The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (17 page)

Such accounts are mainly of interest because of the light they cast on his image—on the fact that people have thought Churchill the right sort of person to fit the story. Some of them could only be about Churchill, but are still dubious—like the yarn about the special sheaths that had to be fitted to the muzzles of the rifles of British troops about to be sent to the Arctic. These were made by a condom manufacturer, and were 10½ inches long. Churchill is said to have inspected the consignment and called for fresh labels. ‘
I want every box, every carton, every packet saying, British. Size: medium. That will show the Nazis, if ever they recover them, who is the master race.’
I apologise for retailing this sort of stuff—but there are many more out there in the same vein.

Sometimes modern scholarship has been able to dismiss claims of Churchillian paternity, even of the ones that have long been thought to bear his stamp. For years I have treasured that one about Nancy Astor, a Virginia-born lady of pronounced views who became Britain’s first female MP and spent much of the 1930s saying that Hitler was an all-round stand-up guy.

‘
Winston,’ she is supposed to have said to him, ‘if I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.’ ‘Nancy,’ Churchill is alleged to have replied to her, ‘if I were your husband I would drink it.’ Alas, Churchill almost certainly never made this brilliant remark, or if he did, he had swiped it from someone else.

Martin Gilbert attributed the gag not to Churchill but to his great friend F. E. Smith—and then further researches spoilt the thing entirely by tracking it down to a 1900 edition of the
Chicago Tribune
, where it appeared in a joke-of-the-day column. Did the young Churchill somehow spot it that year, on his trip to America, and squirrel it away for use on Nancy Astor? I doubt it. Did someone simply recycle the joke, and decide that to be properly funny it needed to be put plausibly in the mouths of some famous people? Much more likely.

Again, I always believed—in fact, I think I heard it from my parents—that Churchill had once ticked off a pompous civil servant who objected to the use of prepositions at the end of sentences. ‘
This is the kind of English up with which I will not put,’ Churchill is meant to have said.

Except that he didn’t. It turns out to have been a joke that was published in the
Strand
magazine, ascribed to no one in particular—but was thought so good that it should be put in the mouth of Churchill. Nor did he say that ‘
In the future, the fascists will call themselves
anti-fascists’. Doubtless a profound remark, depending on your view of politics—but it is not one of Churchill’s.

Nor—and I almost cried when I discovered that this one wasn’t true—did he ever say, of his relations with the exhausting and almost intolerable de Gaulle, ‘
The hardest cross I have had to bear has been the Cross of Lorraine.’ It was actually said by General Spears, Churchill’s envoy to France. But who ever remembers General Spears?

Then there is the beautiful put-down of G. B. Shaw, who sent him two tickets for a first night of one of his plays with the message that he should ‘
bring a friend, if you have one’. Churchill got the ball back over the net by saying that he couldn’t make the first night, but would come to the second ‘if there is one’.

Except that he didn’t, because the omniscient Allen Packwood of Cambridge has found letters from both Shaw and Churchill—unanimously denying it.

Like some hyper-gravitational astral body, it is Churchill who magically claims the joke—when it turns out he never cracked it at all. Which has led some to wonder—mistakenly, in my view—whether he was really as fertile in humour as all that.

You could develop this line of thought, if you chose, and observe that his habits were not completely Falstaffian. He did indeed drink whisky and water from very early in the morning—but his daughter once pointed out that it was a very weak whisky indeed; just a splash of Johnnie Walker at the bottom of the glass, more of a ‘
mouthwash’, as he said, than a proper drink.

As for his cigars, his valet and many others testify that he very rarely smoked them all the way through—generally leaving at least a third or a half in the ashtray. He understood perfectly well that they were not just tobacco; they were part of his brand. On the way to make his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he called for the car to
stop as they neared their destination. He patted his pockets, pulled out a cigar and popped it, unlit, into his mouth.

