It is an error to regard the imagination as a mainly revolutionary force,” Isaiah Berlin has written. “[I]f it destroys and alters, it also fuses hitherto isolated beliefs, insights, mental habits, into strongly unified systems. These, if they are filled with sufficient energy and force of will . . . sometimes transform the outlook of an entire people and generation.” This is another key to understanding the king’s contribution to Churchill—a buoy or mast to which he fastened his imagination.
Churchill could be unpredictable and inconsiderate, but he was rarely obtuse. His approach to life was zestful, extreme. Hence his combination of optimism and hope with intense bouts of depression, and an outer shell of complexity over what some people regarded as a rather simple, straightforward soul. Churchill was clumsy when he tried to deceive, and he almost never did. He was almost pathologically transparent.
He could be dismissive, even forgetful, but rarely absent-minded. His inadvertencies appeared deliberate. During the war, for example, he liked to forget (or pretend to forget) codes, as in a phone call with Eden during which Eden, “[s]peaking slowly and carefully,” said, “I went to the ironmonger’s and there I bought—” to which Churchill replied, “What? . . . What are you talking about? I thought you had been to see the Turks!” Or when he reported to Roosevelt that he was coming to Washington by top secret “puff puff.” Sometimes on the telephone he would pretend to be his secretary John Martin, thereby causing the latter much trouble with the censors.
Churchill was, then, a believer in both chance and the permanence of character, and to understand how that operated vis-à-vis the king, something more must be said of habits and customs.
It was not simply the fact that Churchill, like many great men, was a bundle of contradictions or that the contradictions had contradictions, but that they blurred so often with convictions, as in Lady Lytton’s familiar line: “[T]he first time you meet Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” The latter may have been ends justifying the former. Or that it just took longer for Churchill’s underlying faith to be revealed from the fog of his adversarial temperament, “so adjacent that he comes a damn sight near to being contiguous.”
This adjacent aspect also governed his approach to history and his tendency, at times, to conflate its breadth and its depth. “Winston,” his wife once said, “has always seen things in blinkers.” It was appropriate that in his study at Chequers, his country residence, Churchill kept two objects: a large globe given to him by General Marshall, and an epidiascope, which was a device used to view small objects on reconnaissance photographs. His historical imagination was so rich it tended to smother all present and future realities within a powerful, even mythical, past. This led now and again to a failure to place short-term problems in their proper context, and to rely instead on the luck of the draw when events did not conform to the larger plan or, as he put it, to “take refuge beneath the impenetrable arch of probability.” This way of thinking went against that of the king, who clung to habits, certainties, and rituals.
There were some more apparent, and some less apparent, qualities they had in common. The more apparent were the physical ones: Both were fair, even pale, as young men. Both had smooth skin and, in Churchill’s case, unusually small, delicate hands, which he kept so well that they looked idle. These refinements contrasted with the gait familiar to most people—the hunched shoulders and glaring expression, which also remolded itself every now and then into a sly grin.
For someone so theatrical, Churchill was remarkably free of physical vanity. Legend holds that he verged on the exhibitionistic. There is the oft-repeated story of his accidental encounter in the nude with Roosevelt in the White House when he said that the British prime minister has nothing to hide from the American president. Since he spent so much time working in bed, it was not unusual for assistants to find him coming out of the bath or in various states of undress. Even when traveling, he customarily slept in nothing but one of his special silk underclothes; once, seven thousand feet in the air when he awoke from the cold, he tried to fasten a blanket to the side of the plane to keep out a draft. “On his hands and knees,” Lord Moran has recalled, he “cut a quaint figure with his big, bare, white bottom.”
Both Churchill and the king had been small boys who compensated for physical disadvantage with courage. Churchill’s physical courage, or as some have said, rashness, showed early. He once fell from a tree and perforated a kidney; on a holiday visit to Lausanne he nearly drowned in the lake and came closest in this instance, he said, to staring death in the face. Later, after being hit by a car in New York, he took weeks to recover from his injuries.
