The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 10

THE MAKING OF JOHN BULL

It is the end of July 1940. The British position is absolutely desperate. The last of the British Expeditionary Force has long since scuttled from France. The Germans are in the process of trying to destroy the RAF. Churchill is up inspecting the defences of Hartlepool—a town that had famously been shelled by German ships in the Great War.

He stops in front of a British soldier equipped with an American-made weapon—a 1928 Thompson SMG, or submachine gun. Churchill plucks it out of the soldier’s hands, barrel first. He holds the gun, muzzle thrust down and forward, as if he is on patrol on the British coast. He turns to face the camera—and the resulting picture becomes one of the great images of his will to resist.

In fact, the photograph is so strong and arresting that it becomes a propaganda hit for both sides. Goebbels immediately reprinted Churchill and the tommy gun in leaflets that accused him of being a war criminal and gangster—a man who loved personally to flourish the very same killing machine as Al Capone.

The British used it, too, though with the tin-hatted soldiers cropped out—and in the British case the propaganda message was rather different. Yes, says the picture (which can be bought on all sorts of mugs and tea towels and posters to this day): our war effort is indeed being led by a civilian of advancing years, a man who is so outlandish in his garb that he is still wearing a tall ‘Cambridge’ bowler hat, a titfer he bought at Lock’s of St James’s in 1919—they still have the record—and which went out of fashion years ago.

Yes, he has the same taste in headgear as Stan Laurel, and yes he wears spotty bow ties and pinstriped suits and looks like a country solicitor. But I tell you what—that poster informs the viewer—this man Churchill has fired a gun many times. He knows how to cock it and load it.

He knows the business end of a tommy gun, and he knows how to shoot. To use an overused word, there is something iconic about that shot, because in 1940 Churchill was in the process of becoming an icon—almost literally.

He was transmogrifying himself into the spirit of the nation, the very emblem of defiance. Consider those round-cheeked features, the hint of merriment in the upturned lip, the frank gaze of the eyes. He has channelled that portly gentleman who for two centuries or more has embodied the truculent-but-jovial response of the British to any great continental combination. He has become John Bull, and he shares many obvious qualities with that eighteenth-century personification of England—most familiar from prints and propaganda of the Napoleonic era.

He is fat, jolly, high-living, rumbustious—and patriotic to a degree that many have always considered hyperbolical and unnecessary, but which now, in the present crisis, seems utterly right. It is impossible to imagine any of his rivals achieving this feat—not Halifax, Chamberlain, Stafford Cripps, Eden, Attlee—none of them.

No other leading British politician of the day could have toted that tommy gun and got away with it (and indeed, it is still a golden rule of all political photo-opportunities: ‘don’t touch the gun!’ the image-makers hiss). None of them had the requisite swagger, and none of them had the colour, the contour, the charisma, the cut-through of the Churchillian personality.

To lead the country in time of war, to keep people together at a moment of profound anxiety, you need to ‘connect’ with them—to use more modern political jargon—in a deep and emotional way. It was not enough to appeal to the logic of defiance. He couldn’t just exhort them to be brave.

He needed to engage their attention, to cheer them, to boost them; if necessary even to make them laugh and, better still, to laugh at their enemies. To move the British people, he needed at some level to identify with them—with those aspects of their character that he, and they, conceived to be elemental to the national psyche.

What are the key attributes of the Brits—at least in our own not-quite-so-humble opinion? Well, we think we have a great sense of humour, unlike some other countries we could mention. Ever since Shakespeare put that chauvinistic drinking-song into the mouth of Iago and Cassio, we have fancied our ability to drink your Hollander under the table, your Dane dead drunk, and so on. The British tend to be a bit suspicious of people who are inordinately thin (and we are now the second-fattest nation on earth); and in general we think of Britain as the natural homeland of the eccentric, the oddball and the individualist.

All four of these traits Churchill covered under the capacious bowler hat of his own personality. The interesting question, when we consider his role in 1940, was how far he confected that identity. Did it all just happen with complete and unconscious spontaneity? Or was he really the most brilliant self-image-maker and spin-doctor of them all?

There have been many who have argued that Churchill’s effulgent public personality was the product of a certain amount of myth-making—by both himself and others. One of the things we believe about Churchill today was that he was John Bull-ish in his irreverence, in his deployment of wit—often barbed wit.

There are any number of anecdotes that appear to illustrate his bluff, hilarious and mordant manner. They cling to him like burrs. Many of them, alas, are not provably true—or certainly not true of Winston Churchill.

Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop—at a reception, allegedly, in Canada—when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’

At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice.’ Perhaps I am wrong, but that feels to me less like a true story about Churchill, and more like some after-dinner anecdote from the pages of The Funster’s Friend—pinned on Churchill in the hope of making it more amusing.