‘
Never forget your trademark,’ he growled in his trademark growl. Far from being a dissolute Toby Belch, he showed—in his own way—remarkable personal discipline. He worked out with dumb-bells. In the dispatching of business he was more phenomenally industrious than anyone you have ever known. All of which suggests again, perhaps, that the more exuberant sides of his personality contained an element of calculated exaggeration—something a little bit borrowed, like the V for Victory sign that he took from occupied Europe, where it was scrawled by anti-Nazis on buildings and stood for ‘
vrijheid
’ or freedom.

Was Churchill a poseur? No, though everybody to some extent acts out the identity they have assigned themselves. The extraordinary thing is that Churchill’s public persona—his image—was overwhelmingly congruent with reality.

He might have nicked the V-sign from the Continent—but it was pure Churchill to turn it mischievously round, as he often did, so that it could be read to mean not just victory but ‘fuck off’. And yes, whichever way you look at it, his potations were epic. He drank about a pint of Pol Roger champagne a day, together with white wine at lunch, red wine at dinner and port or brandy thereafter. He did once give up spirits (but not if diluted) for a year in 1936, for the sake of a wager; but that did not impede his consumption of other forms of alcohol on a scale that—in the words of his Private Secretary—would have felled a lesser human being.

Nor did he just wave his cigars around for effect, like some vain and Freudian accoutrement of masculine power. According to his secretary, he smoked between eight and ten large Cuban cigars a day. Even if he left a few inches unburned—and the ends were generally
collected and stuffed in the pipe of the gardener at Chartwell—that is still a lot of cigars: about three thousand a year, it has been estimated, or 250,000 over his lifetime.

In spite of all this he managed to get into his eighties with a blood pressure of 140/80. It is as if his body was itself a physical symbol of the nation’s ability to soak up punishment. Talk about Falstaffian behaviour: there is a gripping description of what it was like to watch Churchill eating in his own home, by a man who came to interview him at Chartwell. He wanted everything at once, in no particular order. He would eat a forkful of steak and kidney pie, then puff on a cigar, then gobble a chocolate, then gulp some brandy, then have another forkful of meat—and talking all the while.

As for his sense of humour, and his witticisms, well, the wonder of it really is how many of the stories turn out to be completely true. That is why so many apocryphal stories have been ascribed to Churchill—because the pearl of ornament has formed about the grit of truth; more than a grit—a boulder.

There are so many true stories about Churchill’s behaviour that the false ones have been opportunistically added, by skilled forgers, in the knowledge that it can be hard sometimes to tell which is which. It really is true that in 1946 he met Bessie Braddock—a staunch Labour MP of ample proportions, who once called for some Tory councillors to be machine-gunned—when he was a little bit, as they say, ‘tired and emotional’.

‘
Winston,’ she bristled, ‘you are drunk.’ ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘you are ugly, and I will be sober in the morning.’ That seems to our taste almost unforgivably brutal; but serve her right for being so personal. Anyway, he wasn’t completely sloshed, said his bodyguard, Ron Golding, who confirmed the story; just a bit ‘wobbly’. And it is all the better for being an instant reply.

F. E. Smith once said: ‘
Churchill has spent the best years of his life
preparing his impromptu remarks.’ This one just popped out, and has earned its place, I see, at number one in a
Daily Express
survey of the greatest insults in history.

It seems to be genuinely the case that he made the famous crack about the Lord Privy Seal, who had come to see him when he was in the toilet. ‘
Tell the Lord Privy Seal that I am sealed in the privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time,’ he roared. Even if he didn’t say all of it, he made the essential gag—Privy Seal/sealed in privy.

Again, we see his love of chiasmus—or reversing the word order in an unexpected way: like ‘
beginning of the end/end of the beginning’, or ‘
I am ready to meet my maker; whether my maker is ready for the great ordeal of meeting me is another question’; ‘
we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’; ‘
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me’; and there are many others.

