The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 8

A PROPER HUMAN HEART

It is not raining in London 94 per cent of the time. This, alas, is not one of those times. I am soaked. My blue suit is black and shiny with water and there is a sucking noise in my shoes as I get off my bike and enter the impressive Portland stone gateway.

All the way up the Romford Road I have cycled, through neighbourhoods whose languages and culture have changed a bit since Churchill came this way—past mosques and shops selling saris and kebabs and all the paraphernalia that goes with mobile phones. I am here at the burial-grounds of the City of London, at Wanstead.

‘I have come to find a grave,’ I tell them at the gate. They assure me I have plenty of choice. ‘Dame Anna Neagle’s buried here,’ says the chap in the peaked cap, helpfully. ‘And Sir Bobby Moore, and a couple of Jack the Ripper’s victims.’ And so are thousands of others.

As far as the eye can see there are the tombs and monuments of the Victorians in marble and porphyry and granite. The names have been in some cases eroded by time and sulphurous rain, and for a few minutes I worry that this is going to be one of those airport car park nightmares, and that I will spend hours pacing the well-kept paths, and getting wetter and wetter.

And then I see it—or a grave exactly matching the description. I squelch towards it over the grass, and yes, surely this is it: a simple cross on a square plinth, and before it a rectangle of freshly tilled earth and a couple of alliums. It occurs to me that someone has been looking after it, a bit. I lean down to read the name at the foot of the plinth.

Winston Spencer Churchill, it says.

Except, of course, that it isn’t Churchill’s body mouldering underneath. He’s somewhere else—at Bladon in Oxfordshire. This is the resting-place of someone he is said to have loved very dearly indeed.

I stand for a moment. It has stopped raining, and drops are falling slowly from the chestnut trees above. I brood on the person below, and her passionate relationship with Churchill; and Churchill’s feelings for her.

I am here on a mission, to try to answer the important question about any famous person; the key question, in fact, about any human being. In Churchill’s case the question is critical, because there are so many people (and by no means just politicians or journalists) who have secretly or openly regarded his life as the pattern, example, inspiration and role model for their own. That is why we need to dig into his essential nature.

One night I was explaining Churchill to some friends: his bravery, his genius for language, his indomitable energy. ‘Yes,’ said one friend, leaning back in a languid way, ‘but what do you think he was like to meet? I mean: was he a nice guy?’

Well, I can tell you about what he was like to meet—because a few months previously I had virtually met him.

—

AS SOON AS I walked into the Churchill archive in Cambridge I bit back a yelp of alarm. Allen Packwood, the director, was there to greet me, and he seemed to be holding out an artificial hand. Manners, of course, got the better of me, and I shook his prosthesis; and then I realised that it was made of bronze.

‘You have just shaken the hand of Winston Churchill,’ he said. I examined the cast, and was struck by how dainty it seemed. The fingers were shapely, but not long or large. This was the hand that so fiercely swung polo mallets until the age of fifty-two, that fired Mausers, that steered seaplanes, that pulled apart the barbed wire of no man’s land.

This was the hand that signed the paper that felled the city, five sovereign fingers that put a regime to death. ‘He had small hands,’ confirmed Allen. I would say that Churchill’s hands were about the same size as his mother’s—and if you doubt me, have a look at the cast of Jennie’s hand in a glass case at Chartwell. Churchill’s hands look rather finer.

‘And they were very pink,’ said Allen, ‘because he liked baths so much.’ It wasn’t just that his hands were small. We all know that statue in Parliament Square, of Churchill hunched forward with his stick. You have the impression of a physical colossus with raking arms and bison-like shoulders. In fact Martin Gilbert says he was 5 foot 8, while other authorities—William Manchester, Norman Rose—say he was at best 5 foot 6½.

There are some photos of him walking across Horse Guards—leg swinging in his butler’s trousers—and I swear there is a touch of the Tom Cruise about the heel. When I told Andrew Roberts, that most eminent Churchillian, of Churchill’s vertical sub-eminence, he was not entirely surprised. ‘I knew we would have seen eye to eye!’ he exclaimed.