Such accounts are mainly of interest because of the light they cast on his image—on the fact that people have thought Churchill the right sort of person to fit the story. Some of them could only be about Churchill, but are still dubious—like the yarn about the special sheaths that had to be fitted to the muzzles of the rifles of British troops about to be sent to the Arctic. These were made by a condom manufacturer, and were 10½ inches long. Churchill is said to have inspected the consignment and called for fresh labels. ‘I want every box, every carton, every packet saying, British. Size: medium. That will show the Nazis, if ever they recover them, who is the master race.’ I apologise for retailing this sort of stuff—but there are many more out there in the same vein.

Sometimes modern scholarship has been able to dismiss claims of Churchillian paternity, even of the ones that have long been thought to bear his stamp. For years I have treasured that one about Nancy Astor, a Virginia-born lady of pronounced views who became Britain’s first female MP and spent much of the 1930s saying that Hitler was an all-round stand-up guy.

‘Winston,’ she is supposed to have said to him, ‘if I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.’ ‘Nancy,’ Churchill is alleged to have replied to her, ‘if I were your husband I would drink it.’ Alas, Churchill almost certainly never made this brilliant remark, or if he did, he had swiped it from someone else.

Martin Gilbert attributed the gag not to Churchill but to his great friend F. E. Smith—and then further researches spoilt the thing entirely by tracking it down to a 1900 edition of the Chicago Tribune, where it appeared in a joke-of-the-day column. Did the young Churchill somehow spot it that year, on his trip to America, and squirrel it away for use on Nancy Astor? I doubt it. Did someone simply recycle the joke, and decide that to be properly funny it needed to be put plausibly in the mouths of some famous people? Much more likely.

Again, I always believed—in fact, I think I heard it from my parents—that Churchill had once ticked off a pompous civil servant who objected to the use of prepositions at the end of sentences. ‘This is the kind of English up with which I will not put,’ Churchill is meant to have said.

Except that he didn’t. It turns out to have been a joke that was published in the Strand magazine, ascribed to no one in particular—but was thought so good that it should be put in the mouth of Churchill. Nor did he say that ‘In the future, the fascists will call themselves anti-fascists’. Doubtless a profound remark, depending on your view of politics—but it is not one of Churchill’s.

Nor—and I almost cried when I discovered that this one wasn’t true—did he ever say, of his relations with the exhausting and almost intolerable de Gaulle, ‘The hardest cross I have had to bear has been the Cross of Lorraine.’ It was actually said by General Spears, Churchill’s envoy to France. But who ever remembers General Spears?

Then there is the beautiful put-down of G. B. Shaw, who sent him two tickets for a first night of one of his plays with the message that he should ‘bring a friend, if you have one’. Churchill got the ball back over the net by saying that he couldn’t make the first night, but would come to the second ‘if there is one’.

Except that he didn’t, because the omniscient Allen Packwood of Cambridge has found letters from both Shaw and Churchill—unanimously denying it.

Like some hyper-gravitational astral body, it is Churchill who magically claims the joke—when it turns out he never cracked it at all. Which has led some to wonder—mistakenly, in my view—whether he was really as fertile in humour as all that.

You could develop this line of thought, if you chose, and observe that his habits were not completely Falstaffian. He did indeed drink whisky and water from very early in the morning—but his daughter once pointed out that it was a very weak whisky indeed; just a splash of Johnnie Walker at the bottom of the glass, more of a ‘mouthwash’, as he said, than a proper drink.

As for his cigars, his valet and many others testify that he very rarely smoked them all the way through—generally leaving at least a third or a half in the ashtray. He understood perfectly well that they were not just tobacco; they were part of his brand. On the way to make his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he called for the car to stop as they neared their destination. He patted his pockets, pulled out a cigar and popped it, unlit, into his mouth.

‘Never forget your trademark,’ he growled in his trademark growl. Far from being a dissolute Toby Belch, he showed—in his own way—remarkable personal discipline. He worked out with dumb-bells. In the dispatching of business he was more phenomenally industrious than anyone you have ever known. All of which suggests again, perhaps, that the more exuberant sides of his personality contained an element of calculated exaggeration—something a little bit borrowed, like the V for Victory sign that he took from occupied Europe, where it was scrawled by anti-Nazis on buildings and stood for ‘vrijheid’ or freedom.

Was Churchill a poseur? No, though everybody to some extent acts out the identity they have assigned themselves. The extraordinary thing is that Churchill’s public persona—his image—was overwhelmingly congruent with reality.

