9

ASSASSINS

Portrait of the artist as an old man

Credit 147

“Are you going to paint me as a cherub or a bulldog?” asks Winston Churchill at the opening of Episode 9, interrogating Graham Sutherland, the artist commissioned by the Houses of Parliament to paint the great man’s portrait to mark his eightieth birthday at the end of November 1954. “Assassins,” the confrontational title of this episode, refers to Churchill’s political colleagues who are using the prime minister’s advanced age as a reason to force his resignation — so the arrival of Graham Sutherland with his pencils and camera adds another possible assassin to the band. Will this spikey modern artist, so charming to meet, but so notorious for his merciless depiction of his subjects’ every weakness, wield a generous brush when it comes to the inescapable physical decrepitude of the ailing statesman? “Will we be engaged in flattery or reality?” asks Churchill — to which Sutherland answers evasively, “I imagine there are a great number of Mr. Churchills…I find in general [that] people have very little understanding of who they are.” And so the duel begins…

WSC: “Perhaps I can implore you not to feel the need to be too accurate.”

SUTHERLAND: “Why? Accuracy is truth.”

February,1946. Winston Churchill engrossed in his oil painting at Miami Beach, Florida. “I know of nothing,” he once wrote, “which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” But his encounter with the artist Graham Sutherland came to absorb his mind in another way…Credit 148

This troubled study from the years around 1920 is Winston Churchill’s only known self-portrait, in a brooding style to which he never returned. He wanted pleasure from his painting, not pain – and sunny landscapes, usually painted on exotic foreign holidays, became his trademark. Credit 149

WSC: “No! For accuracy we have the camera. Painting is the higher art…”

The verbal contest between painter and subject draws piquancy from the fact that Churchill himself had been an artist of no little talent and enthusiasm for nearly 40 years. The year 1915 saw the failure of the campaign in the Dardanelles against the Turks, for which Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was blamed, leading to his ignominious withdrawal from Herbert Asquith’s war cabinet and the onset of one of his notorious “black dog” depressions that laid him low at difficult periods throughout his life. “I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it,” he later wrote. “I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them…And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue.” Painting became the disgraced ex-minister’s consolation when a chance encounter with some artistic friends inspired him to start work with his own set of equipment — the oil paints, easel, canvas and brushes were a gift from the ever-supportive Clementine — and he never looked back.

“I know of nothing,” Churchill once declared of his painting, “which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” As his longtime friend Violet Bonham Carter remarked, Winston’s work with a paintbrush was the only occupation that the great orator ever pursued in total silence. “I paint all day & every day,” he wrote to his daughter Mary after his crushing defeat in the 1945 election, “& have banished care & disillusionment to the shades.” With the advancing years, the elder statesman’s hours in front of the easel came to rival brandy and cigars among his principal consolations. “I’d like to spend my first million years in heaven painting,” he used to tell his family, according to his granddaughter Emma Soames. “If Churchill saved Britain during the Second World War,” declared Andrew Marr in his perceptive BBC documentary on Churchill and his more than 500 paintings, “we can say that it was painting that saved him.”

A fine example of Churchill’s vivid and swashbuckling brushwork — and of the turmoil at work below the apparently tranquil surface — was The Goldfish Pond at Chartwell, which he had painted in the garden of his Kentish home while he was Leader of the Opposition and exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1948. This pond was a theme to which he frequently returned — we find him painting beside it early in Episode 9, and later in the same episode Peter Morgan depicts Graham Sutherland complimenting Churchill, painter to painter, on his portrayal of the water, and suggesting a reason why he was so drawn to the subject. “Beneath the tranquillity and the elegance and the light playing on the surface,” says Sutherland, “I saw honesty and pain, terrible pain…You wanted us to see something beneath all the muted colours, deep down in the water. Terrible despair. Hiding like a Leviathan. Like a sea monster.” Churchill is dismissive of Sutherland’s suggestion, trying to insist that his fascination with the pond is simply “because it’s a technical challenge. It eludes me.” But then he recalls how he and Clemmie had built the pond at Chartwell in the months following the tragic death of their youngest daughter Marigold, aged only two years and nine months, from a sore throat that developed into septicemia. “I thought that Clemmie would die from the violence of her grief,” he told his private secretary almost 40 years later, recalling the pain of the tragedy. “She screamed like an animal under torture.” Nowadays, the little girl would have recovered with a prompt dose of antibiotics. In 1921 her heartbroken father banned all mention of Marigold’s existence from family conversation — then got out his brushes, palette and easel to paint the pond at Chartwell for the first of more than 20 times.

