150 Years of Winston Churchill
November 30, 2024 was the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth. With the candles now extinguished on all of the celebratory cakes, the year-long celebration of Sir Winston’s arrival has pretty much reached its end … not that we will ever stop celebrating his life. I’m not a good enough writer to do justice to a commemoration of his 150 years. Instead, I thought it would be more fun to share some of the stories – most of which you have probably never heard – that make him so continuously appealing and intriguing to so many of us.
Source: Alamy.com.
This cake was prepared for Churchill's 80th birthday, He lived for another 10 years.
The photo credits mention mention "Madame Floris" as the cake's admirer
Detective Inspector Walter Thompson, who was Churchill’s bodyguard through the course of World War II, wrote of an occasion when he accidentally overheard a discussion of a planned top secret operation. When Thompson confessed: “I’m sorry I heard that sir,” Churchill offered the absolution of a knowing smile and the remark “You are from Scotland Yard, Thompson, and I’m sure you didn’t hear it.”
Inspector Walter Thompson, Assignment: Churchill, p. 38
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It is prudent to be suspicious when reading stories about Winston Churchill. Quite a few of the stories that seem too good to be true are just that. I wondered about the story that follows, but I trust the source – Dean Acheson, who was Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, and who later served several roles in President Kennedy’s administration. Acheson wrote of an informal meeting during the interim years when Dwight Eisenhower was president. The meeting was so relaxed (and according to Acheson, lubricated with champagne) that Churchill floated this challenge: “Mr. President, I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before St. Peter and he says, “I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?” Robert Lovett, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense at the time, interjected and offered in jest: “Are you sure, Prime Minister, that you are going to be in the same place as the President for that interrogation?” Acheson recorded that: “Mr. Churchill swallowed a glass of inspiration and came back vigorously: ‘My vast respect for the Creator of this universe and countless others gives me assurance that He would not condemn a man without a hearing.”
Dean Acheson, Sketches From Life – Of Men I Have Known, p. 76
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The movie “Darkest Hour” includes a scene in which Winston Churchill descends into the London Underground in search of solace and inspiration. I’ve lost count of how many people have told me this was their favorite scene in the film. Michael Bishop wrote in his review on the International Churchill Society’s website that of the liberties taken with reality in a film that “demonstrates a remarkable fidelity to the historical record,” the most “far-fetched” was the “ wholly invented scene late in the film when Churchill improbably descends into the Underground and asks the working-class people around him whether they think England should keep fighting on. This sentimental diversion has its amusing moments, but the film would have been even better without it."
In reality, Churchill had one experience in the Underground during his long life, an episode that was described by his wife Clementine to his physician Dr. Charles Moran:
“You probably don’t realize, Charles, that he knows nothing of the life of ordinary people. He’s never been in a bus, and only once on the Underground. That was during the General Strike, when I deposited him at South Kensington. He went round and round, not knowing where to get out, and had to be rescued eventually.”
Lord Moran, Churchill at War 1940-45, p.301
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William Percival Crozier, a British journalist, was the editor of the Manchester Guardian for a dozen years, including the early years of World War II. Crozier was such a trusted sounding board that he was granted off-the-record interviews with a who’s who of British and foreign dignitaries. Crozier died in 1944, but his hand-written notes were transcribed in a remarkable book titled Off the Record: Political Interviews 1933-1943 which was posthumously published in 1973. More than a dozen conversations and interviews with Winston Churchill are included in Off the Record. I have written – but not yet published – a fair amount about HMS Hood. One of the most striking – and shocking - stories about this onetime pride of the Royal Navy was her sinking by the German battleship Bismarck. Several weeks after the two ships were lost, Churchill pondered the effect of this news on the United States, which was not yet in the war. As Crozier wrote: “He did not know what really was good propaganda in the United States. He had recently asked someone who had just come from the United States which was better propaganda – our loss of the Hood or our sinking of the Bismarck, and his friend did not know….”
It might just be me, but I found this candid illustration of the coldly pragmatic workings of Churchill’s mind to be fascinating.
W.P. Crozier, Off The Record, Political Interviews 1933-1943, p. 225
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Churchill served as First Lord of the Admiralty from September 1939 until he became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940. In his first radio address over the BBC as First Lord, Churchill described Britain’s campaign against German U-boats. “The Royal Navy is hunting them night and day – I will not say without mercy, because God forbid we should ever part company with that, but at any rate with zeal and not altogether without relish.”
Gerald Pawle, The War and Colonel Warden, p. 18
Footnote: Churchill used the alias “Colonel Warden” when travelling by ship between Britain and the U.S.
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In the spring of 1939, when Churchill was a member of Parliament, but not yet in Neville Chamberlain’s government, he met Grigore Gafencu, the Foreign Minister of Romania, at a dinner given by the Romanian Legation. Gafencu recorded Churchill’s reaction when the possibility of a British compromise with Adolf Hitler entered the conversation. “What can we divide with them? The world? But the world is not ours. And if, in a moment of aberration, we should cede to Hitler what does not belong to us, on the morrow we should not be able to keep what does belong to us. Herr Hitler reproaches us for believing what he himself wrote in his book. How can we not take him at his word, when the security and the very existence of our empire are in question?”
Grigore Gafencu, Last Days of Europe, p. 101
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Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, Robert Boothby was alternately a close colleague and a bitter outcast from Churchill’s life. They reconciled in the last years of Churchill’s life, and Boothby met Churchill for dinner in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life. Boothby recorded: “It was a difficult evening because he was pretty far gone. He did not want to talk about the war. I tried to arouse his interest by a reference to the Battle of Jutland, but all he said was: ‘I used to know a lot about that – now I have forgotten.’ Finally he repeated, with a rather sad look, something that he had said to me long ago: ‘The journey has been well worth making – once.’ ‘And then?’ I asked. ‘A long sleep, I expect. I deserve it’”
Robert Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel, p. 65
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Upon meeting a young airman who was recently awarded the Victoria Cross for valor, and who was conspicuously nervous in the presence of the Prime Minister, Churchill attempted to put him at ease by asking “You feel very humble and awkward in my presence, don’t you.” When the airman replied, “Yes, sir,” the P.M. responded: “Then you can imagine how humble and awkward I feel in yours.”
Hugh Dalton, Memoirs, 1931-1945: The Fateful Years, p. 337-338
With awkward humility, thanks for reading,
Bil