Who else was 5 foot 6 or under? Some of the biggest tyrants and creeps in world history: Augustus (5 foot 6), Napoleon (ditto), Mussolini (ditto), Stalin (teensy at 5 foot 4). Hitler was only 5 foot 8. All these characters have been associated with the over-compensatory aggression that is sometimes referred to as ‘short man’ syndrome; and there is some evidence, at least on the face of it, that Churchill suffered from this, too.

He could certainly be—how shall we say—short with people. Roberts has daringly observed that, of the two men, Hitler was probably kinder and more solicitous to his staff. Churchill would not only keep them up all night while he dictated; he could get quite testy if they got things wrong. ‘Where were you educated?’ he would shout. ‘Why don’t you read a book?’

Mind you, he didn’t only shout at underlings. We have a description of him from the 1920s, marching about Baldwin’s room during a dispute with Neville Chamberlain, ranting and shaking his fist. Let us therefore now assemble the whole case against his character. Let us follow the example of the modern showboating district attorney, and create a kind of insinuating hodge-podge or collage of all the evidence—trivial or otherwise.

The case against him is that he was not only the greatest man of modern British history but also, in his own sweet way, something of a tosser in his treatment of others.

Here are the things that his enemies (and sometimes his friends) would say, and the reasons they gave for saying them. They said that he behaved like a spoilt child; and we must accept that he was used to getting his way—and from a very early age. Read the emetic and manipulative letters he writes to his mother at the age of twelve, begging her to let him go to see Buffalo Bill.

. . . I want to see Buffalo Bill and the Play as you promised me. I shall be very disappointed, disappointed is not the word I shall be miserable, after you have promised me, and all, I shall never trust your promises again. But I know Mummy loves her Winny too much for that . . .

And so on in a similar vein. This was the first of three such letters about Buffalo Bill, and they show not just his iron determination but his sense of entitlement. By the age of fourteen he had already persuaded one of his schoolchums—one Milbanke—to take down his dictation while he reclined in the bath. Poor Milbanke was later to die at Gallipoli, but he was the first of many bathside amanuenses.

As Churchill’s sister-in-law Lady Gwendoline ‘Goonie’ Bertie put it, he had a tendency to ‘orientalism’, and was never so happy as when a servant was pulling on his socks. He may have shown outstanding bravery when he went to the trenches, but his luxuries were astonishing.

To the front with Churchill went a private bathtub, large towels, a hot-water bottle, food boxes from Fortnum and Mason, large slabs of corned beef, Stilton cheeses, cream, ham, sardines, dried fruit, and a big steak pie, not to mention peach brandy and other liqueurs. ‘You must remember,’ his wife once told his doctor, ‘he knows nothing of the lives of ordinary people.’

He never took a bus in his life, she said, and had only once been on the London Underground; one of the few modern technical marvels that defeated him. He got lost, and had to be helped to find his way out.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are those who will tell you that he was not only irascible, and spoilt, but that he was a bully. Remember the murky affair at Sandhurst, and the way the young officers all ganged up on the subaltern called Bruce—so that he was effectively forced to leave.

There is no sign that Churchill did the Christian thing, and tried to reassure the anxious soldier. On the contrary, there were those who said Churchill was the positive ringleader of the bullying.

What is worse than being a spoilt and irascible bully? How about the general charge that he didn’t really have real friends—only people he ‘used’ for his own advancement. In the recent docudrama The Gathering Storm we see the way a young Foreign Office man called Ralph Wigram was persuaded to go down to Chartwell and brief Churchill about the reality of German rearmament—information that Churchill was to use ruthlessly and effectively in his attacks on Stanley Baldwin’s government.

In taking these documents from Whitehall, Wigram put his career on the line. He was eventually suspected of leaking to Churchill, and sidelined within the Foreign Office. In the telly drama we see the toll this takes on his family, the threats from his superiors; and then he appears to commit suicide. Poor fellow—the drama seems to say—sacrificed for the sake of Churchill’s ambition.

Or what about the charge of ratting on his friends—in many people’s eyes the ultimate crime? When he made his famous escape from the Boer jail in Pretoria, there were two men who were meant to go with him, called Haldane and Brockie. The suggestion was that Churchill had welched on the agreement, and scooted off by himself.

An aggressive, spoilt, bullying double-crosser: what else can we add? The final charge is just that he was too self-interested, too wrapped up in himself to be properly human.

