The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill’s powers, declared that week’s Sunday Times, “as he has so brilliantly demonstrated, are still of the highest order.” The next day, as the defence debate continued, Aneurin Bevan accused Churchill of allowing America to dictate Britain’s foreign policy, declaring that Churchill had canceled his 1953 Bermuda trip because he knew Eisenhower would not accede to a request to hold talks with the Russians. Churchill’s reply stunned the House, for he revealed for the first time in public that he had not gone to Bermuda because “I was struck down by a very sudden illness which paralysed me completely. That is why I had to put it off.”203

  Moments later he tucked his reading glasses into a jacket pocket, gathered up his notes, and departed. He delivered two minor speeches in the House during his final month in office, the last a tribute to Lloyd George on March 28. Though he remained the member of Parliament from Woodford for nine more years, Churchill never again spoke in the House of Commons.

  On April 4, Winston and Clementine hosted their last dinner at No. 10. Some fifty guests attended, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The other grandees present, Colville wrote, included high government officials, members of Churchill’s family, and several dukes and duchesses, including the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, soon to chair a special top-secret government committee code-named Hope Not and vested with the task of planning Churchill’s state funeral. Randolph Churchill attended, and predictably got drunk, at one point haranguing his cousin and Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, over a nasty article he had written about Eden for Punch. Sir Winston presided over all, attired in his Garter, Order of Merit, and knee breeches. His after-dinner speech took the form of a long toast to the Queen: “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.” At the end, he raised his glass “to the Queen.” Later that night, after the last guests had left, Jock Colville escorted Churchill up to his bedroom. The Old Man sat on his bed, and for several minutes did not speak. Colville imagined Churchill was “contemplating that this was his last night [as P.M.] at Downing Street. Then suddenly he stared at me and said with vehemence, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’ ”204

  The next evening, Churchill donned his top hat and the frock coat he reserved for such formal occasions and went to Buckingham Palace to resign. Ever since the nineteenth century, an earldom had been the traditional path to the peerage for retired prime ministers who aspired to such titles. But Churchill had no peers, and deserved something more. Thus, the idea of offering him a dukedom was floated, although the Queen was not enthused at creating the first nonroyal duke in eighty years. The most satisfactory outcome for the Palace would be for the offer to be made and for Churchill to decline it. Days earlier, in fact, Churchill had told Colville that if the Queen offered him a dukedom, he would not accept it. Colville passed this information along to the Palace. The Queen indeed made the offer, and Churchill, after a moment’s temptation, indeed declined. The Commons was his home, not the House of Lords. He later that night told Colville that he had declined the dukedom because to accept it would have ruined Randolph’s political career, for as a Lord, Randolph could not sit in the Commons, from where the sovereign chose the prime minister. In fact, after his 1951 defeat, Randolph Churchill never again stood for office. Of his father, Randolph once said, “Nothing grows under the shadow of a great tree.” To the end, the father did what he could to help the son, although Churchill once told one of his private secretaries, “I love Randolph, but I do not like him.”205

  On Wednesday, April 6, Winston and Clementine hosted a tea party at No. 10 for about one hundred of the staff. Late in the afternoon, Churchill left for Chartwell. Clementine, with much to arrange at their London house, stayed behind. Churchill arrived at Chartwell in the gloaming, Mary later wrote, but appeared “in quite good form.” A small crowd of neighbors and reporters had gathered outside the house. As Churchill made for the front steps, a reporter called out: How does it feel not to be prime minister?206

  Churchill replied, “It’s always nice to come home.”

  8

  Postscript

  1955–1965

  Although a general election was not required until 1956, soon after Churchill departed No. 10, Anthony Eden, who wanted to take his case to the people, dissolved Parliament and scheduled elections for late May. Churchill stood for the Commons for the nineteenth time, and was returned to the House in a sweeping Conservative victory on May 27. Eden picked up forty more seats, and the Conservatives this time won a plurality of the popular vote. During the campaign, Churchill was not asked by Eden to make any of the three BBC broadcasts allotted the Tories. The torch had passed.