Both Churchills enjoyed their conversations with the intelligent and charming Sutherland, who came to Chartwell in the autumn of 1954 for eight 45-minute sittings at which he made charcoal sketches and oil studies, as well as taking photographs, all of which he then took back to work on at his studio at Trottiscliffe, Kent, about 20 miles away. This meant that the Churchills had no means of telling what shape the portrait was taking — though Clementine expressed confidence. She admitted to a soft spot for the eloquent 51-year-old painter and craftsman, who also worked in glass and fabrics and would later design the massive altar tapestry at the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. “Mr. Graham Sutherland is a ‘wow,’ ” she wrote to her daughter Mary after the first three sittings. “He really is a most attractive man…” – on the basis of which assessment she feels able, quite early in Episode 9, to venture a vote of confidence: “It’s manifestly clear,” Clemmie declares, “he’s a fan…I have the protective instincts of a loving wife, and I can tell you this one is not an assassin.”

But that was early in September. Two months later, at the end of November 1955, just 10 days before the scheduled presentation, the finished work was finally delivered to Downing Street, a seated life-size portrait nearly five feet high and four feet wide. Churchill hated it immediately. “It makes me look half-witted…” he would later say. “How do they paint one today? Sitting on a lavatory! Here sits an old man on his stool, pressing and pressing…I look like a down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gutter in the Strand.” Physically, the almost square portrait of the seated statesman conveyed an uncanny likeness, but it was the likeness of a decrepit 80-year-old. As Kenneth Clark, the art historian and friend of Sutherland immediately realised, the artist had disregarded the heroic popular stereotypes surrounding the great war leader to focus on the crumbling physical reality. The old warrior was in there to be seen quite clearly — the spark in the eyes and the set of the jaw captured Churchill’s defiant spirit brilliantly. But it was a spirit fighting for survival against graphic bodily decay — and that perspective flouted every imagining on Churchill’s mental agenda. “A lot of his time since the end of the war had been spent in arranging and editing the part he will play in history,” wrote his doctor, Charles Moran, “and it has been rather a shock to him that his ideas and those of Graham Sutherland seem so far apart.”

Next morning an official car left Downing Street for Trottiscliffe, bearing the prime minister’s verdict in an imperious letter to Sutherland. “I am of the opinion,” wrote Churchill, “that the painting, however masterly in execution, is not suitable as a Presentation from both Houses of Parliament…” The ceremony could certainly go forward, he wrote, but in the total absence of the portrait. There was no need for anyone to see it, since the parliamentarians had also commissioned “a beautiful book which they have nearly all signed, to present to me, so that the ceremony will be complete in itself.”

But the wounded Sutherland was not giving in so easily. How could there be an unveiling without a painting? Having consulted Charles Doughty, chairman of the committee of MPs who had commissioned the portrait, he drove down to Chartwell to convey the message that it would offend many MPs if the prime minister rejected their gift, and that Churchill must accept the picture publicly. The Times had already published a photograph of the painting, and their art critic had praised it for capturing “the sitter’s character: it is a powerful and penetrating image of the mind whose qualities, here observed without any excessive or too individual subtlety of interpretation, the world has come to know so well.”

