Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  That was the special role of each man for the other. For Britain already had a permanent ruler with a role to perform. The evidence suggests that most of their Tuesday “picnics”—their weekly lunches, which began in September 1940—were filled with discussions of operations, the kind of talk the king craved. Mastering the brief brought satisfaction. Churchill’s self-confidence in facts and presentation must have rubbed off. The exchange may have served an additional purpose in forcing their individual and collective minds to set the best priorities possible, as an obsession with details may do for some people who use it to tame the imagination, adjust perspective, and prevent panic over complexity.

  Without having been present in the room, it is difficult to say for certain precisely how Churchill and the king underwent such a process together. The king said that the meetings were the “high points of the week.” As for Churchill, according to Rhodes James,

  What particularly impressed him about the King was the latter’s total application to his job in every respect, not least in his careful and thorough reading of all documents put before him. Also, as matters progressed, and the King and Queen travelled throughout the country—far more than Churchill or his principal ministers could—they were in a better position than most to assess the public mood.

  The effect of their meetings and its significance to history exist only in outline, despite all that has been written about each man. Yet the outline is suggestive and significant. The two dined alone, or sometimes with the queen, who, for all intents and purposes, was one with the king so far as knowing his character, apart from her pleasant exterior disguising a “small drop of arsenic in the centre of that marshmallow.” When the king was away, she met Churchill in his stead. The king and the prime minister served themselves at table, as there were almost never any servants present. Churchill was called a “selective listener.” The king was a selective talker. For all that Churchill liked to be the source of his own information and for all that the king did not like to volunteer it, this is probably what took place between them, and sometimes in reverse, resulting in a form of multidimensional asymmetry, if such a thing can exist. For Churchill, at least, “[n]o subject had ever been so honoured. He wanted no other reward.”

  To analyze the full function of the debates happening on both sides of Churchill—above with his monarch and below with his commanders—would seem to require the training of a Gestalt psychologist. They operated as something more than a double-sided sounding board. The ideas, feelings, judgments, and facts did not merely bounce back at Churchill so as to allow confirmation or the occasional refutation of his decisions. Indeed, they may have served a more subtle purpose, which had more to do, again, with the essence of his leadership than with its exercise. They reinforced his position of authority, and his mission, as servant of the state by reminding him of the fundamental necessity of leading a consensus. Some of Churchill’s candor—in language and sentiment, especially—could taste sour in the mouths of his enemies. Yet candor and clarity did not come easily to him. He worked at them. His initial thoughts were often muddled and indiscriminate. He distilled and polished them, oftentimes out loud, until he felt they were at their best and purest. Like most literary brains, Churchill’s needed a dedicated editor. In his own way, which could sometimes seem perverse and self-defeating, Churchill sought and encouraged the tough resistance of those around him, not merely to enhance his own character or position (although this was often a by-product) but to get better results. Remove any of the elements—Parliament, the press, the chiefs, or the king—and the machine was flawed, even doomed. Churchill was as much its cog as its engineer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Personality

  It is an error to regard the imagination as a mainly revolutionary force,” Isaiah Berlin has written. “[I]f it destroys and alters, it also fuses hitherto isolated beliefs, insights, mental habits, into strongly unified systems. These, if they are filled with sufficient energy and force of will . . . sometimes transform the outlook of an entire people and generation.” This is another key to understanding the king’s contribution to Churchill—a buoy or mast to which he fastened his imagination.

  Churchill could be unpredictable and inconsiderate, but he was rarely obtuse. His approach to life was zestful, extreme. Hence his combination of optimism and hope with intense bouts of depression, and an outer shell of complexity over what some people regarded as a rather simple, straightforward soul. Churchill was clumsy when he tried to deceive, and he almost never did. He was almost pathologically transparent.

  He could be dismissive, even forgetful, but rarely absent-minded. His inadvertencies appeared deliberate. During the war, for example, he liked to forget (or pretend to forget) codes, as in a phone call with Eden during which Eden, “[s]peaking slowly and carefully,” said, “I went to the ironmonger’s and there I bought—” to which Churchill replied, “What? . . . What are you talking about? I thought you had been to see the Turks!” Or when he reported to Roosevelt that he was coming to Washington by top secret “puff puff.” Sometimes on the telephone he would pretend to be his secretary John Martin, thereby causing the latter much trouble with the censors.

  Churchill was, then, a believer in both chance and the permanence of character, and to understand how that operated vis-à-vis the king, something more must be said of habits and customs.

  It was not simply the fact that Churchill, like many great men, was a bundle of contradictions or that the contradictions had contradictions, but that they blurred so often with convictions, as in Lady Lytton’s familiar line: “[T]he first time you meet Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” The latter may have been ends justifying the former. Or that it just took longer for Churchill’s underlying faith to be revealed from the fog of his adversarial temperament, “so adjacent that he comes a damn sight near to being contiguous.”