  In mid-May, Soviet foreign minister Molotov informed Harold Macmillan, the new foreign secretary, that Molotov and Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin, who had succeeded Malenkov, were willing to join in a four-power summit meeting in Geneva. Nikita Khrushchev, too, would attend. Khrushchev, the Ukrainian political boss who had bungled the Kharkov battle in 1942, was now effectively co-leader in the Kremlin and leader of the de-Stalinization effort—the attempt to erase Stalin from Soviet history. President Eisenhower, well aware of Churchill’s feelings on the matter, wrote a letter to Churchill in which he expressed wariness of the chances of success in Geneva, adding, “Foster and I know—as does the world—that your courage and vision will be missed at the meeting.” The prize Churchill had sought for so long had gone to Eden.1

  A new man had joined Churchill’s private secretariat three years earlier, Anthony Montague Browne. He was not yet thirty at the time, had flown Beaufighters in Burma late in the war, and after coming home had forged a friendship with Jock Colville. Montague Browne, who, like Colville, was officially attached to the Foreign Office, was asked by Harold Macmillan upon Churchill’s retirement to stay on with Churchill in order to vet the Old Man’s communications with the many foreign leaders who were sure to ask his opinions on myriad matters. The posting, Macmillan assured Montague Browne, shouldn’t last more than a year or two. It lasted almost a decade, until the end of Churchill’s life. Though the Foreign Office paid Montague Browne’s salary, Churchill insisted on repaying the money. Recalled Montague Browne, “Churchill did not want to feel that he was indebted to the government for anything.”

  Montague Browne titled his memoirs of these years Long Sunset, a turn of phrase that applied to both Churchill and the British Empire. He called the portion of the book—about one half—that had to do with Churchill’s retirement “Late Afternoon.” Yet even as the shadows lengthened, Churchill could not bring himself to fully retire from politics. Montague Browne wrote, “It is undoubtedly true that WSC loved his family deeply. It is also undoubtedly true that they came second to his purposes and his political work. How could it be otherwise?” There were consequences to his wife and children, unintended of course, and it is a perverse irony that Churchill’s late afternoon lasted long enough for him to witness them.2

  After his 1951 election defeat, Randolph never again stood for public office. Instead, he followed in his father’s footsteps in the family traditions of the lecture circuit, essay writing, freelance jounalism, and biography. His accomplished biography, Lord Derby: King of Lancashire, was published in 1959, and met with critical acclaim. The son, Montague Browne wrote, displayed the same knack for reportage and writing as the father. By then Randolph had begun assembling the papers of his grandfather, Lord Randolph Churchill, in preparation for writing Sir Winston’s official biography. Although Churchill had long been inclined to allow Randolph the privilege, he had specifically instructed the trustees of the literary trust to undertake the work only after his death. Randolph, as stubborn as his father, pushed for an early start. Finally, in 1960, Churchill relented. Randolph set to work with the same military precision his father had brought to the task of writing The Second World War, and with much the same staff. Yet, recalled the military historian A. J. P. Taylor, Randolph “treated the r
esearchers abominably in his usual arrogant way. He regarded them as quite indistinguishable from the domestic servants.” Thus, Randolph’s team of researchers underwent frequent turnovers. “They never stayed very long.”3

  The son had inherited the father’s cutting wit, but Randolph’s came with a serrated edge and did him little good politically, wrote Montague Browne. On one occasion, Montague Browne dissuaded Randolph from following Anthony Eden (whom he despised) to a Washington conference in order to write a no doubt negative magazine story. Randolph: “Oh well, I suppose you’re right. I would be the last camel to break the straw’s back.” Randolph’s tastes (as did his sister Sarah’s) ran to the extravagant, leading to his asking regularly for financial help from his parents, which meant the Chartwell Trust. The trust purchased him a London house and a three-story redbrick Georgian country house at East Bergholt, Suffolk. Churchill had set up the trust in order to benefit his children, but Clementine resented the children’s repeated trips to the well. She believed, Mary later wrote, that “the fruit of Winston’s genius and generosity” was being “poured… down the drain” in service to the “fecklessness” of their children. Randolph had married June Osborne in 1948. In 1949, a baby girl arrived—Arabella, named for the First Duke of Marlborough’s sister, mistress to James II. But Randolph, wrote Mary with great understatement, “does not seem to have possessed the aptitude for marriage.” He and June divorced in 1962. She later committed suicide. Randolph completed two volumes of his father’s biography before dying of a heart attack on June 6, 1968, aged fifty-seven. His death, like his life, took place in the shadows: Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on that day. Randolph’s passing went little noted.4

