Churchill knew shortly after he boarded the RMS Berengaria for a return to Great Britain on October 30, 1929, after “nibbling the grass” in America, that he would have to return to the United States sooner rather than later.
If he had learned anything in America in 1929—and he had learned a great deal—it was that its wealth and appetite of Americans to hear what this famous British warrior and politician had to say might make for a successful speaking tour. And so, early in 1931, only some fifteen months after leaving America, and some thirty years after his first lecture tour, he began planning another lecture tour.
The circumstances that allowed Churchill to crisscross America in 1929 had, if anything, changed in a way that made another tour even more possible. On January 27, 1931, he had resigned from the Tory front bench over the party’s support for dominion status for India,1 and although retaining his Epping parliamentary seat with a doubled majority,2 had entered into what would later be called his Wilderness Years.
Unlike his earlier 1900–1901 tour, in which Churchill described his personal adventures in the Boer War, this one was aimed at helping Americans place their local experiences in the broader context of world events. As early as 1901, Churchill had noticed “that Americans have no national newspaper… no paper that assigns to local affairs their relative importance and makes it its business to give reports of national events…”3
The lectures would deal with a broad array of national and international topics, including the necessity for the unity between the English-speaking peoples, the gold standard, and wartime reparations, with only occasional, polite references to purely local matters such as the quality and amounts of American foods, and their bathing habits. As always, he hoped to add visits to Civil War battle sites.
There can be no doubt that Churchill undertook this second lecture tour of the United States primarily to rebuild the finances that had been shattered by the stock market collapse of 1929. His great friend, the financier and self-styled “speculator” Bernard Baruch, had written to Churchill as early as 1927, two years before the Troupe had set out on its American adventure, “Business conditions in this country are not as good as the newspapers make them appear.”4
Having observed the run-up to the crash, Baruch wrote, “Men often don’t know when they have enough, and frequently gamble away what they do have in the empty hope of getting more. Never before has there been such gambling as there was in those last turbulent years of the twenties; but few people realized they were gambling—they thought they had a sure thing.”5
But a more apt description of the times would be difficult to conjure. We do know that Baruch continued to advise Churchill, including that the likely performance of one of Churchill’s favorite stocks, mattress-maker Simmons, would be disappointing and that the stock should be sold.6 Churchill was a gambler. Like his father, Lord Randolph, he carried on “the male Churchills’ fondness for gambling.”7
He believed that political advancement required deeds of daring in the battlefield, and saw battle as a game of chance in which “I play for high stakes,” with death the price of losing, fame and political advancement the prizes for winning.8 Churchill did believe the odds were in his favor, “I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”9
He also gambled on the stock market. He relished “the daily excitement of the world’s stock markets.”10 He was not an investor; gamblers do not have long-run horizons. He often traded a company’s shares several times in a single day, at one point, trading “his old favorite Montgomery Ward” sixteen times within four days,11 despite earlier warnings from his brokers Vickers, da Costa that the company’s “shares are amongst the most speculative dealt in on Wall Street.”12
And when home at Chartwell he had a secretary develop a graph so he could follow prices hour by hour.13 As noted earlier, he bought shares in “a stock called Simmons” because he liked the company’s slogan, “You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress.”14 He sought the company of, and admired, many men who had made fortunes speculating on the stock market, most notably but not only Bernard Baruch. During a late-night card game with Averell Harriman, Churchill described the financial debacle he experienced in 1929, but declared, “what a wonderful life it would be to be a speculator.”15 And Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, would later write that Churchill, at a meeting in Baruch’s office in 1929, “…played the markets. He knew nothing of what he was doing: to him it was like playing roulette at Monte Carlo.”16
When not playing the stock market, or entering his horses in top races, Churchill loved the casinos of the south of France, to the consternation of his wife, whose early brush with penury made her extraordinarily sensitive to ups and downs in the family’s financial circumstances. She had the good fortune to be married to one of the world’s most interesting men, a loving and faithful husband. She had the misfortune, given her early life, to be married to a man about whom a biographer and investment banker (who studied Churchill’s finances in exacting detail) said, “I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale during my career of advising people about their finances, including such natural risk-takers as entrepreneurs and politicians.”17
