Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill

by Gretchen Rubin

  Churchill acknowledged that, in writing his novel Savrola, he gave voice to his own philosophy through his hero. On the desk in Savrola’s library (which contains many of Churchill’s own favorite volumes) rests Macaulay’s Essays, with a passage marked by Savrola: “And History, while for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce that among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name.” Savrola’s craving for fame was also Churchill’s.

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  CHURCHILL AS DEPRESSIVE

  The “Black Dog”?

  Winston Churchill Suffered from the “Black Dog”

  Churchill himself spoke freely about his “black dog,” as he called depression. In 1944, he reminisced to his doctor: “When I was young . . . black depression settled on me. . . . I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.”

  The black dog appeared several times during Churchill’s life. In July 1911, he wrote Clementine about a doctor who had cured an acquaintance of depression. “I think this man might be useful to me—if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now—it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture.” He fell into depression after he left the Admiralty in May 1915, under the shadow of the Dardanelles disaster and his subsequent fall from office. Clementine recalled it: “The worst part of our life together was the failure of the Dardanelles expedition. Winston was filled with such a black depression that I felt that he would never recover from it, and even feared at one time that he might commit suicide.” During this time, the artist Sir William Orpen was painting Churchill’s portrait. One day, Churchill arrived at Orpen’s studio for a sitting but did nothing but sit in front of the fire with his head in his hands, without speaking a word. Orpen went to lunch and returned to find that Churchill hadn’t moved.

  The black dog reappeared during the 1930s, when Churchill was out of office, after his defeat in the election of 1945, and after his final resignation as Prime Minister in 1955.

  Churchill’s close friend Lord Beaverbrook described how Churchill alternated in mood between being “at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.” Psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in an essay about Churchill’s “black dog,” based largely on an account written by Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran, points out that depression is often inherited; the first Duke of Marlborough and Churchill’s father Randolph both suffered recurrent bouts. Storr also argues that Churchill’s very productivity proved depressive tendencies—that Churchill, fearful of falling into despondency, denied himself rest or relaxation. Churchill certainly kept himself feverishly busy at all times: with official responsibilities, writing, painting, bricklaying, polo, gambling, hunting, flying.

  Winston Churchill Did Not Suffer from the “Black Dog”

  Churchill didn’t suffer unusually from depression. In distinguishing his life’s unhappiest period—his school days—Churchill described himself: “I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man.” He took voluptuous pleasure in champagne, cigars, and sunshine; in his large, noisy family; and in his passion for politics, writing, and painting.

  The “black dog” notion stems chiefly from Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, who wrote a valuable, but also widely disputed, memoir about Churchill. From his role as doctor, and with a deep interest in psychology, Lord Moran viewed his patient with a self-centered emphasis on the medical and psychological. Although Moran’s book title claims that it was “taken from the diaries of Lord Moran,” the eminent Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert has established that Moran’s account was not based on a true diary. Contrary to Lord Moran, Gilbert concluded that while Churchill did show anger and sorrow in appropriate circumstances, he did not show signs of incapacitating depression.

  Churchill did endure periods of despair—for example, after the military disaster at the Dardanelles. “I thought he would die of grief,” Clementine said. But who wouldn’t have felt that anguish? British troops had been devastated to no purpose. Churchill had been demoted to a position without influence. His reputation, as he rightly recognized, was permanently tainted. A spell of hopelessness would seem perfectly fitting. Over the next decades, during his tumultuous career, he would suffer several more very low periods. Debilitating bouts of depression, however, didn’t mar Churchill’s life.

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  CHURCHILL’S DISDAIN

  His Dominant Quality

  Often, in a large personality, a single exceptional quality pervades both faults and virtues, and the diligent reader of biography searches for this link, which, once found, will explain the subject’s failures and successes, friendships and wardrobe. In Churchill, this quality was obvious: his disdain for other people’s opinions.

  Throughout his life, Churchill was indifferent to the opinions of other people, a maddening quality that gave him both his absurdity and his grandeur. “Of course I am an egotist,” he said without apology. “Where do you get if you aren’t?” Churchill gave no thought to other people’s concerns and didn’t hide his lack of interest in anyone but himself. He’d walk into the House of Commons, make a speech, and then walk out again without waiting to hear anyone else.

  As the grandson of a Duke, a product of the Victorian age, and a world statesman, Churchill gave almost no thought to the convenience of his colleagues or servants. His secretaries worked every day except Christmas. Once, after arguing with his personal attendant, Churchill complained, “You were very rude to me”—to which the attendant retorted, “Yes, but you were rude too.” Churchill thought this over and excused himself, “Yes, but I am a great man.” During the frantic early days of the war, an aide typed a mock minute:

  Action this Day

  Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use. . . . I will inform you at 6 each evening at which office I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs. Churchill, two shorthand typists, three secretaries and Nelson [his black cat]. There should be shelter for all and a place for me to watch air-raids from the roof. This should be completed by Monday. There is to be no hammering during office hours, that is between 7 A.M. and 3 A.M.