  None of the children but Mary displayed the aptitude for marriage. She remained married to Christopher Soames—made Baron Soames in 1978—for forty years, until his death in 1987. Together they had five children; the oldest, Nicholas, followed his father into government, as the Conservative MP for Bedford.

  Sarah and Diana charted the course of their marriages and lives under dark stars. Asked by Montague Browne why the family called Sarah “the Mule,” Churchill replied, “Because she’s bloody obstinate and she won’t breed.” During the six years before Churchill retired, Sarah had spent a great deal of her time in the United States pursuing her stage and screen career, with success. She toured the country in a Theatre Guild production of The Philadelphia Story, and then appeared in the 1951 Broadway version with Jeffrey Lynn. That same year, she signed on with MGM and starred with Jane Powell, Peter Lawford, and Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding. Early in 1952 she made the first of several appearances on NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, the creation of Joyce Hall, founder of Hallmark Cards, and an admirer of Sir Winston Churchill, with whom Hall struck a financial deal to reproduce Winston’s paintings on Hallmark cards. This was the era of live television, and Sarah excelled—in Amahl and the Night Visitors, Joan of Arc, and as Ophelia in Hallmark’s 1953 two-hour production of Hamlet. She had remarried in 1949. As with her first marriage, it was an elopement in the United States, this time at Sea Island, Georgia. The new groom was Anthony Beauchamp, who had served as a war artist and photographer in Burma during the war. Upon first meeting Beauchamp in early 1949, Churchill had taken an immediate dislike to him, for reasons unknown, which may explain Sarah’s decision to have the wedding ceremony performed in Georgia. Her sister Mary—Lady Soames—called Sarah the “sunshine” in her parents’ lives; Anthony Montague Browne anointed her “the brightest star.”5

  But by the late 1950s, Sarah’s star was dimming and her marriage to Anthony Beauchamp failing. It ended utterly in July 1957 when Beauchamp committed suicide by swallowing a fistful of sleeping pills. Beauchamp’s death came almost exactly a decade after Gil Winant, hopelessly in love with Sarah, went home to America and killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Never able to control her drinking, Sarah began a long descent into alcoholism. The next year she was arrested in Malibu and fined fifty dollars for public drunkenness. Her father lived long enough to read the newspaper accounts of three more arrests for drunkenness in Britain and a ten-day stay in jail for violating her probation. In a 1959 letter to Clementine written while he was on the Riviera, he attributed Sarah’s decline to “the difficulties which are common to women at the change of life.” Finally, in 1962, it appeared Sarah might have found happiness when she met and married Henry Touchet-Jesson, the twenty-third Baron Audley. Fifteen months later, Audley died of a massive coronary. Sarah’s film and stage career was at an end. In 1967 she wrote a short and lyrical tribute to her father: A Thread in the Tapestry. In 1981 she published her autobiography, Keep on Dancing, in which she discussed her battles with alcohol in poignant and honest terms. She died an alcoholic in 1982, aged sixty-seven.6

  Diana suffered the same bouts of depression, fatigue, and nervous tension as her mother, yet Clementine, rather than find common cause with her daughter, had always maintained a discreet emotional distance. Diana had had a nervous breakdown in 1953 and was on the verge of another at about the time her father retired. Unlike Randolph and Sarah, she did not find release from her pain in the bottle. It was Diana who comforted Randolph and Sarah during their regular crises; it was Diana alone who attended Henry Audley’s funeral. She was a steady daughter and wife, married since 1935 to Duncan Sandys, who was made minister of defence in 1957 and secretary of state for Commonwealth relations in 1960. They separated in 1956; in 1960, Sandys divorced Diana and soon remarried. Sympathetic to those in severe emotional distress, Diana joined the Samaritans in 1962, an organization dedicated to round-the-clock help for anyone contemplating suicide.