The king had written a note to himself: “The schoolboy’s definition of courage: That part of you which says ‘stick it’ while the rest of you says ‘chuck it.’” While Churchill was of a fundamentally strong physical constitution, and the king of a much weaker one, both had confronted illness with fortitude. Both were athletic. The king had excellent hand-eye coordination, and so was a superb rider, tennis player, and pilot; Churchill, even as an old man, impressed onlookers by his agility, telling a young naval officer who offered his hand, for example, “Young man, do you suppose I have never climbed a ladder in my life?” One day at Buckingham Palace, he was pointed to the lift. “‘Lift?’ demanded the indignant prime minister. He ran up the stairs two at a time, then turned and thumbed his nose at the courtier.” He liked to dart up hills or around fortifications like an agile crab. “On one such occasion,” Colville has related, “he leapt off the top of a high girder into a pool of liquid cement. His feet were embedded.”
“That is your Waterloo,” Colville said.
“Blenheim . . . how dare you! I am not a Frenchman.”
Colville concluded: “[A]fter two gruelling years of endless work and never a day’s holiday, he was gay, resilient and apparently tireless. . . . Extraordinary in a man of almost sixty-six who never takes exercise of any sort.”
Churchill’s tough constitution occasionally succumbed to strain, and he was not always as limber or as lucky as he might have liked to think. He compensated by being droll. Once, when inspecting a kind of antiaircraft device, its wires crossed and it exploded directly above him. He said, without removing the cigar from his mouth, “I think there is something not quite right about the way you are using this new weapon.”
He sometimes reacted badly to the strain of overconcentration. The solution, which he arrived at during his time as Home Secretary, was to make lists. On these he would organize his problems into categories from the least to the greatest, and then focus mainly on the latter. Perhaps this was another feature of his weekly meetings with the king.
His illnesses and injuries were rarely light. He was not the best of patients and challenged the expertise of doctors with his own theories or rationales, such as relying on the king’s advice for malaria medication, for example, over the orders of medical professionals. Or he would self-medicate, taking snuff, for example, to cure a cold; consulting a variety of doctors until he got the opinion he wanted; or simply sorting his cure from the leftover medicines he already had. It was not surprising that his doctor, Lord Moran, penned so unflattering, if affectionate, a portrait of him. Their introduction in May 1940 more or less set the pattern:
I have become his doctor, not because he wanted one, but because certain members of his Cabinet . . . have decided somebody ought to keep an eye on his health. . . .
“I don’t know why they are making such a fuss. There’s nothing wrong with me. . . . I suffer from dyspepsia, and this is the treatment.”
With that he proceeded to demonstrate to me some breathing exercises. His big white belly was moving up and down. . . . Soon after I took my leave. I do not like the job, and I do not think the arrangement can last.
It lasted another quarter of a century, until Churchill’s death, through one “heart attack . . . three attacks of pneumonia . . . two strokes . . . two operations . . . senile pruritis . . . conjunctivitis,” and numerous other smaller maladies. Many of these problems—including the heart attack and the pneumonia—took place during the war.
The king worried after Churchill’s health, writing to him often to “beg of you to take care of yourself & get as much rest as you possibly can in these critical days,” as did others, including Roosevelt, Brooke, and Eden. “If you go on playing the fool like this,” Bracken told him, “you are certain to die.” Ismay recalled, “That kept him quiet, but not for long.” The strain was felt by many of those around him: colleagues and secretaries forced to keep his hours, and particularly members of his household staff. The small, bald, lisping, and devoted valet, Sawyers, bore the brunt, though he, too, occasionally invited rebuke, as when he once placed a dab of shoe polish on Churchill’s toothbrush and handed it to him. Brooke recalled another episode when Churchill addressed him with the usual rudeness: “‘What’s wrong, Sawyers? Why are you getting in my way?’ In a very thick voice Sawyers replied: ‘The brim of your hat is turned up, does not look well, turn it down, turn it down!’ This was accompanied by a waving gesture of the hand. Winston, rather red and looking angry, turned the brim down. Thereupon Sawyers stood to one side, muttering to himself ‘That’s much, much better, much better.’”
Churchill’s tendency to seek rejuvenation of the spirit should be seen in connection with similar efforts, however faulty, to rejuvenate the body. He fought often against his black moods but could be remarkably resilient. Once, during the war, he was visited in bed by Beaverbrook.
He felt ill [and] said to Max: “I’m through. I cannot carry the burdens any longer.” The second front was worrying him and he was right down. He said: “I have done my job. The Americans are in and we cannot lose. Anthony can carry on. I must get out.” While this depression was at its height, the white telephone by his bed rang loudly. The government had been defeated in the House of Commons. Winston threw off the bedclothes, hurled himself out of bed with a glint of battle in his eye, said to Max: “I need a life of action!”