  W.S.C.

  31.10.40

  Churchill’s staff didn’t question the fake memo’s authenticity.

  Most taxing on those around him was his idiosyncratic schedule. He awoke about 8:00 A.M. and for hours worked and received visitors in bed. Then his ever-present valet helped him dress. After lunch, he napped for at least an hour. This was no furtive snooze—“no half-way measures,” Churchill said; “take off your clothes and get into bed.” At 8:30 P.M., dinner was served, and at about 10:30 P.M., Churchill went back to work. To the discomfort of his staff—who didn’t share the luxury of being able to nap whenever they pleased—these were his prime working hours. He and his exhausted aides finally went to bed sometime between 2:00 and 4:30 A.M. Once asleep, Churchill left strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed until 8:00 A.M., except in the case of actual invasion. In fact, on the morning of June 22, 1941, Churchill’s aide didn’t wake him until the usual hour—not even to deliver the staggering, welcome news that the German armies had invaded Russia. But although he himself hated to be interrupted while eating or sleeping, he thought nothing of disrupting anyone else’s meal, sleep, or bath.

  Self-important people are unconsciously funny. One observer recalled, “He dressed and marched around the room. . . . He is full of the poor whom he has just discovered. He thinks he is called by Providence—to do something for them. ‘Why have I always been kept safe within a hair’s breadth of death,’ he asked, ‘except to do something like this?’ ” When he left the Admiralty to become Prime Minister, he sent a melodramatic message to all Royal Navy personnel: “I shall not be far away.” His histrionic gestures could be seen as heroic—or bathetic.

  On man
y issues—such as Edward VIII’s abdication, independence for India, and the planning for postwar reforms—Churchill’s disdain deafened him to the public mood. “I’m quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indian,” he said, when a colleague suggested he update his views on India by talking to some actual inhabitants of that continent.

  Because he wasn’t interested in other people, Churchill’s conversation was usually one-sided. He dominated the talk and didn’t bother to hide his boredom when anyone else took a turn. One hostess mocked him: “Winston leads general conversation on the hearth rug addressing himself in the looking glass—a sympathetic and admiring audience.” Churchill talked for his own amusement, and to persuade others, and to wear them down from sheer exhaustion. Prime Minister Chamberlain explained that he’d left Churchill out of the Cabinet because he knew that, once there, Churchill wouldn’t give anyone else a chance to get a word in. Dwight Eisenhower put it more tactfully: “He could become intensely oratorical, even in discussion with a single person.” Not even President Roosevelt, on whom Churchill lavished as much charm as he possessed, escaped his late-night monologues—which, an aide admitted, Roosevelt sometimes found “tedious.”

  Every characteristic draws others along with it. Churchill’s disdain for others’ opinions gave him a quality of naturalness that bordered on the absurd. He worked each morning, visited by colleagues and secretaries, in a four-poster bed with flowery chintz hangings. He thought nothing of appearing in his favorite gaudy robe embroidered with scarlet dragons or being watched as he waltzed himself around the middle of a room. General Sir Alan Brooke described a meeting at the Churchillian hour of 3:00 A.M.: “[I]n his many coloured dressing gown, with a sandwich in one hand . . . he trotted round and round the hall giving occasional little skips to the time of the gramophone.”

  Even in public, Churchill could be careless of his dignity. He wore his siren suits whenever he felt like it and often looked both conspicuous and inappropriate—as when he insulted Soviet leaders by wearing one to a formal dinner at the Kremlin. He didn’t care: he was Winston Churchill. He’d always been that way. As a schoolboy at Harrow, where open affection was much scorned, he’d kissed his nanny, Mrs. Everest, in full view of the other boys—a gesture described by war veteran Jack Seely as one of the bravest acts he’d ever seen. As a world statesman, to onlookers’ astonishment, he was no different. Arriving in France during the “Phony War,” he explained to a group of officials his predicament. “As there was a war on,” he had decided to travel without his valet, which he hadn’t done in twenty years. “To my surprise,” he admitted without reserve, “I found I had no difficulty at all in shaving, brushing my hair—what is left of it—tying my tie, putting on my coat. It was only when I attempted to respond to your friendly reception I discovered I had left my teeth in the train.” Churchill didn’t mind if people saw him naked. He often walked around his country home Chartwell undressed, and he liked to have conversations from the bathtub. Even his female secretaries got an eyeful. One noted in her diary that during the day’s work, “I got the best view of his behind that I have ever had. He stepped out of bed still dictating, and oblivious of his all-too-short bed jacket.”

