Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill

by Gretchen Rubin

  In a speech given November 10, 1942, after Rommel’s army was defeated, he said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  In November 1942: “The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”

  In 1943, to an American critic of the Raj, Churchill said, “Before we proceed any further, let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?”

  In August 1943, for security reasons, Churchill was warned to keep secret how he was going to travel to the Quebec Conference. Talking to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he said, “They won’t let me tell you how I’m going to travel. . . . So all I can tell you is that I’m coming by puff-puff, if you know what I mean.”

  In January 1945, while waiting in Malta for President Roosevelt to arrive so they could proceed to Yalta for the Big Three conference, Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter.”

  On May 1, 1945, Hitler’s death was announced. When asked in the House of Commons if he had any comment on the war situation, Churchill replied blandly, “It is definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago.”

  On July 26, 1945, Churchill was voted out of office. When his wife tried to comfort him by saying, “It may be a blessing in disguise,” he replied, “Well, at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.”

  In a speech in the House after the Potsdam Conference, Churchill observed, “There are few virtues which the Poles do not possess—and there are few errors which they have ever avoided.”

  In 1945, when invited to send Stanley Baldwin a birthday message, Churchill made a devastating refusal: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been better for our country if he had never lived.” (It was Baldwin who, after Hitler invaded the Rhineland, refused to appoint Churchill as Minister of Defense because “If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross.”)

  “The socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.”

  On August 9, 1947, he commented on the Labor government: “The Island is beset by a tribe of neurotic philosophers who, on awakening, begin each day by thinking what there is of Britain that they can give away, and end each day by regretting what they have done.”

  “Give to me the romance of an eighteenth-century alley with its dark corners, where footpads lurk.”

  When an aide returned one of Churchill’s memos with a note correcting a sentence that he’d ended with a preposition, Churchill wrote his own note in return: “This is the sort of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put.”

  To the House of Commons on November 11, 1947, Churchill observed: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

  Asked whether he was flattered by the crowds drawn by his speeches, Churchill replied, “It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that, if instead of making a political speech, I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.”

  In 1953, of an unpromising candidate proposed for a peerage: “No, but perhaps a disappearage.”

  In 1954, when Clementine tried to put him on a restricted tomato diet, Churchill wrote, “I have no grievance against a tomato but I think one should eat other things as well.”

  In 1955, still firmly in office at age eighty to the consternation of his would-be successor Anthony Eden, Churchill said, “I must retire soon. Anthony won’t live forever.” He also observed, “When I want to tease Anthony, I remind him that Mr. Gladstone formed his last administration at the age of 83.”

  8

  CHURCHILL IN SYMBOLS

  Metonymy

  It isn’t enough that a biography explain what a person has done; it must explain how he or she was able to do it. During his life, and even after it, in the thickening haze of distance, Churchill kept his bulky figure fixed in people’s view. He had a genius for presenting himself so he could be understood and remembered by everyone. How did he do it?—through symbols.

  To drive himself into the public mind, Churchill simplified himself. As his image multiplied, it became more recognizable, as not only his appearance but even his character was reduced to a few swift strokes.

  The uniform, the cigar, and the V sign make Churchill an instantly recognizable figure.

  The uniform, the cigar, and the V sign . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  What makes certain bold figures stand out in the crowded bus of history? Churchill recognized that the public needs to see its heroes clearly. “One of the most necessary features of a public man’s equipment,” Churchill noted, “is some distinctive mark which everyone learns to look for and to recognize.” Like Hitler’s toothbrush mustache, Montgomery’s beret, or T. E. Lawrence’s Arab robes, Churchill used his V sign, his cigars, his champagne and whiskey to blaze himself on the public mind. Just as his lisp and his idiosyncratic pronunciation made his voice identifiable on the radio, his distinctive appearance made him easy to recognize.

  Early on, he’d used eccentric hats as one of his marks, and they were a constant subject of photographs and commentary. Later, he replaced hats with cigars: he was never without one. The cigar was a prop that gave him an air of manly nonchalance in a time of danger, of sensual pleasure at a time of austerity, and of jolly indifference to warnings about health or foreign protocol. Churchill was so closely associated with cigars that when he visited Roosevelt after the Pearl Harbor attack, map pins showing the location of the “Big Three” leaders were in the shapes not of flags or initials or even of a lion, an eagle, and a bear but of a cigar, a cigarette holder, and a briar pipe.

  Churchill’s characteristic gesture, the V sign, showed his skill at evoking emotion. Simple and memorable, it made a terrific contrast to the Nazis’ sinister Heil Hitler. The V sign was suitably hostile: with the front of the hand toward the audience, as Churchill did it, it meant “Victory,” but by turning the back of the hand to the audience, especially with an upward movement, the gesture became an obscene “Up yours!” It was also a call-and-response gesture that the crowd could use to signal their own confidence in victory. Leslie Hore-Belisha admitted of Churchill’s hats and cigars, “Perhaps such foibles call attention to himself. But,” he continued, “what of his V-sign? There we have his knack of evoking a patriotic emotion. It is a gesture of genius.”

