at Chartwell, in the spring when natural food from blossoms might not yet be sufficient, resulting in, as Churchill put it, “starving the bees of private owners”.42

  There are many other celebrated stories illustrating Churchill’s remarkable attention to detail when it came to maintaining a rationing scheme. But perhaps the most telling – and most surreal – is the one involving plovers’ eggs. Plovers’ eggs were another Churchill favourite, a fact sufficiently well known to unleash a supply of these eggs to him from several admirers. When Sir William Rootes, a wealthy car manufacturer, sent some plovers’ eggs to the Churchills, Clementine, in her 7 April 1942 note of thanks, wrote: “They are a great delicacy and rarity and Winston is very fond of them.”43 And when, on 20 April 1942, Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, a friend of Queen Elizabeth, sent him “a few that [she] collected this weekend”, the Prime Minister, during a very difficult month and year of the war, asked that she be telephoned with his thanks.44 In April 1944, his second cousin, the 10th Duke of Marlborough, wrote to the Prime Minister from the Dorchester Hotel: “Please accept these plovers’ eggs. There are, I fear, only twelve but I have not the personnel now available to find them.”45 Churchill did once share his treasured eggs, at one of their regular lunches, with General Eisenhower, who remembered later that “they were golden plover … It was the first time I had ever tasted them. I loved them … He was always finding some special thing”.46

  Whether it was the Prime Minister’s special love of plovers’ eggs, or excessive bureaucratic zeal that set off the following train of events we cannot know.47 It seems that he had “heard on good authority” that plover, partridge and pheasant eggs were on sale – by “Messrs. Fortnum and Mason”, no less – and he asked the Ministry of Food for “a special report on this which he regards as most urgent,” undoubtedly a part of his on-going desire to prevent violations of regulations that would generate “class feeling”. Both the ministries of Food and Agriculture, and the Metropolitan Police investigated. A plain-clothes officer verified that indeed “eggs” were on sale at Fortnum’s but there was some confusion about what kind of eggs they actually were. A sales clerk told the policeman that they were gulls’ eggs, not plovers’ eggs, which were not allowed to be sold. Having checked several reference books and the Ornithological Department at the Natural History Museum, the serious-minded undercover copper reported that:

  …the eggs being sold were indeed those of the black-headed gull and not those of the lap-wing [a part of the plover family]. The eggs of the latter bird are of a distinctive shape although of a similar colour and marking to a gull’s egg and of approximately the same size. In my view therefore a genuine mistake has been made by the informant …

  This full and detailed correspondence, which eventually involved not only the Prime Minister reporting what he had “heard” but also the ministries of Food and Agriculture, the Home Office, the West End Central Station of the Metropolitan Police and the London Area Egg Officer (an expert on pheasant eggs), took place during the month in which Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

  This tale tells as much about the problems of maintaining a rationing scheme as it does about Churchill’s preferences for these eggs. By insisting that the scheme be applied fairly, by adhering to the rules himself (with their impact ameliorated to some degree by his special circumstances and the kindness and appreciation of friends), by pressing the bureaucracy to do what it could to maximise food production and imports, Churchill shored up Britain’s willingness to endure the hardships of shortages of food and most civilian goods in order to win the war. If at times his inquiries triggered an overreaction from the bureaucracy, so be it. His management of the rationing scheme was one of his least remarked and most important contributions. No small achievement.

  Between premierships, South of France, 1948

  Notes

  1. CAB 120/854

  2. CAB 123/74

  3. CAB 120/854

  4. Gardiner, Juliet, Wartime London, 2004, p. 147

  5. CAB 123/74

  6. Gilbert, Volume VII, pp. 161 and Calder, Angus, The People’s War, p. 71

  7. Calder, p. 405

  8. NF 1/292 Home Intelligence Weekly Report, No. 90, 16-23 June 1942

  9. Gilbert, Churchill War Papers, Volume III, p. 376

  10. CHAR 1/379/40 and 1/379/39

  11. CHAR 1/389/5

  12. Nesbitt, p. 274

  13. Hastings, Max, Finest Years: Churchill as War Lord 1940-1945, p. 202

  14. News Chronicle, 30 September 1941

  15. CHAR 1/380/25 and CHAR 1/368/85

  16. CHAR 2/441/61

  17. CHAR 2/446A

  18. Profumo, David, The Laxford Shows its True Colours, Country Life, 6 October 2010, p. 104

  19. CHAR 20/53C/256

  20. Char 2/442/51

  21. Char 2/446 B

  22. Gilbert, Churchill War Papers, Volume 3, p. 357

  23. Meiklejohn to Thompson, “Subject: Hams”, 3 January 1942. Library of Congress, Harriman Papers, Box 161, Folder 6

  24. Colville, The Churchillians, p. 156

  25. CHAR 20/138A/11

  26. Hastings, p. 203

  27. Ibid.

  28. Pawle, p. 155

  29. Hastings, p. 203

  30. Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Volume 3, p. 990

  31. MAF, 286/8

  32. Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John (ed.), Action This Day: Working With Churchill, p. 30