Churchill and the king both thought and spoke poorly on their feet, or at least they thought they did, although the king reckoned he was better at speaking extemporaneously than he was at reading aloud. Both men had overcome speech defects—Churchill earlier than the king—although the former admitted some time later that only the war had finally cured him of the anxiety he felt before giving a speech. He had the additional early disadvantage of having his talents contrasted unfavorably with the eloquent and clear voice of his father.
Churchill was principally a writer more than he was a speaker and so made careful preparation and skillful borrowing a habit. He became so good at writing by dictation that he could claim that he “lived from mouth to hand” and that “he wrote his speeches and spoke his books.” The latter were dictated, a practice that had begun at Harrow with a friend who would take down what young Winston said.
Several who worked with Churchill commented upon the method, resembling percolation, by which he found and memorized the perfect word or phrase. He would either hear it or think it, repeat it a few times, play it over and again in his mind while listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operas or Sousa marches, carry it with him to bed, the bath, the car, or the Cabinet Room, all places where he tended to work, and mumble it again to himself over the course of several days. He let it stew while using it with colleagues until, finally, it would be used in public. When composing a speech, he mobilized his resources, throwing everyone into apparent disorder in what could only have seemed like “a cross between comic opera and the launching of a major offensive.” And no matter how dire or poignant the occasion, he did not relinquish the pride of authorship. Following his famous blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech in May 1940, for example, he quipped to a secretary, “That got the sods.”
Colville has given another vivid picture of the Churchill method: “To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath. Then comes out some masterly sentence and finally with a ‘Gimme’ he takes the sheet of typewritten paper and initials it or alters it with his fountain-pen, which he holds most awkwardly halfway up the holder.” The king noted: “I have studied the way in which his brain works. He tells me, more than people imagine, of his future plans & ideas & only airs them when the time is ripe.”
The king’s experience was no less arduous but certainly a good deal more painful. “The damned things aren’t working” was his apropos remark about loudspeakers, which suddenly began working very well indeed right before he said this during the speech at Wembley that went so badly for him in 1925. His efforts to overcome his stammer are now widely known. He acquired it as a child, and it grew progressively worse. Only through hard, disciplined work with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, and the constant encouragement of the queen, was he able to make progress. That his cure coincided with the onset of war and the demands on him for a public show of strength, especially by radio broadcast, must also have had something to do with it.
The king’s disposition became calmer in a crisis, however excitable he was beneath, and occasionally on, the surface. The self-discipline obviously came from his peculiar upbringing as well as his naval education, where he acquired the ability not only to master fear and strain but also to demonstrate self-discipline in a social setting. For him as well as Churchill, much of that ability emerged through the deliberate use of language. “If words counted,” the latter said, “we should win this war.”
To say that a personality is more complex than generalizations allow is a biographical commonplace. To say that disposition conditions rather than causes action is less obvious but no less important. Together these truisms remind us that nuances of personality are sometimes indistinguishable from the means by which they develop. Robert Rhodes James has quoted Lord Randolph Churchill’s shorthand depiction of Disraeli’s career as similar to that of Winston’s: “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.” Yet Rhodes James’s conclusion has taken the man’s image at face value. This was a source of his many failures, Rhodes James and others have asserted, until events dictated that it became the basis of great success. From the perspective of personality, the verdict could just as easily have been delivered the other way around. “It was Churchill’s greatest deficiency in the 1930s that he was unchanged; it was to be his greatest strength in the ordeal that began on 3 September 1939.” To Churchill, however, some forms of constancy—even in abstract or romantic guise—were a source of strength and merit regardless of circumstance. They allowed a reputation to work for itself. “You will have to forget a great many things,” Churchill once advised Colville. “Be wise rather than well-informed. Give your opinion but not the reasons for it. Then you will have a valuable contribution to make.”
Each man followed the practice of careful arrangement in the name of perfection. They sought these absolutes. Several people have noted the king’s “eagle eye,” for example. This was known as a Windsor family trait; his father had it as well, often commenting upon the slightest sartorial slippage as if it were a capital offense. The practice, whether intentional or not, had the effect of cowing others and making the king appear cold and critical. It offset his otherwise consistent efforts to foster a sense of camaraderie. One day, for instance, the king noticed that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder “was not wearing the Africa Star. Tedder replied that he did not know if he was entitled to it, but he was not interested unless all his chaps received it. Went on to say that the decision had been taken.”