  Casual of his public dignity, Churchill regularly wore a sort of zip-up coverall designed for air raids, which he called a “siren suit.” The siren suits made for Churchill were sewn from different materials like worsted, pinstripe flannel, even black velvet for dinner, and some sported a large breast pocket to hold his cigars. Churchill’s friend Diana Cooper described the effect: “Winston dresses night and day, and I imagine in bed, in the same little blue workman’s boiler suit. He looks exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.” Churchill, who loved to wear uniforms of all sorts, made the siren suit his signature garment. It first appeared in November 1940, and less than a year later, journalist H. V. Morton observed that it was “already acquiring a definitely historical appearance” and was “clearly destined for a glass case in years to come.” The siren suit, Morton added with some cheek, made Churchill “seem rounder, plumper and more of a character than ever.”

  Although using these visual emblems—what renowned cartoonist David Low called “tags of identity”—may seem crude, the public embraced them. This was in a time, after all, before television made politicians’ faces ubiquitous. Churchill’s peculiarities sharpened his image in the public mind and also, given the English affection for eccentrics, boosted his popularity. And not only the British appreciated Churchill’s symbols. When he spe
nt Christmas in the White House, the gifts that poured in for him included a six-foot-tall V sign made of flowers and hundreds of boxes of cigars. Churchill was so closely identified with the cigar and V-for-victory sign that a birthday card that bore no address—just a drawing of a cigar between fingers giving the V sign—nevertheless reached him.

  From the beginning of the war, Churchill exploited radio, and as the war dragged on, he increasingly relied on film as well. Newsreels allowed him to project himself through symbols to large audiences, without the exhausting preparation that a speech required. “His sensitiveness to effect was shown by various small traits of behavior,” explained Sir John Martin, “presenting the character which the public expected and wanted to see—the hat, the stern set of the jaw, the cigar.”

  And Churchill exaggerated aspects not only of his appearance but also of his disposition. People feel closer to public figures when they can identify with their likes and dislikes, whether fishing, golf, broccoli, or as in Churchill’s case, liquor. Churchill used his legendary drinking as a running joke that everyone could appreciate. Once, when asked if he’d like tea, Churchill replied, “My doctor has ordered me to take nothing non-alcoholic between breakfast and dinner.” (But then he finished only two drinks all day.) Defending his request to his doctor to drink alcohol after lunch, Churchill explained, “I neither want it nor need it but I should think it pretty hazardous to interfere with the ineradicable habit of a lifetime.”

  “To be great,” Clementine reminded Churchill, “one’s actions must be understood by simple people.” Churchill used symbols to press himself on the minds of the people. Whatever they thought about him, the British saw Churchill very clearly. As time passes, the clarity of these symbols helps to keep Churchill in sight while other immense figures—think of Joseph Stalin—begin to fade.

  9

  CHURCHILL, TRUE

  In a Single Word

  Many have tried to distill Churchill’s character into a single word. “Liberty,” one proposed; others suggested “courage,” “persistence,” “his fearlessness both physical and mental,” “his vivid imagination,” his “capacity for picking out essential things.” British writer C. P. Snow, in a Churchillian series of powerful adjectives, described him: “Massive, witty, inconsiderate, he was sufficient for himself.”

  But it was Margery Allingham who best captured Churchill’s character and his bond to the English. In a definition so forceful it bears reading at length, she summed up Churchill’s character in a single word: true.

  In 1941, to woo American support for Britain, the mystery writer Margery Allingham wrote The Oaken Heart, a book describing the wartime situation of her Essex village, called Auburn. Allingham explained how England responded to Churchill as Prime Minister and indeed explained so clearly that she foreshadowed, in 1941, his shocking defeat four years later.

  Allingham began with a line from Shakespeare’s King John:

  “Naught shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true.”

  That is the basic rock, the ultimate secret belief of the instinctive Briton, the touchstone, the magic ring, the root of his pride, the cornerstone of his remembered history.

  “Resting true” means what it says, too. It is not only resting honest, according to one’s own or anyone else’s lights. True means true. True as a line or a weight or a wheel is true, true like a ship’s compass or a horseshoe or a gunsight. . . .

  Mr. Churchill saved the government and saved the country and saved Auburn too. In a week it was over and all was safe and true again, whatever the outward danger. . . .

  It is believed by some less simple people that Mr. Churchill, after having been neglected for years, was suddenly remembered in the hour of stress. Auburn does not see it in that way at all, as far as I can gather. From Auburn’s point of view . . . Mr. Churchill has been perfectly recognized and liked and trusted to be true to himself and faithful to his country ever since he first appeared in Parliament. However, never until now has the country come into line, come into the true, that is, with Mr. Churchill. He is not a man to rise to an hour. The hour has had to rise to him. His is a fixed compass. The Auburn kind has always enjoyed him and known him as they knew his father and mother before him, and his tremendous qualities and tremendous peculiarities are not only known but understood by the people . . . and that is for a very good reason indeed.