Churchill’s was not the style of many of the I-can-take-it-or-leave-it visitors who gamble these days in Las Vegas. One of his secretaries reports that in 1938, en route to catch a train near Monte Carlo, Churchill ordered the car stopped, dashed into a casino, and emerged exuberant at the fact that his winnings would cover fares for him and her to London.18 Perhaps he assumed the train would wait for him, as it so often would. Lough estimates that over his lifetime Winston lost £40,000 every year while on vacation.19
Unfortunately, Churchill’s risk-taking was accompanied by a need for funds that far outstripped those of men of similar means. His desire for only the best is legend in the literature covering his life. Several secretaries sought to bring order to household expenditures, and failed miserably. Winston often spent income anticipated from work not yet performed. Surveying the profits of his speculations immediately before the 1929 crash, he advised Clementine to begin expanding Chartwell, advising her to build out the nursery, order dining room chairs with arms for ease of entertaining, and hire servants to help at dinner parties for political friends and enemies. His idea of economizing seems to have included reserving his best cigars for himself and offering the lesser brands to his guests, and directing his supplier to send a gift to his grandson “of good quality, but not quite as good as the Romeo & Julieta, and of medium size.”20 “He could not bear to pay bills,” one of his secretaries told an audience many years after his death.”21
It might seem odd to say that Churchill’s “addiction” to gambling, his unwillingness to control his spending, were a gift to the world. But they were. For one thing they forced him to rely on his pen, and a prolific pen it was: “43 book-length works in 72 volumes.”22 Churchill wanted to speak out on issues, but he also was compelled by his financial brinkmanship to earn fees for newspaper and magazine columns and multivolume histories of a quality that led to a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. His need for commissions often led him to negotiate simultaneously with magazine publishers in the United States and in Britain, always coordinating that there would be no overlaps in publication dates or topics.
More important, “A common thread of exceptional risk-taking unites Churchill’s financial dealings and his political career.”23 Churchill gambled his career by “ratting and re-ratting,” leaping from party to party and back again. He gambled and lost in Gallipoli and other military ventures, and was prevented from gambling on an overthrow of the Bolsheviks only by the restraints placed on him by his own and other governments. He gambled his life in military adventures and reported that he found “nothing in life more exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”24
Most important of all these gambles, some against the odds, was the gamble he took by refusing to seek compromise with Hitler. Germany had swiftly conquered most of Europe, was allied with a militarily potent Japan that threatened British interests in the Far East, and with Russia. Prudence dictated a deal with Nazi Germany. A gamble that he could woo America from its isolationism dictated holding out. He relied on his pen and tongue to try to rally the British people, and the important Americans he had linked into a network that would offset some of the isolationist pressures on FDR to remain aloof from Britain’s trials.
This is the man who returned to America in December 1931 to reverse some of the consequences of his failed gambles on the stock market only two years earlier. This is also a man for whom multitasking, to use a modern description, was the norm—dictating while in the bath, responding to urgent messages while laying brick, making certain that sugar rations were adequate for honey-making bees while waging war against Hitler, networking while lecturing. He knew that this visit to America would provide an opportunity to expound on issues of importance to him—the gold standard, Anglo-American unity.
Equally important, he would reacquaint himself with existing members of his network and form new links. In New York he would get to see his old friend Baruch, who would certainly introduce him to any titans of global finance he had not yet met. In Washington he would have an opportunity to talk with outgoing President Herbert Hoover, with whom he had only a perfunctory meeting on his last trip, but with whom he might want to discuss what he later described as “American methods of dealing with unemployment and distress,” a subject he would later propose to Collier’s as a subject for one of his commissioned articles.25 In Chicago he might test whether the favorable view the great publisher “Colonel” Robert R. McCormick formed of the then-first lord of the Admiralty when they met in 1915 could be used to moderate the “Colonel’s” virulent anti–British Empire editorials.