He might have nicked the V-sign from the Continent—but it was pure Churchill to turn it mischievously round, as he often did, so that it could be read to mean not just victory but ‘fuck off’. And yes, whichever way you look at it, his potations were epic. He drank about a pint of Pol Roger champagne a day, together with white wine at lunch, red wine at dinner and port or brandy thereafter. He did once give up spirits (but not if diluted) for a year in 1936, for the sake of a wager; but that did not impede his consumption of other forms of alcohol on a scale that—in the words of his Private Secretary—would have felled a lesser human being.

Nor did he just wave his cigars around for effect, like some vain and Freudian accoutrement of masculine power. According to his secretary, he smoked between eight and ten large Cuban cigars a day. Even if he left a few inches unburned—and the ends were generally collected and stuffed in the pipe of the gardener at Chartwell—that is still a lot of cigars: about three thousand a year, it has been estimated, or 250,000 over his lifetime.

In spite of all this he managed to get into his eighties with a blood pressure of 140/80. It is as if his body was itself a physical symbol of the nation’s ability to soak up punishment. Talk about Falstaffian behaviour: there is a gripping description of what it was like to watch Churchill eating in his own home, by a man who came to interview him at Chartwell. He wanted everything at once, in no particular order. He would eat a forkful of steak and kidney pie, then puff on a cigar, then gobble a chocolate, then gulp some brandy, then have another forkful of meat—and talking all the while.

As for his sense of humour, and his witticisms, well, the wonder of it really is how many of the stories turn out to be completely true. That is why so many apocryphal stories have been ascribed to Churchill—because the pearl of ornament has formed about the grit of truth; more than a grit—a boulder.

There are so many true stories about Churchill’s behaviour that the false ones have been opportunistically added, by skilled forgers, in the knowledge that it can be hard sometimes to tell which is which. It really is true that in 1946 he met Bessie Braddock—a staunch Labour MP of ample proportions, who once called for some Tory councillors to be machine-gunned—when he was a little bit, as they say, ‘tired and emotional’.

‘Winston,’ she bristled, ‘you are drunk.’ ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘you are ugly, and I will be sober in the morning.’ That seems to our taste almost unforgivably brutal; but serve her right for being so personal. Anyway, he wasn’t completely sloshed, said his bodyguard, Ron Golding, who confirmed the story; just a bit ‘wobbly’. And it is all the better for being an instant reply.

F. E. Smith once said: ‘Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing his impromptu remarks.’ This one just popped out, and has earned its place, I see, at number one in a Daily Express survey of the greatest insults in history.

It seems to be genuinely the case that he made the famous crack about the Lord Privy Seal, who had come to see him when he was in the toilet. ‘Tell the Lord Privy Seal that I am sealed in the privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time,’ he roared. Even if he didn’t say all of it, he made the essential gag—Privy Seal/sealed in privy.

Again, we see his love of chiasmus—or reversing the word order in an unexpected way: like ‘beginning of the end/end of the beginning’, or ‘I am ready to meet my maker; whether my maker is ready for the great ordeal of meeting me is another question’; ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’; ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me’; and there are many others.

Sometimes I have been tempted to dismiss a story as being surely apocryphal—only to discover that it really is true. He did say that. Take the yarn about the time he was on a lecture tour in America, and was served a buffet lunch of cold fried chicken.

‘May I have some breast?’ he is supposed to have asked his hostess. ‘Mr Churchill,’ the hostess replied, ‘in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.’ The following day the lady received a magnificent orchid from her guest of honour. The accompanying card read, ‘I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat’.

I had this one firmly on my list of forgeries—and then I had it authenticated by his granddaughter Celia Sandys. ‘Where did you hear it?’ I asked.

‘Horse’s mouth,’ she said. You can’t argue with that.

Churchill’s humour is both conceptual and verbal. He not only used his colossal English vocabulary, but is also responsible for some of the greatest Franglais of all time. He has been credited with issuing this superb threat to de Gaulle: ‘Et marquez mes mots, mon ami, si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquiderai.’ (‘And mark my words, my friend, if you double-cross me, I will liquidate you.’)

Even if the whole thing isn’t from him, he certainly said ‘je vous liquiderai’. All these remarks have in common not just that they are funny, but that they are staggeringly rude. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, was not just a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’. One day he went farther, with an attack that ranks in the great tradition of parliamentary invective, an insult of which his father Randolph would have been proud.

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

When he saw Stafford Cripps—the austere Labour figure who had briefly and incredibly been touted as his wartime rival—he said, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.’ He could be rough with colleagues, too. He said that the new Tory MPs around Rab Butler in 1945 were ‘no more than a set of pink pansies’, and when he was told by his Private Secretary that Butler and Eden were waiting outside to see him, he told Anthony Montague Browne: ‘Tell them to go and bugger themselves.’