  Mr. Churchill is the unchanging bulldog, the epitome of British aggressiveness, and the living incarnation of the true Briton in fighting. . . . Moreover, he always has been like this as far as anybody remembers, and his family before him. After half a century the country has got into the true with him, but it is its fighting not its normal angle.

  10

  CHURCHILL’S DESIRE FOR FAME

  His Motive

  Although it is impossible to prove a subject’s motives, a biography must probe them, because motive helps to explain a subject’s actions. Why did Churchill do what he did? To maintain the Empire—because he loved war—to prove himself to his father. These theories are plausible, but there is another possible explanation as well: to satisfy his overpowering desire for fame.

  Churchill was driven by his longing for fame. He lusted for honors, medals, offices, the respect of kings, a place in history. He worked constantly to thrust himself into the supreme role he believed he deserved. “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off,” he fretted as a junior officer. “It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.”

  Growing up, Churchill watched his family members bask in public admiration. One of his grandfathers was the noble Duke of Marlborough; the other was the millionaire “King of Wall Street.” During Churchill’s most impressionable years, his father Randolph was a star politician, a figure pointed out on the street, his speeches reported in full in the newspapers. In 1885, Churchill wrote his father from school, “Every body wants to get your signature will you send me a few to give away?” His mother Jennie was a celebrated society beauty whose photograph sold briskly in the shops during the 1880s and 1890s. What’s more, Churchill claimed a national war hero—the first Duke of Marlborough—as an ancestor. From his family, Churchill learned early to crave fame for himself. At Harrow, when one of the senior boys beat him for breaking a school rule, Churchill boasted, “I shall be a greater man than you.” “You can take two more for that,” the boy replied. Even in those days, as a schoolboy, Churchill bragged about how important he’d be one day: “in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Capital and save the Empire.”

  Churchill spun a myth that he’d been ignored as a child, that he was always a dunce in school, and that he was hampered by a limited education. In truth, he brazenly capitalized on his aristocratic and political relationships. In particular, he goaded his mother to exploit all her connections for the benefit of his career. Practically no member of Britain’s inner circle was beyond the determined reach of mother and son.

  From his first days as a subaltern, Churchill sought the spotlight, and in fact, it was his desire for fame that explained his eagerness to be a soldier: “having seen service with British troops while still a young man must give me more weight politically . . . and may perhaps improve my prospects of gaining popularity with the country.” Polishing his reputation was always Churchill’s first priority. Writing his mother in 1897, he complained that no one had noticed when he’d dragged a wounded soldier to safety: “given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.”

  Like his father, Churchill had an instinct for grabbing public attention. He knew it wasn’t enough merely to thrust himself into the center of the action—he must also make himself conspicuous. Churchill cultivated his remarks and appearance, with his cigars, hats, and gestures, to make himself irresistible to the newspapers. If his contrivances struck many as vulgar, if his blatant self-promotion added to his reputation for wild judgment, he didn’t care. From his early day
s in India, when his ambitions were taking shape, he warned Jennie, “If I am to do anything in the world, you will have to make up your mind to publicity and also to my doing unusual things. Of course a certain number of people will be offended.”

  Churchill was right. A number of people were offended by his naked ambition, but rather than inhibiting him, this encouraged him. He embraced the label of troublemaker because he knew that the quickest route to fame was to criticize his most prominent colleagues. He whipped up strife because he knew that being the object of attack made him a larger figure. He twice made the controversial decision to change parties. Churchill used great causes—tariffs, social welfare, the status of Ireland and India, the defeat of the Nazis—as the ropes by which he hauled himself to prominence. He was in a hurry to beat out everyone else: early on, he confided to a young dinner partner, “I am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though.” His personal ambitions, he admitted, were “an ugly and unsatisfactory spectacle by themselves, though nothing but an advantage when borne forward with the flood of a great outside cause.”

  Churchill’s love of fame explains his unseemly gusto for war: war always brought him new opportunities to thrust himself into view. Of Churchill’s ouster from power during World War I, Frances Stevenson’s diary noted how painful it had been for Churchill to be absent from “the war to which he had been looking forward all his life.” Churchill loved the showy trappings of war: the uniforms, which he wore whenever possible; the brass bands; the medals; the troops standing at attention. Because of his high position, World War II gave Churchill the widest scope to indulge his appetite for military pomp and ceremony. He related with glee that during his U.S. travels, the American press accorded his movements the same secrecy as the whereabouts of American battleships. An official at the Tehran Conference commented dryly on the extravagant number of generals, admirals, and air marshals who accompanied Churchill, solely to make the Prime Minister appear more grand. For those who didn’t share Churchill’s attitude, his enthusiasm for war was alarming. As one colleague pointed out, “I thought that he was nearly always right. . . . But I did think that he rather enjoyed a war: and, after three years in the infantry, in Gallipoli and France, I did not.”