  This adjacent aspect also governed his approach to history and his tendency, at times, to conflate its breadth and its depth. “Winston,” his wife once said, “has always seen things in blinkers.” It was appropriate that in his study at Chequers, his country residence, Churchill kept two objects: a large globe given to him by General Marshall, and an epidiascope, which was a device used to view small objects on reconnaissance photographs. His historical imagination was so rich it tended to smother all present and future realities within a powerful, even mythical, past. This led now and again to a failure to place short-term problems in their proper context, and to rely instead on the luck of the draw when events did not conform to the larger plan or, as he put it, to “take refuge beneath the impenetrable arch of probability.” This way of thinking went against that of the king, who clung to habits, certainties, and rituals.

  There were some more apparent, and some less apparent, qualities they had in common. The more apparent were the physical ones: Both were fair, even pale, as young men. Both had smooth skin and, in Churchill’s case, unusually small, delicate hands, which he kept so well that they looked idle. These refinements contrasted with the gait familiar to most people—the hunched shoulders and glaring expression, which also remolded itself every now and then into a sly grin.

  For someone so theatrical, Churchill was remarkably free of physical vanity. Legend holds that he verged on the exhibitionistic. There is the oft-repeated story of his accidental encounter in the nude with Roosevelt in the White House when he said that the British prime minister has nothing to hide from the American president. Since he spent so much time working in bed, it was not unusual for assistants to find him coming out of the bath or in various states of undress. Even when traveling, he customarily slept in nothing but one of his special silk underclothes; once, seven thousand feet in the air when he awoke from the cold, he tried to fasten a blanket to the side of the plane to keep out a draft. “On his hands and knees,” Lord Moran has recalled, he “cut a quaint figure with his big, bare, white bottom.
”

  Both Churchill and the king had been small boys who compensated for physical disadvantage with courage. Churchill’s physical courage, or as some have said, rashness, showed early. He once fell from a tree and perforated a kidney; on a holiday visit to Lausanne he nearly drowned in the lake and came closest in this instance, he said, to staring death in the face. Later, after being hit by a car in New York, he took weeks to recover from his injuries.

  The king had written a note to himself: “The schoolboy’s definition of courage: That part of you which says ‘stick it’ while the rest of you says ‘chuck it.’” While Churchill was of a fundamentally strong physical constitution, and the king of a much weaker one, both had confronted illness with fortitude. Both were athletic. The king had excellent hand-eye coordination, and so was a superb rider, tennis player, and pilot; Churchill, even as an old man, impressed onlookers by his agility, telling a young naval officer who offered his hand, for example, “Young man, do you suppose I have never climbed a ladder in my life?” One day at Buckingham Palace, he was pointed to the lift. “‘Lift?’ demanded the indignant prime minister. He ran up the stairs two at a time, then turned and thumbed his nose at the courtier.” He liked to dart up hills or around fortifications like an agile crab. “On one such occasion,” Colville has related, “he leapt off the top of a high girder into a pool of liquid cement. His feet were embedded.”

  “That is your Waterloo,” Colville said.

  “Blenheim . . . how dare you! I am not a Frenchman.”

  Colville concluded: “[A]fter two gruelling years of endless work and never a day’s holiday, he was gay, resilient and apparently tireless. . . . Extraordinary in a man of almost sixty-six who never takes exercise of any sort.”

  Churchill’s tough constitution occasionally succumbed to strain, and he was not always as limber or as lucky as he might have liked to think. He compensated by being droll. Once, when inspecting a kind of antiaircraft device, its wires crossed and it exploded directly above him. He said, without removing the cigar from his mouth, “I think there is something not quite right about the way you are using this new weapon.”

  He sometimes reacted badly to the strain of overconcentration. The solution, which he arrived at during his time as Home Secretary, was to make lists. On these he would organize his problems into categories from the least to the greatest, and then focus mainly on the latter. Perhaps this was another feature of his weekly meetings with the king.

  His illnesses and injuries were rarely light. He was not the best of patients and challenged the expertise of doctors with his own theories or rationales, such as relying on the king’s advice for malaria medication, for example, over the orders of medical professionals. Or he would self-medicate, taking snuff, for example, to cure a cold; consulting a variety of doctors until he got the opinion he wanted; or simply sorting his cure from the leftover medicines he already had. It was not surprising that his doctor, Lord Moran, penned so unflattering, if affectionate, a portrait of him. Their introduction in May 1940 more or less set the pattern:

  I have become his doctor, not because he wanted one, but because certain members of his Cabinet . . . have decided somebody ought to keep an eye on his health. . . .

  “I don’t know why they are making such a fuss. There’s nothing wrong with me. . . . I suffer from dyspepsia, and this is the treatment.”

  With that he proceeded to demonstrate to me some breathing exercises. His big white belly was moving up and down. . . . Soon after I took my leave. I do not like the job, and I do not think the arrangement can last.