Preplanning for this lecture tour started as early as May 1931, when Churchill wrote to his American publisher, Scribner’s, worried that sales of A Roving Commission26 had not been higher but that “If I should lecture in the autumn [in the United States] no doubt we will flush it all up… and I have not the slightest doubt that on both sides of the Atlantic it will have a prolonged existence.”27 It is still in print worldwide. And he continued negotiations with Scribner’s on what would be the fifth volume of The World Crisis (volume IV, The Aftermath, had been published in 1929).28 Churchill, writing from Juan-les-Pins in August 1931, told Bracken: “I should hold myself free to market the articles [promised to the Daily Mail] so far as possible in the United States…. [Articles] sometimes descriptive when I am in America on travel and foreign matters…”29
There were also negotiations on the proposed schedule, routes, and on the contract, which lasted several months, involving lawyers both in the U.K. and the U.S. Churchill worked through an American lecture agency, Alber Wickes Platform Service of Cleveland, Ohio, later titled the Affiliated Lecture & Concert Association.30 These firms had handled a tour Randolph Churchill had undertaken, probably against his father’s advice, in October 1930.31 Churchill had learned from his dealings with Major Pond in 1900 that the financial and intellectual success of a lecture tour depended on more than the talent of the lecturer. It depended, too, on his personal attention to detail before signing contracts, and indeed, the necessity of contracts, something Pond did not encourage. Not to mention all the details of what we now call advance work, i.e., transportation, lodging, security, and of course secretarial help all along the route.
The 1931–1932 plan included a feature new to these trips: the added pleasure of having his wife, Clemmie, and daughter Diana accompany him. In addition, Walter Thompson, a detective seconded from Scotland Yard and Winston’s regular bodyguard, was to accompany the family. Protection was deemed necessary because of death threats from groups unhappy with Winston’s opposition to granting India independence.32 Churchill authorized Baruch, a continuing useful link in his network of American friends, to read the highly secret information on the threats from pro-Indian independence protestors. Baruch, with his easy access to presidents, shared the information with the then-occupant of the White House, Herbert Hoover. The result was that Winston was “guarded every moment, night and day, by groups of armed plainclothes men.”33
Perhaps unaware of the threats to Churchill and the arrangements that had been negotiated for his safety, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle took umbrage at the thought that Winston needed a bodyguard: “The assumption that Churchill was thinking of the United States as a wild country, where safety first demanded a British policeman on duty, was natural but unfair.”37
The planning done, in December 1931 Churchill, who had just completed the final volume of The World Crisis, sailed to New York.38 Because they sailed aboard a German liner—the “Speed Queen”39 Europa, instead of on a British-owned Cunard vessel—in spite of the “Buy British” campaign then ongoing, the trip raised a storm of criticism. The New York Times reported that “Mr. Churchill made no reply [to these critics]. It is understood, however, that he arranged for passage by a British liner but missed the boat, owing to Wednesday’s India Debate.”40
Churchill planned to “give forty lectures for a guaranteed minimum income of £10,000. In addition the Daily Mail was paying him £8,000 for a series of articles on life, travel, and politics in the United States”42 and on Anglo-American relations, a subject on which Churchill was now a well-known and practiced speaker. He would also address what he saw as the coming economic crisis. Collier’s magazine had agreed to take six articles at $1,500 each, the subjects to be chosen in consultation with the Collier’s editor but “with the purpose of appealing to the American audience.”43 In addition, Brendan Bracken had made an arrangement that left Churchill free to negotiate further sales of these articles in the U.S.