So, the stage was set in Westminster Hall, packed with parliamentarians and their wives, for an eightieth birthday party no one had envisaged — kicked off with a personal tribute from Clement Attlee to whom Churchill hastened to return an elegant compliment. “The Leader of the Opposition and I,” he declared, “have been the only two Prime Ministers of this country in the last fourteen years. There are no other Prime Ministers alive. It is not, however, intended to make this a permanent feature of the Constitution.” This political in-joke was a warm-up for Churchill’s thanks to the gathering, followed by his one-line dismissal of the painting which Attlee had just unveiled behind him. “The portrait,” he declared archly, with a pointed failure even to mention the name of the artist, ‘is a remarkable example of modern art…” stressing the words sardonically. Then, having paused to encourage the derisive laughter that accumulated around the hall, he moved on to lavish praise on the “beautiful” leather-bound book of parliamentary signatures that was the other part of his gift. He said not another word about the painting, but devoted no fewer than 11 effusive sentences to the book, thanking the MPs who had signed it, and even the MPs who had not. “I shall treasure it as long as I live,” he said, “and my family and descendants will regard it as a most precious possession.”

The insult could not have been more obvious at the time, but only history would reveal the full extent of Churchillian displeasure. Mortified by her husband’s unhappiness, Clemmie had the portrait immediately consigned to the cellars of Chartwell, then spoke in the following months to his latest private secretary, Grace Hamblin. The presentation of the portrait carried no obligation for the painting to be exhibited publicly, nor to end up one day at Westminster. It was an outright gift for the Churchills to do with as they wished — and Clementine reckoned she knew exactly what her husband wished. She never consulted him, so far as is known, and, having spoken to Hamblin, she herself turned a blind eye to what the efficient secretary did next. Hamblin enlisted the help of her brother, who turned up at Chartwell a few evenings later “in dead of night” to help spirit away the offending object. “It was a huge thing,” Hamblin recalled in a taped interview that remained secret for 20 years, “so I couldn’t lift it alone.” Reaching her brother’s garden a few miles away, the pair lit a bonfire together out of sight of passers-by and consigned the canvas to the flames. “I destroyed it,” confessed Hamblin on the tape, “but Lady C and I decided we would not tell anyone. She was thinking of me.” And thinking most of all, of course, about the morale of her ever more fragile husband, to whom Clemmie had promised that the painting “would never see the light of day.”

4 April 1955. On the eve of his resignation as prime minister, Winston and Clementine Churchill entertained Queen Elizabeth II at a full-dress dinner in Downing Street. “Never,” he declared, “have the august duties which fall upon the British monarchy been discharged with more devotion than in the brilliant opening of Your Majesty’s reign.” He was besotted with his sovereign to the end. Credit 151

The real issue at stake — the physical and mental decline of the once-great prime minister — proved less easy to send up in smoke. In parliamentary comments that followed the presentation, the Labour MP Henry Usborne mischievously suggested that Graham Sutherland’s image had illustrated the look on the prime minister’s face “at the moment when a delegation of his unfaithful cabinet colleagues came to present him with a demand for his resignation” — and they duly came calling. On 22nd December 1955, just three weeks and a day after the ceremony in Westminster Hall, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan headed a deputation of seven senior cabinet ministers to Downing Street — a “hanging jury.” Ostensibly they wanted to discuss the date of the general election that would have to be held at some time before the following autumn, when the current parliament’s five-year term would expire. But that raised the question of who would lead the party on the hustings, and Churchill responded angrily, as Eden recorded in his diary, saying “it was clear we wanted him out. Nobody contradicted him…At the end W said menacingly that he would think over what his colleagues had said & let them know his decision. Whatever it was, he hoped it would not affect their present relationship with him. Nobody quailed.” It was “the most painful affair,” recalled Harold Macmillan.