  Churchill didn’t care what anyone else thought. He never shut up; he was rude; he was undignified. And yet . . . and yet strangely this did not mar his dignity but added to it. Churchill’s greatest fault was the fault of his greatest virtue: he was sufficient for himself. His disdain for others’ opinions gave him his own clear vision, and he saw what others missed. Willingness to consider all points of view can be a source of weakness as well as strength; in 1940, Churchill knew the true course and led the way without listening to anyone.

  In May 1944, touring with Dominion Prime Ministers to inspect Allied troops participating in the liberation of Europe, Churchill unabashedly wears his siren suit.

  In May 1944, touring with Dominion Prime Ministers . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  13

  CHURCHILL’S BELLIGERENCE

  His Defining Characteristic

  Virtues and vices—like carpets and hats—obey the law of fashion, and at different times, society, with infuriating inconsistency, punishes or rewards the same trait. What characteristic, in Churchill, won him adulation and honors? The same characteristic that earned him censure: his love of war. He never changed, but the values of the world did.

  On his twenty-first birthday, Churchill heard bullets hit bodies for the first time and by 1899, he’d seen action on three continents. When he became Prime Minister in 1940, he’d served in the Army, Navy, and Air Force; been a member of Lloyd George’s and Chamberlain’s War Cabinets; and got a reputation as someone who couldn’t resist a fight.

  For good or for ill, right or wrong, Churchill’s stomach for war was the defining aspect of his career. While others shrank from battle, Churchill embraced it. War allowed him to channel his belligerency into the flood of something finer, something real, historic. It gave him his greatest moments of adventure and opportunity: the first thrills of battle, his celebrated escape from the Boer camp in 1899, the rigors of the Great War, the stern days of 1940 and 1941. Churchill dismissed those who derided war. “People talked a lot of nonsense when they said wars never settled anything; nothing in history was ever settled except by wars.” “Look at the Swiss! They have enjoyed peace for centuries. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!” He told Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who wrote about war’s horrors, “War is the normal occupation of man” (but then corrected himself, “war—and gardening”).

  Certainly Churchill was always eager to fight. After leaving Sandhurst in 1896, he strove to push his way into battle, whether as war correspondent or as soldier. He exploited all his parents’ connections in high circles—his mother left “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked”—to secure a place for him. He was frustrated by the difficulty of getting into action. “Nowadays,” he complained in an 1896 letter, “every budding war is spoiled and nipped by some wily diplomatist.”

  War was no remote exercise for Churchill. He personally killed at close range and, after one battle on horseback, wrote his mother that he “rode up to individuals firing my pistol in their faces and killing several—3 for certain—2 doubtful—one very doubtful.” Years later, he chose to serve in the trenches of the Western Front, with their terrible alternations of boredom and terror, their lice, their mud and rot. Even as Prime Minister, Churchill longed to be in action. On D-Day, only the insistence of the King himself stopped Churchill from sailing with the fleet.

  To his regret, over his lifetime Churchill saw war deteriorate from a splendid clash of manly combatants to a statistical race of mass production and indiscriminate slaughter—a contest in which a methodical Speer was far more dangerous than a valiant Rommel. Later, recalling the pageantry of the old battles, Churchill wrote, “It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns.”

  Churchill didn’t hide his frank zest for war. “This, this is living History!” he exulted during World War I. “Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why, I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me.”

  The public was suspicious of his attitude. In 1922, Clementine campaigned for him and reported that voters seemed to object to his enthusiasm for war, but that she was presenting him as a “Cherub Peace Maker” with “fluffy wings round your chubby face.” This peacemaker Churchill was unconvincing, and he lost the election. Then, and during the 1930s, and again after World War II, Churchill’s eagerness for war cost him public support.

  Beneath his happy truculence, however, Churchill recognized the cost of war. He wrote to Clementine in 1909, “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situati
ons—I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.”

  Churchill’s affinity for war sprang in part from his faith in the possibility of a glorious death. As Prime Minister, he inspired people with this conviction that death, if it must come, would be meaningful: life was precious, but not more precious than liberty. Of the desperate months when Britain stood alone, Churchill wrote, “This was a time when it was equally good to live or die.” When he visited his former school Harrow during the war, students added to the school song a new verse, in his honor, about the “darker days” of the war. Churchill asked that the word darker be changed to sterner—because, he said, they were not dark days, they were great days.

  Churchill’s great wartime command suited him perfectly. His faults were harnessed to his great task, and he surprised everyone with his terrific ability. His natural bellicosity had frequently got him into trouble, but in England’s danger, Churchill’s fighting nature helped, not hurt, him. He’d worked to prevent the war, but he was also glad to fight; he’d do anything, and suffer anything, before surrendering. He promised the demoralized French in 1940, “Whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.”