The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (16 page)

She gave up almost all her time for Winston, who came—as Mary Churchill put it—‘
first, second and third’. This was a sacrifice, and it can be argued that both Clementine and her children suffered from feeling themselves to be minor celestial bodies, condemned to perpetual orbit around the
roi soleil
of Chartwell. He was so busy that sometimes she felt neglected.

He could write to her with unmistakable ardour (there is a letter about wanting to grab her naked out of the bath, for instance); but there is also a plangent letter she writes to him in March 1916, when he has gone away to the trenches. ‘
We are still young, but time flies, stealing love away and leaving only friendship which is very peaceful but not very stimulating or warming.’ Uh-oh.

On at least one occasion she threw a plate of spinach at his head. Given his immense capacity for self-obsession, I expect there will be many people who will cheer the gesture—and be thankful that she missed. Both of them had parents who were serially unfaithful; both had grown up in households that were unhappy in one way or another. Did Churchill or Clementine ever feel the temptation to stray, in fifty-six years of marriage?

I would be surprised—whatever the occasional rumours—if we found that Churchill had done any such thing himself. He was not only devoted to Clementine, it just wasn’t the way he was made. There is the story of Daisy Fellowes, described as ‘
a figure of panache, chic
and somewhat heartless beauty’, who bumped into Churchill when he was at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. She invited him round to tea ‘to see my little child’. When Churchill rolled up for tea, he found no little child, but a chaise longue on which had been stretched a tiger skin, and on the tiger skin stretched his hostess. She had no clothes on. He fled.

As for Clementine, well, much has been made of the tale of the Bali dove. Such was the general stress of living with Churchill that she used to go on quite long holidays—to the south of France, or the Alps, or the West Indies. In 1934 she went on an absolute odyssey—30,000 miles across the South Seas aboard a luxurious steam yacht belonging to the Guinness heir, Lord Moyne. She went to Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Caledonia, New Hebrides and the island of Bali, from where she wrote to her husband: ‘
It’s an enchanted island. Lovely temples embedded in green vegetation in every village. Lovely dancers. The inhabitants lead an Elysian life. They work for about two hours a day—the rest of the time they play with musical instruments, dance, make offerings in the Temples of the Gods and make love! Perfect, isn’t it?’

At this time Churchill was waging hand-to-hand warfare with the government over the India Bill—struggling home exhausted after late divisions—and one can see that the life he offered Clementine back home was not always paradise; nor, perhaps, was daily lovemaking as high on the Chartwell agenda as it was among the happy tribes of Bali. Clementine had all sorts of mementoes in her luggage on her return in April 1935, having lost weight and looking well.

She had pretty seashells that they put into the ornamental ponds, and which turned a bit yellowy-green. Her prize trophy was a Bali dove. Her daughter Mary described it as an enchanting pinky-beige little bird, with coral beak and feet. ‘
He lived in a beautiful wicker
cage rather like a glorified lobster pot. He would crou crou and bow with exquisite oriental politeness to people he liked.’ The dove was a present from a chap who was with Clementine on the boat. He was an art dealer named Terence Philip.

We have a hint of the feelings this fellow aroused in Clementine, because when the dove eventually wheezed its final crou-crou, she personally designed an inscription to go on the sundial, in the rose garden at Chartwell, which serves as the grave stele.

HERE LIES THE BALI DOVE

It does not do to wander

Too far from sober men.

But there’s an island yonder.

I think of it again.

The lines were not by herself, but taken—at the suggestion of the travel writer Freya Stark—from the works of the nineteenth-century literary critic W. P. Ker. Some people say it is pretty blindingly obvious what this is supposed to be driving at.

Churchill is the sober man from whom she wandered, and she admits that she was wrong. But the dove—the bird of Venus, the symbol of love—is the reminder of the other life she almost had on a tropical island half a world away. The dove has been so ceremoniously interred not just because it was a jolly little bird, but because it reminds her of the time when she was billing and cooing herself. It is a symbol of her fling—her first, her last, her only fling.

Is that right? Did she have a thing with the art dealer? Well, it is possible, I suppose—though others have pointed out that Terence Philip was in fact supposed to have homosexual leanings. We know that he came several times to Chartwell in the next two years; but whatever it was that existed between them died as dead as the dove—
and Philip himself died during the war, working for the art dealer Wildenstein in New York.

Perhaps there was something a little bit more than a flirtation between Clemmie and this suave fellow; perhaps not. But there are two points about the Bali dove business. The first is that whatever the bird signified, Churchill knew about it and understood it and forgave it: how else could he allow a shrine to this holiday romance to be erected in his own garden?

The second is that whatever Terence Philip did for Clemmie—whatever he made her feel—did absolutely nothing to affect the love affair between herself and her husband. Here she is, writing to him from the yacht, as she heads back home. ‘
Oh my darling Winston, the Air Mail is just flitting and I send you this like John the Baptist to prepare the way for me, to tell you I love you and I long to be folded in your arms.’ Does that sound like a woman in the grip of a red-hot affair with another man? Possibly, of course—but unlikely, I think, in her case.

Here is what Churchill wrote to her:

I think a lot about you, my darling Pussie . . . and rejoice that we have lived our lives together and still have some years of expectation in this pleasant vale. I have been sometimes a little depressed about politics and would like to have been comforted by you. But I feel that this has been a great experience and adventure to you and that it has introduced a new background to your life and a larger proportion; and so I have not grudged you your long excursion; but now I do want you back.

You sense from this letter that Churchill knows the awful demands he has made on his wife. We also understand that he has had more than enough of her absence, and badly needed her with him. Why
did Churchill forgive her flirtation with Terence Philip, assuming there was anything to forgive? Because he loved her, that’s why. The world owes her a huge debt—a point the British government recognised after Churchill’s death, when they made her a peeress in her own right.