Churchill promised to cable the copy to which he had committed himself by the 27th of December.52 This was to be a working trip. Inevitably, not all the projects Churchill hoped to add to the revenue side of the tour eventuated in contracts. Mr. Ivy Lee, a representative of the Rockefeller family and of some of the financiers already known to Churchill, among them Charles Schwab and Otto Kahn, not to mention Collier’s magazine, advised Churchill that his clients could not agree to the $250,000 fee he was asking for a biography they were hoping he would write of the founder of the Rockefeller family fortune. Such a subsidy or guaranteed royalties would “lay the proposed book open to the charge of having been subsidized… to result in giving the reader a favorable impression…”53
Before sailing, Churchill had arranged to have copies of the Times (London) delivered daily to his Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite starting on December 8 through January 19, 1932.54 Perhaps as a result of his eagerness to keep pace with developments at home, Churchill atypically paid the bill promptly. It would be surprising if he did not also or somehow follow the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which at various times and under similar names claimed a circulation in excess of one million, and called itself “the LARGEST CIRCULATION [sic] of any evening newspaper published in the United States.”55
That paper’s intense coverage of his visits had begun when he arrived in New York some three decades earlier for the start of his first lecture tour, when its reporter carefully described what he was wearing.56
On arrival on December 11, 1931, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle focused on his youthful appearance. He is “57 but [he] looks a decade younger. He is as wholesome as English mutton… as he parried and occasionally answered question of nearly 30 newspapermen in the lounge of the Europa.”57
Two newspaper headlines (Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Boston Globe) referred to Churchill as a “stormy petrel.”58 Another descriptive from the Globe: “a comet of English politics.”59 And the Chicago Tribune, in its weekend edition, wrote of Churchill, “England’s political bad boy, the image-breaker, who has held every office in the British cabinet except prime minister,60 the brilliant, bold, picturesque Winston Spencer Churchill, arrived here today… Here is an Englishman who has no sense of landing upon foreign soil when he comes to the United States… The German situation he regarded as ‘anxious’… but he does not believe Hitler’s success will lead to war… in the next few years.”61
After disembarking on December 11, the family traveled directly to Grand Central Station to board a train to Worcester, Massachusetts. Thompson recalls being met by “several hundred police… in a whirling parade [we] rocked up Broadway with enough sirens to waken the dead.”62
The train pulled into Worcester at 5:30, leaving Winston just enough time to check in at the Bancroft Hotel for a speech that night to an audience of some 1,000 people sponsored by the local Economic Club. There, “recalling the ties that bind the two nations together, [Churchill] pleaded for a stronger alliance between the two nations in the interest of the peace of the world.”63 Among the audience, the Atlanta Constitution64 listed J. P. Morgan Jr.,65 John D Rockefeller, Otto Kahn, and Parker Gilbert.66
The American Gilbert, who had worked in the Wilson administration’s Treasury Department and, later, on the Reparations to Germany Committee, was at this time an associate at J. P. Morgan. The lecture fee Churchill received included the agreed commission and reacquaintance with important pillars of the American financial community. Writing to Randolph from the Bahamas about a month later, Churchill expressed satisfaction with his reception in Worcester, the talk “certainly went extremely well. The people were almost reverential in their attitude.”67 On their return to New York City on the day after the Worcester talk, December 12, the family checked into a 40th floor suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Churchill “began dictating his next lecture to a stenographer he’d employed.”68
Churchill was very big news in the United States of 1931 and the pressmen and women followed him everywhere. Thompson was left to deal with the clamorous press and photographers outside the hotel, one even bribing a maid to let her take the hotel employee’s place. The problem was compounded by the reporters’ interest in Thompson himself. The detective characterized “the US newshounds as ‘indecently adhesive.’ ”69
The following day, Churchill headed to an after-dinner visit with Bernard Baruch, who lived at 1055 Fifth Avenue, an address Winston could not remember. Confident that he would recognize the building, as he had been there before, he got out of a cab, started across Fifth Avenue from the Central Park side, but probably looked left instead of right when halfway across and was struck by what was initially (and in some cases subsequently) incorrectly reported as a New York City taxi. In fact the vehicle was a private motor car, “my own car,” driven by one Mario Cantasano.70 Churchill perhaps forgot that Americans drive on different side of the road than do the British.
Churchill, then aged 57, was taken immediately in a taxi, with the help of its driver, to Lenox Hill Hospital on Lexington Avenue and 76th Street, only 2 ½ blocks from the scene of the accident. Clemmie, Thompson, and Baruch arrived almost immediately, and along with Diana were the only visitors allowed. Medical specialists were summoned and Thompson was posted at Churchill’s hospital room door.71 The patient’s rather serious injuries included “multiple bruises and abrasions particularly of both shoulders…. Traumatic pleural hemorrhagic effusion of right lung,” deep cuts on the forehead,72 and nose and possible rib fractures.73 In addition he again suffered an injury to a shoulder that he had dislocated in 1896 while scampering up from a small boat at the dock in Bombay (now Mumbai) with his regiment.
The doctors recommended that he remain in the hospital for three days so they could ensure his injuries were not more serious than they appeared to be, in which case there would be the threat of a concussion or, more seriously, pleurisy in the lungs. They recommended that after leaving the hospital Churchill spend several weeks in bed to recuperate.