  33. Halle, Kay (ed.), Winston Churchill on America and Britain, p. 259

  34. Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Never Surrender, Volume 2, p. 514

  35. MAF 286/6

  36. MAF 286/6

  37. MAF 286/3

  38. CAB 123/74

  39. CAB 123/74

  40. CAB 123/74

  41. MAF 286/8

  42. CHAR 1/394/22

  43. CHAR 2/446/A

  44. CHAR 2/445/72

  45. CHAR 1/380/34

  46. Nelson, James (ed.), General Eisenhower on the Military Churchill: A Conversation With Alistair Cooke, p.54

  47. Unless otherwise indicated, correspondence relating to the affair of the plovers’ eggs can be found in MAF 286/1

  EPILOGUE

  Iwas never fortunate enough to have had dinner with Winston Churchill. But during the five years I have spent working on this book, I have come to see aspects of his character and personality – humanity, humour, curiosity, zest and resilience – that were revealed at the dinner table to an extent not explicitly noted in many of the biographies that rightly concentrate on his enormous impact on world affairs. Churchill was capable of a toughness of the sort displayed in his decision to tell Stalin, face to face, that there would be no second front in 1942. But that necessary toughness should not obscure his basic humanity. He cared deeply for th
e people of Britain, admired their morale and steadfastness in the face of almost unimaginable adversity, and understood their daily lives in ways that most politicians only profess to comprehend. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that Churchill’s support of free trade, which early in his career caused a break with the Conservatives, was “a social rather than an economic issue”.1 Protectionism, he said, meant “dear food for the million, cheap labour for the millionaire”.2 That lifelong concern for the welfare of the British people was again manifested in his development of the rationing plan instituted during the Second World War, with its emphasis on ensuring that the less-wealthy were as much as possible treated as well as the better-off, and that vital shipping was diverted to maintaining adequate food supplies. Indeed, Churchill’s humanity extended to fallen enemies, as the now-famous statement that precedes each volume of his history of the Second World War – “In victory, magnanimity” – shows. As we have seen, he was overcome with compassion for the plight of the “haggard” bombed-out Berliners he saw during his tour of the German capital during the Potsdam Conference.

  This consideration infused not only his policies, but his personal treatment of people. Yes, he could be impatient at times, and at times less than sensitive to the needs of his dinner companions to call the evening to a close. But he also saw to it that his gardener received the unused tobacco from his cigars to use as pipe tobacco, that Bernard Baruch’s desire for privacy when attending a dinner party was respected, and that an old friend and comrade-in-arms, General Jan Christiaan Smuts, would not be demoted to the second spot at his wartime dinner table, even though Churchill had good strategic reasons to put General Eisenhower, also attending, on his right.

  The Churchillian humanity extended, as I discovered, to animals. I am encouraged in applying that word to his concern for cats, dogs, pigs, bees, geese and turtles – creatures that reappear throughout this book – by the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as “disposition to treat human beings and animals with consideration and compassion, and to relieve their distresses”. Churchill could not bring himself to carve a goose (“You’ll have to carve it, Clemmie. He was my friend.”) at one of his dinner parties, diligently fed the fish at Chartwell; and paused to do the same for the fish at his Moscow dacha en route to an important meeting with Stalin. That did not stop him from enjoying the goose once carved, and beef properly cooked, of course, but those were instances in which his compassion was trumped by his zest for life.

  So deeply did he enjoy food, champagne and cigars that I had to prepare separate chapters on these items. It is true that he was “easily satisfied with the best”, but it is also true that he heartily enjoyed a humble shepherd’s pie when visiting the front, and picnic fare in the company of his generals. If Pol Roger was not available, Caucasian champagne would do – no complaints. Only when it came to his cigars did his ability to do with less than the best fail him: witness his rejection – a quiet rejection, no tantrum – of the cheap cigars offered to him by the Americans when his own supply inexplicably ran out at the Casablanca meeting.

  That zest was not confined to food, champagne and cigars. It extended to the baths he so enjoyed, to battles as far away as Cuba and India, and to the challenge of debates in the House, where his enthusiasm for combat enlivened the proceedings. “When he gets up to go,” noted Woodrow Wyatt, a Labour Member and opponent whose service partially overlapped Churchill’s, “the vitality of the House goes with him. It subsides like a reception after the champagne is finished.”3

  One cannot spend years with Churchill without also coming away with an admiration for his humour, his playfulness. He most often seemed to find a way to wrap a devastating riposte in humour to remove some of its sting, and used humour as one of the weapons with which to dominate a dinner table, whether in the presence of friends and admirers, or of the glowering Joseph Stalin. Invited to drinks by a very angry dictator after a particularly tense meeting, Churchill reports: “I said I was in principle always in favour of such a policy.” I hope that jest survived its translation.