Churchill’s decline was impossible to avoid. “He was ageing month by month,” observed Jock Colville in a note written three months later, “and was reluctant to read any papers except the newspapers or to give his mind to anything he did not find diverting. More and more time was given to bezique [Churchill’s favourite, and avidly enjoyed, card game] and ever less to public business. The preparation of a Parliamentary question might consume a whole morning; facts would be demanded from the Government departments and not arouse any interest when they arrived…It was becoming an effort even to sign letters and a positive condescension to read Foreign Office telegrams.” And yet, as the private secretary noted, “on some days the old gleam would be there, wit and good humour would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or phrase.”

Following the December visit from Eden and his “hanging jury,” Churchill was defiant, stomping off for Christmas at Chequers. But when he got back to Downing Street after the holiday, his mood had changed. Perhaps Clementine had spoken to him sternly, for the 80-year-old was now reconciled to stepping down early in April, following Parliament’s 1955 Easter recess. He retained the lingering hope that some international development — ideally, a grand, summit peace conference involving America, France and the new leaders of Russia following Stalin’s death — might enable him to bow out on a high. But while France was willing to attend such a gathering, President Eisenhower was not, and 5th April became set as the scheduled resignation date. “Don’t you hate it when the show is over?” the prime minister mused unhappily to Sarah, his actress daughter, asking her how she felt at the end of a long-running play.

The old man dabbled with some pet projects during his final months in Downing Street, trying to advance his long-cherished ambition as a Zionist to make the recently independent state of Israel a member of the British Commonwealth: “Israel,” he explained, “is a force in the world & a link to the USA…So many people want to leave us, it might be the turning of the tide.” But his truly memorable contribution was, as ever, oratorical: “The day must dawn,” he told the House of Commons in a brilliantly sustained 45-minute speech on the hydrogen bomb that proved to be his farewell at the beginning of March 1955, “when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forward serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair!” On 4th April 1955, the eve of his resignation, Churchill entertained his Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to an unprecedented full-dress dinner in Downing Street. “I have the honour,” he declared, “of proposing a toast which I used to enjoy drinking during the years when I was a cavalry subaltern in the reign of Your Majesty’s great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria…Never have the august duties which fall upon the British monarchy been discharged with more devotion than in the brilliant opening of Your Majesty’s reign. We thank God for the gift He has bestowed upon us and vow ourselves anew to the sacred cause, and to the wise and kindly way of life of which Your Majesty is the young, gleaming champion.” Then he raised his glass to utter the words for the last time as prime minister — “The Queen!”

Three days later, on 7th April 1955, as he was boarding a plane for the retirement holiday that he had planned with Clemmie, painting in Sicily, Churchill was given a handwritten letter from the Queen. “My dear Winston,” she wrote, “I need not tell you how deeply I felt your resignation last Tuesday, nor how severely I miss, and shall continue to miss, your advice and encouragement. My confidence in Anthony Eden is complete, and I know he will lead the Country on to great achievements, but it would be useless to pretend that either he or any of his successors who may one day follow him in office will ever, for me, be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister, to whom both my husband and I owe so much and for whose wise guidance during the early years of my reign I shall always be so profoundly grateful…My husband and I enjoyed so much the dinner party at No. 10 Downing St. last Monday — neither of us will ever forget it.

“We send our best wishes to you and Lady Churchill for your time in Sicily and we look forward to seeing you on your return and frequently in the future. With my deepest gratitude for your great services to my country and to myself, I am, yours ever sincerely,

“Elizabeth R.”

In the days that followed Churchill read and reread the letter, storing it away when he got home as one of his most treasured possessions, along with a personally inscribed photograph that Elizabeth had given him of her smiling in her carriage on her way to open parliament in November 1952. He also set about the supervision of a new portrait that had recently been commissioned of him as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the ancient union of England’s defensive southern harbours — Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings — and England’s oldest military rank of distinction. Glad of the opportunity to avoid all the mistakes that he felt Graham Sutherland had made, Churchill carefully instructed the artist, Bernard Hailstone, to paint him standing, not sitting; in full ceremonial uniform, not a drab “parliamentary” suit; in shiny bright hues, not flat mustard-yellow; and with a happy smile, not a malevolent growl, playing across his features. Predictably, the resulting portrait was a mess.