The New York Times referred to the famous patient as “the statesman,”74 and along with the rest of the press reported the regular bulletins issued by the doctors on their famous patient’s progress, as well as cancellations and rescheduling of his speaking schedule. The American press was augmented by reporters sent from Britain; there was an incessant flow of cables requesting information.75 Clemmie and Diana telephoned and telegraphed friends, reporting that the patient was being well treated and was in no danger. Randolph reported to the press that he had “unexpectedly” received a call from his father in New York City informing him that “he was making excellent progress… He put the accident down to his unfamiliarity with the New York electric traffic lights.”76
This call was made possible by the president of the New York Telephone Company, James S. McCulloh, who set up telephone and telegraph services separate from the hospital’s switchboard so Churchill could make and receive calls from his hospital bed in privacy.77 One such incoming call is reported to have come from King George V, who telephoned the hospital room to check on the patient.78 McCulloh acknowledged Churchill’s thank-you note and seems to apologize for the accident by describing New York as “fog-bound.”79 Churchill thanked the president of the company for “the very large facilities which you so kindly gave me in telegraphing to friends and relations about my accident. I need to say how grateful I was to you for this princely courtesy….”80 There were some limits on the communication center set up for Churchill. Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt, who treated him, denied rumors that his patient intended to do a live broadcast to England from his bed.81
Another thoughtful gift arrived at the hotel: a “new Remington Rand Noiseless Portable typewriter.”82 Presumably the press had reported that Churchill was back at work in the hotel, hence this gift. Churchill’s thank-you note was written the day after Christmas:
It is not my practice to accept such valuable presents, but in view of the courtesy and kindness which has inspired your offer, and of course the circumstances of my accident, I do so with the greatest pleasure. It will be the companion of my journey…. I do hope, however, you will allow me to send you, as a very small return, a complete set of my volumes on “THE WORLD CRISIS” [sic], the first of which I have inscribed to you…83
Never one to waste time, even when still “in a white hospital room” at Lenox Hill hospital, swathed in bandages “with only his mouth and eyes visible,” Churchill asked William Chenery and his Collier’s managing editor to come to see him. Chenery said, “he wanted to talk… we were his first audience… He had talked for nearly forty minutes and while I have heard some of his great war speeches I was never more moved by the virtuosity of his eloquence….”84
Inspector Thompson once again was called upon to deal with the ever-present American and British press. Some reporters wore white coats, pretending to be doctors, nurses, or waiters. All were looking for a scoop to feed readers eager for news, any news, about the famous patient. The New York Times issued almost daily reports on his condition. Unfortunately for those reporters, the famous patient was also a skilled journalist. Earlier, in 1924, he had negotiated with Cosmopolitan magazine for the publication of eight articles at a time when Cosmopolitan’s top rate for a nonfiction article was $1,500.85
He had come to America in the hunt for commissions and fees. Churchill sold the tale of his accident to the Daily Mail, promising “to hand copy for cabling” to the Mail’s New York manager. The proprietor, Esmond Harmsworth, cabled back that the article was “brilliant,”86 and published it early in the new year, in two installments titled “My New York Misadventure.”87
The New York City press much appreciated Churchill’s exonerating the driver, Mario Cantasano, whose name was variously misspelled as Constasino by Churchill and Contasino by others.88 Cantasano explained that “it was one of those damp nights which make the streets all wet…. Not so good for driving… the streets are slippery…”89 but Churchill gallantly claimed the accident was his own fault. Having heard that the driver was unemployed and supporting his family, Clemmie offered him money. He refused. Churchill did send him an autographed copy of The Unknown War, the final volume in The World Crisis, just published in the U.S. in 1931.90
Cantasano later wrote, “I telephoned several times to find out how Mr. Churchill was, and was invited to have tea [at the hotel] with Mr. Churchill’s daughter and to tell her all about the accident… explaining that Mr. Churchill had been looking in the wrong direction. I had some tea and a cigarette. I had never been in the Waldorf before. Before long the statesman was well enough to see me in person. But there he was, cheerful and a very fine person. I never knew anyone so interested in his own accident. Mr. Churchill even had figures by that time to prove that the crash would have been about the same if he had fallen out of a window thirty feet up.”91 (In 1942, this young man, Cantasano, would enlist as a mechanic in the U.S. Army.)