Suppose you were a young woman ushered into a dinner party, and found yourself sitting next to the great man. The allegation against Churchill was that he was really fascinated by only one subject, and that was Winston Churchill. As Margot Asquith put it: ‘Winston, like all really self-centred people, ends up by boring people.’ So that is the case for the prosecution, Your Honour.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is accused of being a spoilt, bullying, double-crossing, self-centred bore, and a bit of an all-round brute. Let’s now call the counsel for the defence—a role I am also happy, for the sake of argument, to play myself.

Take first the assertion that he was a tyrant to his staff. Yes, of course he pushed people hard, and it is certainly true that poor Alan Brooke, his military adviser, was driven more or less round the bend in the war—silently snapping pencils in an effort to control his feelings. But think of the stress that Churchill was under, coordinating a war that we showed no sign of winning.

It was not as if Churchill was always unaware of his behaviour. ‘I wonder that a great many of my colleagues are on speaking terms with me,’ he said. He would sometimes break out of his marathon dictation sessions, realise that his assistants were getting cold, and make the fire himself.

On the death of Violet Pearman, one of his most faithful and put-upon secretaries, he made sure that her daughter got money from his own pocket. He sent money to the wife of his doctor, when she got into difficulties. When a friend of his was injured in the Boer War, Churchill rolled up his sleeve and provided a skin graft himself—without anaesthetic.

Was this the action of a selfish tosser? ‘When you first meet Winston you see all his faults,’ said Churchill’s early love interest Pamela Plowden. ‘You spend the rest of your life discovering his virtues.’

Let us turn now to the allegations of his luxury amid the squalor of the trenches—the suggestion that he somehow lorded it over the rest of the battalion. What nonsense.

It is true that there was a certain amount of dudgeon when he arrived at his command in January 1916. Who was this politician? grumbled the Scots Fusiliers. Why couldn’t he find another battalion? Churchill began by launching a savage rhetorical attack on the louse, Pulex europaeus. The men listened, amazed, to his disquisition on the origins of the insect, its nature, its habitat, its importance in wars ancient and modern.

He then organised for unused brewery vats to be brought to Moolenacker for a collective delousing—and it worked. Respect for Churchill climbed. He reduced punishments. He dished out his luxuries to all who visited the mess. Read With Winston Churchill at the Front, published by ‘Captain X’ (in reality Andrew Dewar-Gibb), who saw what happened with his own eyes.

If a man left that mess ‘without a large cigar lighting up his mollified countenance, that was because he was a non-smoker and through no fault of Col Churchill’. He did the same with the peach and apricot brandy. Yes, there was a bath—described by Dewar-Gibb as a kind of long soap dish; but plenty of other people used it. Churchill’s trenches reign was somehow both democratic and domestic, says Dewar-Gibb, and he paints a picture of the battalion at rest: Churchill sitting tilted in a rickety chair, reading a pocket Shakespeare and beating time to the gramophone, with other officers lounging about or reading in the sun.

Remember that these men are taking awful casualties, with shells (German and sometimes British) exploding around them virtually every day. It was Churchill who got them singing music-hall songs—some of them a bit ‘robust’ for Captain Dewar-Gibb’s taste. It was Churchill who urged them to laugh when they could. One young officer, Jock MacDavid, later recalled that ‘After a very brief period he had accelerated the morale of officers and men to an almost unbelievable degree. It was sheer personality.’

I put it to you that this is the conduct of a leader, a man with a proper care for the welfare of his charges. This is not the behaviour of a bully; and we can likewise dismiss the old canard about the treatment of poor Bruce the subaltern at Sandhurst.

Almost all the allegations were peddled by a radical journalist and MP (and ocean-going creep) called Henry Labouchere, who was not only vehemently anti-Semitic but moved a horrible motion in Parliament that criminalised all homosexual activity. The allegations do not appear to have any foundation. Churchill’s lawyers easily dismissed the baseless suggestion that he had indulged in ‘practices of the Oscar Wilde variety’ and he won very substantial damages.

Did he really ‘use’ young Ralph Wigram, and recklessly blight his career? It is not quite clear that Wigram did commit suicide, and in any event the Foreign Office man leaked information to Churchill because he wanted to expose the horror of what was happening in Germany, and government complacency.