In 1955 Winston Churchill set about supervising a portrait (above) by Bernard Hailstone that had been commissioned of him as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He saw it as his chance to show where Graham Sutherland’s portrait (following) went wrong. But maybe it showed precisely the opposite. Credit 152

Elizabeth and her racehorses

In 1953 the Epsom Derby, Britain’s premier horse race, was due to be held on Saturday 6th June, four days after the Queen’s coronation. The day before the sacred ceremony, on Monday 1st June, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting remarked to Her Majesty that she must be feeling very nervous. “Of course I am,” replied Elizabeth. “But I really do think that Aureole will win!”

The Queen’s love of horses went back to the first ponies of her childhood, and she soon became a proficient rider, quickly mastering the precarious side-saddle posture that she was required to adopt for military parades. But it was not until 1942 that her father took her to the Beckhampton Stables on the Marlborough Downs, where the royal racehorses were trained. Horse racing had continued in Britain during the early years of the war, and that spring the royal stables had two highly fancied prospects: Sun Chariot and Big Game. Both had been bred at the royal studs, and the Princess was allowed to go up and pat the magnificent Big Game. She later admitted that she did not wash that hand for the rest of the day. It is with her horses that Elizabeth II can be seen most herself, least a queen. She can forget her position sufficiently to leap up and down like any other enthusiast, shouting and waving to urge her horse on, and whenever that horse wins you can see reborn the delighted monkey grin of childhood photographs. On the racecourse she comes as close as she possibly can to that most elusive thrill of all – that of being treated just like anyone else (or at least as an equal in an open fraternity). She unashamedly talks to her horses, nuzzling them and losing herself in the spell cast by their inscrutable aristocracy. She revels in the enchantment of rising at dawn to watch the great animals come thundering past her down the dew-covered gallops, and then to walk round the stables afterwards, stroking their glistening sides and talking horse-talk with the nut-brown little men who worship at the same shrine. “If it were not for my Archbishop of Canterbury,” she once said, “I should be off to Longchamps every Sunday in my plane.”

The royal enclosure at Epsom in 1955, from left to right: unknown woman; Queen Elizabeth II; Lord Rosebery; Captain Charles Moore, Manager of the Royal Stud for both George VI and Elizabeth II; Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, next to her sister Princess Olga (far right). The Duke of Edinburgh stands behind Princess Olga with the Duke of Beaufort, organiser of the Badminton Horse Trials, to his right. Credit 155.1

The main books beside her desk, according to those who have visited her study, are abstruse volumes of racing pedigrees, for her success at racing is based on her knowledge of bloodstock. It is her grandmother Queen Mary’s taste for arcane genealogies turned in another direction, and she has the same royal eye for a well-bred line. It could almost be described as an unfair advantage over non-royal racing owners, but it is the only advantage that Elizabeth II possesses – and this is the basis of the enduring fulfilment she has derived from managing her own racing stables. It is one area of achievement where it is impossible to say that her success is due to her position.

17th July 1954. Winners’ Enclosure. Queen Elizabeth II gives a congratulatory pat to her four-year-old Aureole, after the horse’s victory in the prestigious King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, at Royal Ascot. Aureole went on to a successful and very profitable career at stud, becoming the sire of many winners. Credit 155.2

Aureole did not, in fact, win the Epsom Derby in coronation year – he came second – and the Derby remains the only major British race the Queen has never won. But the horse went on to enjoy spectacular success in 1954, winning the Victor Wild Stakes at Kempton, the Coronation Cup at Epsom, the Hardwicke Stakes at Ascot, and Britain’s most prestigious all-aged race, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes. In the excitement of victory, Elizabeth despatched a crate of champagne to the press tent so the hacks could join in the celebrations, a generous gesture towards the Fourth Estate that she has never been known to repeat.