The figures Mario refers to were from a telegram from “the Prof,” Frederick Lindemann, who had answered Churchill’s request for information on the impact of the accident on his body. Lindemann telegraphed: “Collision equivalent falling thirty feet onto pavement… equivalent stopping ten pound brick dropped six hundred feet or two charge buckshot pointblank range… rate inversely proportional thickness cushion surrounding skeleton and give of frame.”92
Churchill later described the impact as “of the same order as the shell explosion” to which he had been exposed in Flanders.93 It was also undoubtedly similar to another one of his misadventures, this one when he was air minister after World War I, learning to pilot aircraft. His plane went “into the nose-dive when it struck the ground at perhaps fifty miles per hour with terrific force… I felt myself driven forward, as if in some new dimension by a frightful and overwhelming force, through a space I could not measure. There was a sense of unendurable oppression across my chest as the belt took the strain… I had two hours later to preside and speak at a House of Commons dinner to General Pershing. I managed to do this; but next day I found myself black and blue all over.”94
After being hit by the car in New York, he was more than “black and blue all over.” The doctors’ original estimate of a three-day hospital stay proved a bit optimistic. It would be eight days after the accident before Churchill returned to his hotel and started to plan for his further recuperation. And for further work during his first Christmas in America, albeit bedridden.
On Christmas Eve, he dictated a letter to be sent on hotel stationery to the New York American, a Hearst morning newspaper, saying that he had “definitely sold the special article on my accident” but that he could meet “upon the question of a series. I ought, however, to tell you that I am in treaty for a series of 12, which, of course, would suit me much better than the 6 which were mentioned tentatively in our discussion.”95
And he telegraphed George Harrap, the future publisher of Marlborough, that he had no other “serious literary work between me and this book [Marlborough] at the present time and have a large portable library on the early portion of the Duke’s life with me on my travels.”96
And he negotiated with the editor of The Strand, a London magazine that wished to publish six articles Churchill had promised Collier’s on American topics. Winston agreed not to offer any other English magazines any articles for a period of six months.97
And on the same day he offered the Daily Mail the long article the newspaper eventually published about his accident.
So he was back at work, even semi-bedridden and in pain, in a foreign hotel, his head and nose bandaged, his schedule in tatters, his income from the tour threatened, Clemmie urging him to delay work until fully recuperated, his detective holding off baying reporters. Churchill’s long history of relying on his extraordinary recuperative powers allowed his prompt return to action, whether in Washington on an earlier tour when he honored a speaking engagement although still quite ill, or later at the 1945 Yalta Conference, when he arrived with a fever.
This time, on December 30, a mere nine days after his release from the hospital, he agreed to a press conference in the dining room of his Waldorf suite, telling the press, “the United States has within it ‘the power to enter quite speedily into a grand period of prosperity’ which will furnish the entering wedge for restoration of world prosperity.”98 He was reported to look “pale, nervous and shaky after his ordeal… [but] aroused to irritability on questions of currency stability and on whether he had bought many hats since he had come to New York… [and] whether certain members of his family were still alive.”99 But his irritability diminished a bit as he described his day “…like Mark Twain’s diary… got up, washed, went to bed.”100
On the advice of his doctors, and no doubt under pressure from his wife and daughter, Churchill decided to recuperate in the Bahamas. Cheekily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that “Churchill, after recovering from an injury by a New York taxicab, is going to the West Indies without, for some unexplained reason, stopping at Bermuda, where motor vehicles are banned.”101 And further irony from the Daily Dispatch in Moline, Illinois, crediting the Arkansas Gazette: “The courtesy extended by the Winston Churchills to the taxi driver [repeating a common error] who ran over Mr. Churchill should have a tendency toward ending hit-and-run driving. Offenders now may stop long enough to leave cards with victims on the chance of being invited to tea.”102 And in Minneapolis, a columnist wrote that just after the accident, Churchill had not “forgotten the incident… far from it. He sat down and wrote a few thousand words on ‘How it Feels to Be Run Down by an American Cab’ and sold it to an English publication for 500 pounds, almost $2500. The astute Englishman!”103
Wide press coverage of his accident reminded Americans that the famous British politician/warrior/journalist and, as the New York Times would have it, “statesman” was once again among them. He received hundreds of best wishes from strangers, and from the many people who had attended Churchill speeches on prior tours and/or had read about his adventures in the press or his books.