He did it out of a sense of duty—not because he was cozened by Churchill. After the funeral, Churchill threw a lunch party at Chartwell for the mourners; and showed great solicitude to his wife, Ava, with whom he remained in touch for many years afterwards.

Nor does Churchill need to reproach himself for any detail of his conduct towards Haldane and Brockie, his two would-be fellow-escapees from the Pretorian jail. It is absolutely clear from all the diaries and letters that when it came down to it, on the night, they just wimped out.

Churchill went into the latrine and jumped over the wall, and then waited for them for an hour and a half in the garden, risking detection. But they never came: he can’t be blamed for that! He later sent gold watches to all those who helped him escape, a present he could ill afford. Did he do it out of some sense of guilt? On the contrary; he did it out of characteristic impulsiveness and generosity.

Let us deal lastly with the general charge of selfishness: that he wasn’t much interested in other people, that he wasn’t much fun at parties—except when bragging about himself. Of course he was self-centred, and narcissistic—a fact that he readily acknowledged. But that does not mean he had no interest in or care for other people.

Read his letters to Clementine, worrying about such things as whether the baby is going to lick the paint off the Noah’s ark animals. Think of his kindness to his mother—who had actually cheated him of his £200,000 inheritance; how he puts his arms round her on the day of her wedding to George Cornwallis-West, and tells her that her own happiness is all that matters.

Note his endless generosity towards his younger brother Jack, who lives with Churchill in Downing Street in the war. All the evidence suggests that Churchill was warm hearted to the point of downright sentimentality. He showers kindness on his menagerie at Chartwell (not conclusive, of course: Hitler liked Blondi, his Alsatian; but Churchill’s love extended much farther over the animal kingdom).

He blubs at the drop of a hat. He weeps at the news that Londoners are queuing to buy birdseed to feed their canaries during the Blitz; he weeps when he tells an ecstatic House of Commons that he has been forced by fate to blow up the French navy; he weeps when he watches Alexander Korda’s Lady Hamilton, a film he sees seventeen times. He loved cheap music, and we have plenty of vignettes of Churchill bawling out his favourites; he was no party-pooper.

He was openly emotional in a class and society that was supposed to be all about the stiff upper lip. And—most unusually for a British politician—he never bore grudges. People responded to this warmth; and if he was exhausting to work for, his colleagues nonetheless gave him loyalty and unstinting devotion.

When he came back from New York in 1932, after nearly dying under the wheels of an oncoming car, he was presented with a Daimler. The Daimler had been organised by Brendan Bracken, and financed by a whip-round of 140 friends and admirers.

Can you think of any modern British politician with enough friends and admirers to get them a new Nissan Micra, let alone a Daimler? It would be fair to say that his wife did not always approve of his friends: F. E. Smith was a boozer; Beaverbrook was said to have been dodgy in his business dealings; and Brendan Bracken—who rather played up the (absurd) suggestion that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son—was positively bizarre.

Bracken lied about his age, even going back to school in order to fake it. He lied about his Irish origins, and claimed to be Australian. A fine man, you might think, to end up being Minister for Information. But Churchill stuck with them, and they with him.

Reading that account by Dewar-Gibb of Churchill in the trenches, I am struck by the favourable mention of Lord Fisher—the great naval chief who went so spectacularly wobbly over the Dardanelles in 1915, and whose inconstancy contributed significantly to the delay, and therefore to the disaster.

‘Colonel Churchill amused us much by his frequent stories of Lord Fisher,’ says Captain Dewar-Gibb, ‘for whom he seemed to have the greatest admiration.’ That shows superb generosity of soul, when you consider that Fisher’s wacko behaviour had helped all but destroy Churchill’s political career.

On leave from the trenches for a couple of days, he then made a speech in the Commons urging the recall of Fisher to the Admiralty—a suggestion that most people thought was final proof that Churchill had lost the plot altogether. He didn’t have to defend Fisher—in fact Fisher had been spectacularly disloyal to him, telling Clementine (falsely, it seems) that the reason Churchill was always hopping over to Paris was to see a girlfriend.

There was every reason, rationally, for him to chuck the old man overboard. But Churchill didn’t think like that: he liked Fisher, he admired him, and he wanted to express it.