Sometimes I have been tempted to dismiss a story as being surely apocryphal—only to discover that it really is true. He
did
say that. Take the yarn about the time he was on a lecture tour in America, and was served a buffet lunch of cold fried chicken.

‘
May I have some breast?’ he is supposed to have asked his hostess. ‘Mr Churchill,’ the hostess replied, ‘in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.’ The following day the lady received a magnificent orchid from her guest of honour. The accompanying card read, ‘I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat’.

I had this one firmly on my list of forgeries—and then I had it authenticated by his granddaughter Celia Sandys. ‘Where did you hear it?’ I asked.

‘Horse’s mouth,’ she said. You can’t argue with that.

Churchill’s humour is both conceptual and verbal. He not only used his colossal English vocabulary, but is also responsible for some of the greatest Franglais of all time. He has been credited with issuing
this superb threat to de Gaulle: ‘
Et marquez mes mots, mon ami, si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquiderai
.’ (‘
And mark my words, my friend, if you double-cross me, I will liquidate you.’)

Even if the whole thing isn’t from him, he certainly said ‘
je vous liquiderai
’. All these remarks have in common not just that they are funny, but that they are staggeringly rude. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, was not just a ‘
sheep in sheep’s clothing’. One day he went farther, with an attack that ranks in the great tradition of parliamentary invective, an insult of which his father Randolph would have been proud.

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

When he saw Stafford Cripps—the austere Labour figure who had briefly and incredibly been touted as his wartime rival—he said, ‘
There but for the grace of God, goes God.’ He could be rough with colleagues, too. He said that the new Tory MPs around Rab Butler in 1945 were ‘
no more than a set of pink pansies’, and when he was told by his Private Secretary that Butler and Eden were waiting outside to see him, he told Anthony Montague Browne: ‘
Tell them to go and bugger themselves.’

Since this was clearly audible to the waiting pair, he shouted out after the departing Browne: ‘There is no need for them to carry out that instruction literally.’ These are just a handful of the hundreds of
glossy old Churchillian chestnuts, and they illustrate a key point about his political identity: that he had all the unruly combativeness of a bulldog, or of John Bull himself. It wasn’t always to everyone’s tastes; but in time of war you wanted someone so incorrigibly cheerful and verbally inventive that he could really stick it to the Nazis—or rather, to Corporal Schickelgruber and the Narzis.

To mobilise a democracy to war you must be demotic, and Churchill could do demotic better than any of his contemporaries. He loved puns, and wordplay, in the way that
Sun
headline writers love them. A socialist utopia was ‘queuetopia’; he built a shed for his chickens called ‘Chickenham Palace’, and on the subject of chickens he went to Ottowa in December 1941 and told them how he had stuck it to Pétain and the vacillating French. ‘
When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! Some neck!’

They laughed because he was not only cunningly tailoring his language for a North American audience (‘some chicken’, rather than the more usual British English ‘what a chicken’); he was punning on neck, which also means brazenness or cheek.

There is a final sense in which Churchill incarnated something essential about the British character—and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity, verbal and otherwise. He invented words to suit himself. Mountbatten was a ‘
triphibian’, which meant that he was capable of deployment on land, sea and air. The Lend-Lease deal was ‘unsordid’—a word not found before or since. He had an aversion to staples and paper clips and therefore preferred documents to be joined by a treasury tag, or, as he put it, ‘klopped’.

‘
Gimme klop,’ he would bark. ‘When I say klop, Miss Shearburn, that’s what I want, klop.’ One new secretary, Kathleen Hill, famously tried to fulfil this request by producing the fifteen volumes of
Der Fall des Hauses Stuart
by the German historian Onno Klopp (1822–1903). ‘
Christ almighty,’ said Churchill.

He not only wore Laurel and Hardy hats of a kind that had been abandoned by everyone else; he startled people by designing and appearing in his own clothes—those blue velvet or sometimes cerise romper suits that made him look like an overgrown toddler.