He could not have done it without her. She gave his life a pile-driven domestic foundation, and not just in supplying the management of Chartwell and its nine servants and two gardeners; and in meeting all the vast emotional and logistical demands of four children. Here, too, her efforts must be counted a success.

It cannot have been easy to bring up the four of them—Diana, Randolph, Sarah and Mary—and though they were not all of them always happy in their lives they were all to become remarkable and courageous individuals: a credit to Winston (he was a loving father, when time allowed) and above all to Clemmie.

She curbed his excesses, she made him think more of other people, and to be less self-centred, and she helped to bring out what was lovable and admirable in his character. That was important, in 1940. The country needed a leader the public could understand, and who was likeable, and who seemed wholly ‘grounded’ and authentic.

If Churchill was to lead his country in war, he needed to be able to relate to people, and they needed to be able to relate to him; and in Churchill’s case it helped that they could go farther, and actually identify themselves and their country with his personality.

CHAPTER 10

THE MAKING OF JOHN BULL

I
t is the end of July 1940. The British position is absolutely desperate. The last of the British Expeditionary Force has long since scuttled from France. The Germans are in the process of trying to destroy the RAF. Churchill is up inspecting the defences of Hartlepool—a town that had famously been shelled by German ships in the Great War.

He stops in front of a British soldier equipped with an American-made weapon—a 1928 Thompson SMG, or submachine gun. Churchill plucks it out of the soldier’s hands, barrel first. He holds the gun, muzzle thrust down and forward, as if he is on patrol on the British coast. He turns to face the camera—and the resulting picture becomes one of the great images of his will to resist.

In fact, the photograph is so strong and arresting that it becomes a propaganda hit for both sides. Goebbels immediately reprinted Churchill and the tommy gun in leaflets that accused him of being a war criminal and gangster—a man who loved personally to flourish the very same killing machine as Al Capone.

The British used it, too, though with the tin-hatted soldiers
cropped out—and in the British case the propaganda message was rather different. Yes, says the picture (which can be bought on all sorts of mugs and tea towels and posters to this day): our war effort is indeed being led by a civilian of advancing years, a man who is so outlandish in his garb that he is still wearing a tall ‘Cambridge’ bowler hat, a titfer he bought at Lock’s of St James’s in 1919—they still have the record—and which went out of fashion years ago.

Yes, he has the same taste in headgear as Stan Laurel, and yes he wears spotty bow ties and pinstriped suits and looks like a country solicitor. But I tell you what—that poster informs the viewer—this man Churchill has fired a gun many times. He knows how to cock it and load it.

He knows the business end of a tommy gun, and he knows how to shoot. To use an overused word, there is something iconic about that shot, because in 1940 Churchill was in the process of becoming an icon—almost literally.

He was transmogrifying himself into the spirit of the nation, the very emblem of defiance. Consider those round-cheeked features, the hint of merriment in the upturned lip, the frank gaze of the eyes. He has channelled that portly gentleman who for two centuries or more has embodied the truculent-but-jovial response of the British to any great continental combination. He has become John Bull, and he shares many obvious qualities with that eighteenth-century personification of England—most familiar from prints and propaganda of the Napoleonic era.

He is fat, jolly, high-living, rumbustious—and patriotic to a degree that many have always considered hyperbolical and unnecessary, but which now, in the present crisis, seems utterly right. It is impossible to imagine any of his rivals achieving this feat—not Halifax, Chamberlain, Stafford Cripps, Eden, Attlee—none of them.

No other leading British politician of the day could have toted
that tommy gun and got away with it (and indeed, it is still a golden rule of all political photo-opportunities: ‘don’t touch the gun!’ the image-makers hiss). None of them had the requisite swagger, and none of them had the colour, the contour, the charisma, the cut-through of the Churchillian personality.

To lead the country in time of war, to keep people together at a moment of profound anxiety, you need to ‘connect’ with them—to use more modern political jargon—in a deep and emotional way. It was not enough to appeal to the logic of defiance. He couldn’t just exhort them to be brave.

He needed to engage their attention, to cheer them, to boost them; if necessary even to make them laugh and, better still, to laugh at their enemies. To move the British people, he needed at some level to identify with them—with those aspects of their character that he, and they, conceived to be elemental to the national psyche.

What are the key attributes of the Brits—at least in our own not-quite-so-humble opinion? Well, we think we have a great sense of humour, unlike some other countries we could mention. Ever since Shakespeare put that chauvinistic drinking-song into the mouth of Iago and Cassio, we have fancied our ability to drink your Hollander under the table, your Dane dead drunk, and so on. The British tend to be a bit suspicious of people who are inordinately thin (and we are now the second-fattest nation on earth); and in general we think of Britain as the natural homeland of the eccentric, the oddball and the individualist.

All four of these traits Churchill covered under the capacious bowler hat of his own personality. The interesting question, when we consider his role in 1940, was how far he confected that identity. Did it all just happen with complete and unconscious spontaneity? Or was he really the most brilliant self-image-maker and spin-doctor of them all?

There have been many who have argued that Churchill’s effulgent public personality was the product of a certain amount of myth-making—by both himself and others. One of the things we believe about Churchill today was that he was John Bull-ish in his irreverence, in his deployment of wit—often barbed wit.

There are any number of anecdotes that appear to illustrate his bluff, hilarious and mordant manner. They cling to him like burrs. Many of them, alas, are not provably true—or certainly not true of Winston Churchill.

Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop—at a reception, allegedly, in Canada—when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘
Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’

At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice.’ Perhaps I am wrong, but that feels to me less like a true story about Churchill, and more like some after-dinner anecdote from the pages of
The Funster’s Friend
—pinned on Churchill in the hope of making it more amusing.