He had what the Greeks called megalopsychia—greatness of soul. Churchill was not a practising Christian. He never believed in the more challenging metaphysics of the New Testament; and when some prelate benignly hailed him as a ‘pillar of the church’ he had the honesty instantly to demur. He was more of a ‘flying buttress’, he said.

His ethic was really pre-Christian, even Homeric. His abiding interest was in glory and prestige—both for himself and for the ‘British Empire’. But he had a deep sense of what it was right and fitting for him to do—and remember that his self-narrator’s eye was beadily following and judging him all the time.

—

THAT IS WHY I am here at this sodden graveyard in East London. The lady before and beneath me is—of course—Churchill’s nanny. ‘Erected to the memory of Elizabeth Ann Everest,’ says the inscription, ‘who died on 3rd July 1895 aged 62 years, by Winston Spencer Churchill and John Spencer Churchill’.

Compared to the other memorials, it is not a particularly gushing tribute. There is no mention of love, or angels singing her to rest; and indeed the two-foot cross is just about the smallest and plainest that I can see. The story of how it came to be here is in some ways an awful one, but also a physical testimonial to the fundamental goodness of Churchill’s nature.

As we have seen, Churchill’s mother Jennie was a remote and glamorous figure, swishing in panther-like in her skin-tight riding gear to kiss him goodnight; otherwise not much involved. It was Mrs Everest, a largish and middle-aged woman from the Medway towns, who gave Churchill the unstinting love he craved. Most Churchill biographies rightly contain a splendid picture of her looking a bit like a pudgy Queen Victoria: white lace cap and black dress, with so much bustle and petticoat that she appears as pyramidical in structure as Everest itself.

‘My nurse was my confidante,’ said Churchill. ‘Mrs Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.’ He called her ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’, and we have many lovely letters from her to him: urging him to take heroin for his toothache, to watch out for the east wind, not to try to get on moving trains, to avoid the hot weather, and debt, and bad company.

On one famous occasion neither of his parents could be bothered to come to his Speech Day at Harrow; so Mrs Everest came, and Churchill walked around town with her, arm proudly in arm, while the other boys snickered. That showed moral courage; and more was to come.

When Churchill was seventeen and Jack was eleven it was decided that the nanny was no longer needed; and though there were plenty of posh English families that retained their superannuated nannies, Churchill’s mother made no provision for Mrs Everest. She was to be out on her ear.

Churchill was incensed. He protested, supposedly on behalf of his brother; and as a compromise work was found for her at the London home of his grandmother, the Duchess. But two years later that job, too, came to an end. Again Churchill was angry that she was being treated in this way—dismissed by a letter! He accused his mother of being ‘cruel and mean’.

It was no good. Mrs Everest went to live in Crouch End, and Churchill helped to support her from his own relatively meagre income. She continued to write to him, and while he was at Sandhurst she sent him some encouragement. ‘Take plenty of open air exercise and you will not require medicine . . . Be a good Gentleman, upright, honest, just, kind and altogether lovely. My sweet old darling, how I do love you, be good for my sake.’

By 1895 Mrs Everest’s health was failing, and on 2 July he received a telegram at Sandhurst, saying that her condition was ‘critical’. He arrived at Crouch End, to find her only concern was for him: he had got wet on the way there. ‘The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again.’

He found a doctor and a nurse, and then had to rush back to Aldershot for the morning parade—returning to North London as soon as the parade was over. She sank into a stupor and died at 2.15 a.m., with Churchill by her side.

It was Churchill who organised the funeral and the wreaths and the tombstone, and indeed it was Churchill who paid for them all, out of his own exiguous resources. He was only twenty.

It is hard to know exactly how much the world owes Winston Churchill’s nanny. But if anyone taught him to be good and kind and by and large truthful, it was surely her. She it was, I reckon, who helped him to that vast and generous moral sense.

Once, at the age of seven, he was walking with his nanny in the grounds of Blenheim. ‘We saw a snake crawling about in the grass,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I wanted to kill it but Everest would not let me.’ Chapeau, Mrs Everest.

It may be that Churchill despaired when Everest died, and thought he would never again find a woman so rock-like and dependable. If so, he was wrong there. It is time to consider his brilliant decision to marry Clementine; and, indeed, the eternal puzzle of Winston Churchill’s relations with women in general.