  Sometime during the night of October 19–20, 1963, Diana swallowed a massive overdose of sleeping pills and died. Her sister Mary delivered the news to Clementine, herself hospitalized and under sedation that month, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And it fell to Mary to deliver the news to her father, who, dulled now by old age, only took it in slowly and “then withdrew into a great and distant silence.” Both father and mother were too weak to attend Diana’s funeral, held in the little churchyard at Bladon, where Churchill’s parents were buried.7

  The theme of the latter portion of Lord Moran’s memoirs, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965, is one of Churchill brought low in his retirement years by the relentless onslaught of the Black Dog of depression. It is a tale—exaggerated and incomplete—of Churchill’s journey to decrepitude and the slow wasting away of his physical and mental powers. Among the chapter headings are “Swan-song,” “Depression,” “The Flesh Was Weak,” and “The Dying Gladiator.” Moran chronicles Churchill’s battle with carbuncles in 1955 (which Churchill believed were “malignant”), pneumonia in 1958, and two minor strokes in 1959. Churchill was not afraid of death, yet minor illnesses provoked bouts of anxiety. Moran, Montague Browne later wrote, was always ready and willing to treat his most important—his only—patient.

  Although Moran claimed that Churchill had approved his publishing his medical memoirs, he had not secured the approval in writing. The family, then and since, has held that against Moran. His narrative of Churchill’s first five years of retirement is rife with scenes depicting Churchill’s loneliness and despondency. Moran called the decade of 1954–1964 “a long chronicle of despair.” These were years, he wrote, that found Churchill giving up reading; he had not and in fact polished off War and Peace, Tom Jones, Scott’s Rob Roy, and Macaulay’s essay on Milton, among many other works. A stack of books borrowed from the local library always occupied Churchill’s night table, and the turnover was swift.

  Churchill loved his days outside, painting and feeding his menagerie, including Toby, a budgerigar Churchill had received on his eightieth birthday. Where Churchill went, Toby went, including the Riviera. Moran suggested that Churchill teach Toby the Chartwell phone number in case the bird escaped. Churchill replied that he did not know his own phone number. Alas, Toby gained his freedom in 1960 after finding an open window at the Hôtel de P
aris. At the end of a Chartwell day, the Old Man enjoyed the movies regularly screened at 9:15 P.M. sharp: The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Longest Day, The Guns of Navarone, the 1958 musical Gigi, and all the Disney films. Moran wrote that these were the years that found the Old Man spending his days “staring into the fire, giving it a prod with his stick when the room got cold” as the Black Dog of depression hovered nearby. These were “sad years of mounting decrepitude” when Churchill became “the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral.”8

  That was largely untrue during Churchill’s first five or six years of retirement, and only partially true during Churchill’s last two years. Montague Browne writes that in his thirteen years of service to Churchill, he never once heard the Old Man refer to the “Black Dog.” Churchill mourned the passing of the British Empire, recalled Montague Browne, and was profoundly saddened by the dangerous state of world affairs. He expressed his worries in that regard to Montague Browne as only Churchill could: “I always feared that mass pressure in the United States might force them to use their H-bombs while the Russians still had not got any. It’s always been a tendency of the masses to drop their Hs.” Churchill’s melancholy, Montague Browne wrote, was “objective, detached, and sadly logical”; it did not stem from any sort of “subjective mood of deep depression.”9

  Retirement found Churchill busy publishing his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He regularly attended dinners at his private dining society, the Other Club, and visited Harrow at least once each year. In 1956 he was invited by Eden to lunch at No. 10 in order to meet Bulganin and Khrushchev, co-leaders in the Kremlin, although Churchill told Moran that week that he thought Khrushchev would soon emerge as the real power. Meals, as always, were splendid affairs, and Churchill’s intake of roast beef, brandy, whisky, and cigars remained undiminished. He painted dozens of landscapes that met with critical acclaim. The eminent British art critic and historian Ernst H. Gombrich wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that Churchill’s essay Painting as a Pastime contained ideas “so acute and so profound… I could do no better than to build them into the fabric of my book, Art and Illusion.”10