As usual, he had time for some recent members of his newly formed network. He sent a cable to William Randolph Hearst wishing him “all good wishes for the New Year” [adding] “If I can come to Pacific Coast will not fail to let you know.”104
And he sent separate New Year wishes cables to Hearst’s New York wife, Millicent, and to Marion Davies, Hearst’s Hollywood mistress. The cable to Davies was signed “The Star of the Churchill Troupe,” reminding her of his 1929 visit with Randolph.105
Planning his recuperation and, as always, future work, Churchill cabled the British Colonial Secretary in the Bahamas, Charles Dundas, asking him to “find me trustworthy shorthand writer during my stay….”106 And on New Year’s Eve, 1931, the Churchills sailed for Nassau in the Bahamas.107 Thompson notes that immediately upon passing the three-mile limit of American jurisdiction, the passengers “did a considerable amount of drinking… [and continuing the] celebrations until we reached Nassau three days later.”108 There was no mention in Thompson’s diary of the extent to which the recovering patient joined his shipmates in celebrating their relief at being beyond the reach of Prohibition, about which Winston had written so scathingly in the past.
Churchill cabled his requirements to the Polly Leach Hotel,109 later renamed Graycliff House. The hotel confirmed “two large double rooms with bath, private sitting room, porches with meals… outside room nearby for man.”110 Built in “the early 1800s… with its high wall and private entrance… [and] airy porches,”111 it was conveniently located directly opposite the Governor’s residence.
The Churchill family and Detective Thompson arrived in Nassau on January 4. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the Bahamian parliament honored Churchill with a dinner, with the Honorable Charles Dundas as chairman.112 And the same newspaper reported that Henry Ford “had instructed his local agents to place one of his cars at his disposal during the latter’s stay in Nassau….”113 And, as always, he hired a stenographer to deal with his voluminous correspondence, both business and personal, and his promised articles. The Churchill family stayed at Graycliff House, built in “the early 1800s… with its high wall and private entrance… [and] airy porches,”114 conveniently located directly opposite the Governor’s Residence.
A new governor-general, Sir Bede Clifford, arrived in Nassau and was sworn in on January 10. It was not long before he invited the Churchills to move into Government House, which they did. Sir Bede knew Churchill as he had been secretary to the governor-general of South Africa when Churchill had requested his help for one of the men who had aided his escape from the Pretoria jail. Clemmie was invited to his swearing-in. Presumably Churchill was not well enough to attend, and elected the option Sir Bede mentioned in his invitation to “remain a-bed as you felt inclined.”115
Signaling that his restlessness was overcoming his need for rest, Winston wrote a long letter to his son, Randolph, telling him that he had begun planning his “Economic [sic] lecture and have prepared an argument long enough for three” lectures. “…Brendan [Bracken] has sent me lots of materials for my Economic speeches….” And he told Randolph he was planning “to give some lectures on Russia toward the end of the tour.” Although he had “not felt like opening the paint box,” he was reading “very nearly a book a day.” Churchill did have a few regrets about his decision to leave Nassau. For one thing: “I have never seen your mother so well or so completely amused.”116 And of course he would write an article for the March 23, 1932, the Daily Mail, “My Happy Days in the ‘Wet’ Bahamas,” outlining Bahamian history, weather, and its economic dependence on tourism and on Uncle Sam, as well as his own reactions to that lovely place.117 For another he would miss the “soothing and somewhat enervating climate” of Nassau. But he expected the “electric atmosphere of New York to act as tonic.”118
He could not rest for long. Never could, never would. By January 22, two days after he had laid out his plans in his letter to Randolph, Churchill felt sufficiently rested and recovered to sail back to the United States to resume his postponed lecture tour. He was the same man who had written to his mother in 1897 from India that he could not sit still and wanted action, which to him meant work. His intellectual curiosity and drive would see him through.
The Churchills arrived back at the Waldorf on January 25, 1932, and Churchill immediately—“action this day” as that idea would become—held a press conference, as he was eager to be back at work and to fulfill his obligations to the tour managers, not to mention filling his much-depleted bank accounts. Most newspapers in those cities in which a lecture had been canceled ran stories announcing the new dates for his appearances and the availability of tickets. And the national press announced the new dates and cities.