“‘Yes,’ said the King rather testily: ‘one more dammed [sic] 2 a.m. decision taken by Winston and a very silly one too.’” Here again he took after his father. George V’s biographer Kenneth Rose has written:
Perhaps he did attach too much importance to what he wore; but then he grew up in an age that cared for such things. Endowed with neither inches nor a commanding presence, [George V] made the most of his modest attributes. His hair was always brushed with care, his beard neatly trimmed and anointed with lavender water, his manicured hands protected by gloves when shooting. Almost at death’s door in 1928, he insisted on sending for a looking glass. He liked to have his family round him as he completed the ritual of dressing for dinner: the winding of the watch, the touch of scent on the handkerchief, the last adjustment to white tie and Garter Star. It was as if the centuries had rolled away and the Sun King reigned once more at Versailles.
George V went to great lengths to dictate matters related to uniforms and comportment, such as ordering his grown son to take his hat off before kissing his mother at the railroad station. His son would retain the habit, at one point insisting, in the case of plans that were being drawn up for the postwar army, that he see and approve all matters pertaining to military dress.
Churchill’s eye was also keen, but it tended to notice things behind the scenes or between the lines, as it were, rather than oversights per se. His attention to detail expressed itself more obliquely. He was known, for example, to pass judgment after asking just a single question. John Peck, an assistant, has recalled going to work for him.
It was the first time I had seen Winston Churchill at close range. He was sitting up in bed with a large cigar in his mouth, studying some maps. He took no notice of me, but at intervals he reached forward to stroke a fine black cat sleeping at the foot of the bed.
“Poor Pussy,” he said, “poor Pussy.” I stood in silence for what seemed an age, while he comforted the cat. He then said “Poor Pussy. He’s just had a painful operation. His name is Nelson. So you’ve come to work for me.”
“Yes please, Sir.”
“Good, what have you got there?”
I told him. He looked through the papers. A gentle, almost paternal smile.
“Thank you very much.” I was in.
The king was slower with his judgment but also struggled with a bad temper and a terrible propensity to worry, forcing calmness upon himself—often with cigarettes. Churchill’s own sleeping, smoking, drinking, and eating habits—often seen to be excessive—were, with the partial exception of the final one, also like what today is popularly called self-medication.
Even in repose, Churchill’s pregnant mind and restless constitution remained active. So odd were his working and meal hours, which he called “stomach” or “tummy” time, that he kept going by a fondness, acquired in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, for taking afternoon naps—absent which he could be in the foulest of moods—usually followed by a second daily bath.
Knowing this fact about his physiology helps to explain other well-known habits. Churchill has been celebrated as a great champion of the glass, and this was true, but it should be said that he rarely abused alcohol; he was a “sipper not a guzzler.” He preferred champagne, brandy, and whiskey, and drank little else; and though he took it at all hours, his whiskey almost always came heavily diluted with water. Only on rare occasions did he vary, for example, during the First World War when he drank hock and received a rebuke. His riposte: “I am interning it.”
A similar tendency governed his enthusiasm for tobacco. Accounts vary but most say that he rarely actually smoked; he simply kept the cigars in his mouth, or in his hand after having lit them. He certainly was neither a drunkard—as Hitler had once called him—nor a chain smoker. What he abused, if this is the correct word, was an appetite for food. He generally liked a simple English diet—especially roast beef—at any time of the day, but very little bread, as, he said, “it is nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach.” He was not averse to more elaborate cuisines but was usually disinclined to impose limits on his diet.
More than drink, cigars, or roast beef, his greatest tonic was the rhythm of life itself, in spite of the above-mentioned belief in constancy. Change, he said, is “[a]ll that the human structure requires.” He loved to change plans and change them again, which drove his military commanders mad. Rest, especially sleep, were necessities to master, not to obey. While Churchill rarely heeded anyone’s advice to take a rest, he would also suggest that he had no choice in the matter, as if he were in a race to achieve as much as possible in the limited time provided to him, albeit on his own schedule, which also included long hours working in bed, generally in his favorite silk Chinese dragon dressing gown alongside his favorite cat (Nelson or “Cat, darling”).
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Like the king, Churchill had few permanent enemies or hatreds, although this was not true in reverse, as many people were said to hate him at given moments. He once said that “he hated nobody and didn’t feel he had any enemies—except the Huns, and that was professional!” This did not mean that he was never angry. Colville observed that his temper “was like lightning and sometimes terrifying to see, but it lasted for a short time.”