Since this was clearly audible to the waiting pair, he shouted out after the departing Browne: ‘There is no need for them to carry out that instruction literally.’ These are just a handful of the hundreds of glossy old Churchillian chestnuts, and they illustrate a key point about his political identity: that he had all the unruly combativeness of a bulldog, or of John Bull himself. It wasn’t always to everyone’s tastes; but in time of war you wanted someone so incorrigibly cheerful and verbally inventive that he could really stick it to the Nazis—or rather, to Corporal Schickelgruber and the Narzis.

To mobilise a democracy to war you must be demotic, and Churchill could do demotic better than any of his contemporaries. He loved puns, and wordplay, in the way that Sun headline writers love them. A socialist utopia was ‘queuetopia’; he built a shed for his chickens called ‘Chickenham Palace’, and on the subject of chickens he went to Ottowa in December 1941 and told them how he had stuck it to Pétain and the vacillating French. ‘When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! Some neck!’

They laughed because he was not only cunningly tailoring his language for a North American audience (‘some chicken’, rather than the more usual British English ‘what a chicken’); he was punning on neck, which also means brazenness or cheek.

There is a final sense in which Churchill incarnated something essential about the British character—and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity, verbal and otherwise. He invented words to suit himself. Mountbatten was a ‘triphibian’, which meant that he was capable of deployment on land, sea and air. The Lend-Lease deal was ‘unsordid’—a word not found before or since. He had an aversion to staples and paper clips and therefore preferred documents to be joined by a treasury tag, or, as he put it, ‘klopped’.

‘Gimme klop,’ he would bark. ‘When I say klop, Miss Shearburn, that’s what I want, klop.’ One new secretary, Kathleen Hill, famously tried to fulfil this request by producing the fifteen volumes of Der Fall des Hauses Stuart by the German historian Onno Klopp (1822–1903). ‘Christ almighty,’ said Churchill.

He not only wore Laurel and Hardy hats of a kind that had been abandoned by everyone else; he startled people by designing and appearing in his own clothes—those blue velvet or sometimes cerise romper suits that made him look like an overgrown toddler.

There is a wonderful picture of him appearing before the Washington media in one of these bizarre outfits, with a smirk on his face reminiscent of Hugh Hefner about to attend a slumber party. When he wasn’t wearing his bowler, he would wear an extraordinary variety of headgear. It has been said that Churchill never saw a hat he didn’t like. That wasn’t quite true: he’d put on a Glengarry, the traditional Scots cap, in the trenches, looked at himself in the mirror and said ‘Christ!’ before taking it off again.

But he wore top hats, yachting caps, fireman’s hats, giant white astrakhan hats, kepis, solar topis, builder’s helmets, fedoras, sombreros. He was the Imelda Marcos of hats. In fact we need only find a picture of Churchill in a Native American headdress and he could pose as the entire cast of Village People. All his life he had been a showman, an extrovert, theatrical, comical: there is a photo of him dressed for a fancy-dress ball at Sandhurst—meticulously made up, with carefully applied white face paint, as Pierrot the Clown.

He knew how to project his personality, and the war called for someone who could create an image of himself—decisive, combative, but also cheery and encouraging—in the minds of the people. Churchill alone was able to do that, because to a great extent he really was that character.

There is a sense in which eccentricity and humour helped to express what Britain was fighting for—what it was all about. With his ludicrous hats and rompers and cigars and excess alcohol, he contrived physically to represent the central idea of his own political philosophy: the inalienable right of British people to live their lives in freedom, to do their own thing.

You only had to look at Churchill, and see the vital difference between his way of life and the ghastly seriousness and uniformity and pomposity of the Nazis. Never forget: Hitler was a teetotaller, a deformity that accounts for much misery.

In his personal individualism and bullish eccentricity, Churchill helped define the fight. It was an idea that was to lead him badly astray in the 1945 election, when he made the mistake of comparing Labour government bureaucrats to the Gestapo. But it was absolutely what was needed for the war.

In late March 1944 you will find him again pictured with a tommy gun, inspecting the D-Day troops with Eisenhower. This time he is actually aiming the gun. He has it up to his shoulder and is pointing towards France. He is wearing the same pinstripe suit, the same bowler hat. I can hardly believe it is a coincidence. It is almost as if he is referring to that photo-opportunity of almost four years previously, and saying, ‘I told you we could do it.’

Churchill’s qualities allowed him to stand for the nation. It was also essential to the Churchill Factor that he was seen, more than any other politician, to be his own man: someone whose protean political identity enabled him to explode out of the straitjacket of party politics.

One of the reasons he was able to appeal both to right and left was that he had begun his career as a social reformer, a politician who could certainly claim to have done great things for working people.