  Even a reader only casually acquainted with the life of Churchill will have been exposed to the retelling of his bons mots, retorts, quips and jokes. The House of Commons cheered when, accused of sleeping during a members speech, Churchill quickly shot back: “I wish I were.” Such comebacks diffused criticism and cheered his supporters, and quickly spread through Whitehall. His staff, at the Admiralty, Downing Street, Chequers and elsewhere benefited from the tension-diffusing effect of his touches of playfulness amid serious events.

  He never played the clown or buffoon, or told jokes as we generally use the term. His humour always had a point. When he nicknamed Harry Hopkins “Lord Root of the Matter”, he did so to convey Hopkins’ importance and his inclusion on Britain’s side in the war effort. And when confronted in Adana by the Turkish Foreign Minister’s recitation of how difficult life was in Britain, part of the Minister’s effort to demonstrate that Britain might well lose the war, Churchill countered tales of rationing by taking out the largest cigar anyone had ever seen, and remarking with a pixie-like grin: “And we are down to the tiniest cigars”, with the stress on the word “tiniest”.4

  Often his humour, not unexpectedly, was based on language and wordplay. And not always in English – occasionally in French, albeit fractured French. Whatever the language, Churchill’s humour “lightened the burdens of the dispirited and were quoted as the words of a champion”, writes a late editor of The Washington Post.5

  His dinner table companions relished and repeated Churchill’s witticisms. That is one reason why we have records of so many of his conversations and quips today. Some of these tales are verifiable, others are plausible, still others fabricated, with Richard Langworth regarded as an expert on what Churchill said or did not say.

  I also came to realise that the dinner table was the perfect venue for the display of another Churchill characteristic: a boundless curiosity. Every aspect of life attracted his interest, which extended from floating harbours to bath taps, from dining-room chairs to plovers’ eggs, from sugar for bees to maritime rights. Dinner companions were often chosen for their ability to satisfy his wide-ranging curiosity as to how things worked, how people lived, what opponents were planning.

  Churchill also satisfied his curiosity by using his many wartime travels to visit places and people not necessarily essential to the war effort. When in Teheran en route to Moscow, he lunched with the Shah. When in Washington in 1941 to meet with Roosevelt, he found time for a visit with a cousin and dinner with leading administration figures. When in Cairo, he visited the sphinx, and made arrangements to conduct a tour of the pyramids for President Roosevelt, and to arrange for the wheelchair-bound President to be brought to a vantage point to view the Atlas Mountains, still another example of his consideration for the circumstances of others and a desire to share a good thing with a friend.

  Finally, the sheer resilience of the man is a wonder. He could maintain his composure at a dinner at the White House after being informed of a series of devastating military setbacks, and doggedly return to his wooing of the President. He could recover quickly from pneumonia and set off on an arduous trip across the Atlantic to meet and dine with Franklin Roosevelt. He could recover from a stroke and immediately head to a meeting with President Eisenhower in Bermuda, hoping his dinner-table talents would outweigh the intransigence of John Foster Dulles. And, in the end, he could leave a failed meeting in Bermuda, rebuffed in his desire for a summit meeting with the Russians, and almost immediately resume planning for just such a meeting.

  I do not mean to be so besotted with the subject of this book as to suggest Churchill was a paragon. He was not. But he was humane, funny, curious and resilient – not inconsiderable virtues. As one historian put it, Churchill was “quiet simply, a great man”.6

  Notes

  1. Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, p. 207


  2. Jenkins, p. 95, cited by Himmelfarb, ibid.

  3. Halle, Kay (ed.), The Irrepressible Churchill, p. 10

  4. Martin Gilbert, email, 19 April 2011, to the author. The cigar may just be seen in the ash tray in the photograph on page 83 of Martin Gilbert’s book Churchill At War 1940-1945: His “Finest Hour” In Photographs

  5. Halle, p.10.

  6. G. R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice, p. 71. Cited in Himmelfarb, Moral Imagination, p. 197

  DINERS

  Dean Acheson

  US Secretary of State, 1949–53. As Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State during the Second World War, Acheson played a key role in framing policies ranging from Lend Lease to plans for the post-war financial order at the Bretton Woods conference. First as Truman’s Under-Secretary and then as his Secretary of State, he proved a forceful advocate of containing the further spread of Soviet power and was instrumental in establishing NATOTO. He strongly encouraged Truman to intervene in the Korean War and to support French efforts in Indochina. He died aged 78 in 1971.

  A.V. Alexander

  Labour politician who succeeded Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Born in 1885, the son of a blacksmith, he left school at 13 and served in the Artists’ Rifles in the First World War. In the post-war Labour government he served as Minister of Defence and Labour leader in the House of Lords. He died in 1965.

  Clement Attlee

  Leader of the Labour Party, 1935–55 and Prime Minister, 1945–51. Attlee served as Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister in the War Cabinet, putting aside political differences in a successful partnership. He enjoyed Churchill’s respect and also endured his occasional jibes. He was a former public schoolboy who fought in the First World War and whose social conscience was shaped by witnessing poverty in the East End of London where he was a local mayor and MP. His wife was a closet Tory. He died in 1967, two years after Churchill.