He could be violently offensive to those who worked for him and although he would never say he was sorry, he would equally never let the sun go down without in some way making amends or showing that he had not meant to be unkind. His sarcasm could be biting, but it was often accompanied by an engaging smile which seemed to say that no harm was really intended.
He had to be careful. The “dignity of a Prime Minister,” he said, “like a lady’s virtue, is not susceptible of partial diminution.” Again, like the king, he spoke with the voice of the nation, or as he once put it, in reaction to Ismay’s having given him credit for inspiring the British people: “Not at all. It was given to me to express what was in the[ir] hearts. . . . If I had said anything else, they would have hurled me from office.” Churchill repeated the idea several times, as those who recall his line—“It was the nation and the race living all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called on to give the roar”—will know.
He liked credit but only certain kinds: medals he craved; titles he abjured. He repeatedly turned down the Order of the Garter until finally persuaded to accept it in 1953, which allowed him to say “with his schoolboy’s grin, ‘Now Clemmie will have to be a lady at last.’” Otherwise, “I don’t see why I should not have the Garter and continue to be known as Mr. Churchill,” he wondered. “After all, my father was known as Lord Randolph Churchill, but he was not a Lord. That was only a courtesy title. Why should I not continue to be called Mr. Churchill as a discourtesy title?”
He nevertheless did accept the Order of Merit and the title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1941, which allowed him to stay at Walmer Castle, Wellington’s final residence, although living so close to the Channel had by then become too dangerous.
There were these occasional attempts to appear humble. They were also exaggerated, perhaps. The point is that both Churchill and the king depicted their public role as being indistinguishable from their service as symbols of the people and the nation. Both understood the value of perceptions and impressions and the significance these had on public opinion, their first audience.
Both men therefore shared the tendency to draw connections between moods, habits, dispositions, tendencies, and personality, with varying degrees of self-awareness. This was connected to their need for companionship. Churchill, especially, found it hard to be alone for too long. Ultimately, both shared the tension between the internally and the externally driven parts of their character, possibly, in extremes—because who they were (and who they knew they were) and what was, and was seen to be, expected of them came to exist in relation and in reference to each other. When they felt alone, they both had a “tendency to morbidness and introspection and self-pity.” The king’s only began to dissolve following his marriage. Churchill’s never really did.
The king’s favorite principles were the simplest: they were consistent, he said, with his lifelong service as a freemason: “hierarchic discipline . . . dignity and simplicity of [the] ceremonial . . . [and] the simplicity and vitality of [the] three great tenets—brotherly love, relief and truth.” These were the sources of his concentration, regulation, and moderation. Relaxation and stimulation for their own sake were another matter. The king’s enjoyment of motoring, for example—being a “demon driver”—probably served no other purpose. Churchill’s pleasures were had in five-pack bezique, the Corinthian bagatelle, and the occasional film, as well as singing. He also had a special fondness for water—of any kind. He loved to partake in exuberant baths: to “fling himself under the water, and then surface again, blowing like a whale. When he emerged from the bath Sawyers would be standing with an enormous towel, and, draped in this, the prime minister would pace to and fro, followed by [a secretary] with notebook and pencil.” Unlike the king, he adored the sea. There are frequent references to his porpoise-like qualities, his bathing “like a hippopotamus in a swamp.” Rarely was he bothered by any aquatic subject. Sawyers once observed him resting on top of his hot water bottle.
“That isn’t at all a good idea.”
“Idea? It isn’t an idea, it’s a coincidence.”
Churchill’s most celebrated hobby, finally, was painting. It may have been the only activity about which he was consistently modest: “I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.” The challenge was to avoid the tendency to “turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon” it. He continued:
We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. . . . Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette—clean no longer—and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken . . . I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berzerk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.
It was with painting and in tending the house, walls, and fields at Chartwell that Churchill appeared most at peace. For all that he thrived upon action, he was not immune to the need for rest and relaxation, although here, too, he was as obsessive over minute matters as in any other field—for example, taking considerable time to lay bricks or to inspect the butterflies, golden orfe, and other fauna and flora in Chartwell’s gardens, small waterfalls, pools and streams, many of which he designed, dug, or built himself.
“Nobody is more lovable than he when he is in this frame of mind,” Colville said, “communicative and benign.” How else may one regard a wartime prime minister “snuggled down beneath the bedclothes,” given his copy of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and then “smiling sweetly” before saying good night?