  It lasted another quarter of a century, until Churchill’s death, through one “heart attack . . . three attacks of pneumonia . . . two strokes . . . two operations . . . senile pruritis . . . conjunctivitis,” and numerous other smaller maladies. Many of these problems—including the heart attack and the pneumonia—took place during the war.

  The king worried after Churchill’s health, writing to him often to “beg of you to take care of yourself & get as much rest as you possibly can in these critical days,” as did others, including Roosevelt, Brooke, and Eden. “If you go on playing the fool like this,” Bracken told him, “you are certain to die.” Ismay recalled, “That kept him quiet, but not for long.” The strain was felt by many of those around him: colleagues and secretaries forced to keep his hours, and particularly members of his household staff. The small, bald, lisping, and devoted valet, Sawyers, bore the brunt, though he, too, occasionally invited rebuke, as when he once placed a dab of shoe polish on Churchill’s toothbrush and handed it to him. Brooke recalled another episode when Churchill addressed him with the usual rudeness: “‘What’s wrong, Sawyers? Why are you getting in my way?’ In a very thick voice Sawyers replied: ‘The brim of your hat is turned up, does not look well, turn it down, turn it down!’ This was accompanied by a waving gesture of the hand. Winston, rather red and looking angry, turned the brim down. Thereupon Sawyers stood to one side, muttering to himself ‘That’s much, much better, much better.’”

  Churchill’s tendency to seek rejuvenation of the spirit should be seen in connection with similar efforts, however faulty, to rejuvenate the body. He fought often against his black moods but could be remarkably resilient. Once, during the war, he was visited in bed by Beaverbrook.

  He felt ill [and] said to Max: “I’m through. I cannot carry the burdens any longer.” The second front was worrying him and he was right down. He said: “I have done my job. The Americans are in and we cannot lose. Anthony can carry on. I must get out.” While this depression was at its height, the white telephone by his bed rang loudly. The government had been defeated in the House of Commons. Winston threw off the bedclothes, hurled himself out of bed with a glint of battle in his eye, said to Max: “I need a life of action!”

  Churchill and the king both thought and spoke poorly on their feet, or at least they thought they did, although the king reckoned he was better at speaking extemporaneously than he was at reading aloud. Both men had overcome speech defects—Churchill earlier than the king—although the former admitted some time later that only the war had finally cured him of the anxiety he felt before giving a speech. He had the additional early disadvantage of having his talents contrasted unfavorably with the eloquent and clear voice of his father.

  Churchill was principally a writer more than he was a speaker and so made careful preparation and skillful borrowing a habit. He became so good at writing by dictation that he could claim that he “lived from mouth to hand” and that “he wrote his speeches and spoke his books.” The latter were dictated, a practice that had begun at Harrow with a friend who would take down what young Winston said.

  Several who worked with Churchill commented upon the method, resembling percolation, by which he found and memorized the perfect word or phrase. He would either hear it or think it, repeat it a few times, play it over and again in his mind while listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operas or Sousa marches, carry it with him to bed, the bath, the car, or the Cabinet Room, all places where he tended to work, and mumble it again to himself over the course of several days. He let it stew while using it with colleagues until, finally, it would be used in public. When composing a speech, he mobilized his resources, throwing everyone into apparent disorder in what could only have seemed like “a cross between comic opera and the launching of a major offensive.” And no matter how dire or poignant the occasion, he did not relinquish the pride of authorship. Following his famous blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech in May 1940, for example, he quipped to a secretary, “That got the sods.”

  Colville has given another vivid picture of the Churchill method: “To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath. Then comes out some masterly sentence and finally with a ‘Gimme’ he takes the sheet
of typewritten paper and initials it or alters it with his fountain-pen, which he holds most awkwardly halfway up the holder.” The king noted: “I have studied the way in which his brain works. He tells me, more than people imagine, of his future plans & ideas & only airs them when the time is ripe.”

  The king’s experience was no less arduous but certainly a good deal more painful. “The damned things aren’t working” was his apropos remark about loudspeakers, which suddenly began working very well indeed right before he said this during the speech at Wembley that went so badly for him in 1925. His efforts to overcome his stammer are now widely known. He acquired it as a child, and it grew progressively worse. Only through hard, disciplined work with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, and the constant encouragement of the queen, was he able to make progress. That his cure coincided with the onset of war and the demands on him for a public show of strength, especially by radio broadcast, must also have had something to do with it.

  The king’s disposition became calmer in a crisis, however excitable he was beneath, and occasionally on, the surface. The self-discipline obviously came from his peculiar upbringing as well as his naval education, where he acquired the ability not only to master fear and strain but also to demonstrate self-discipline in a social setting. For him as well as Churchill, much of that ability emerged through the deliberate use of language. “If words counted,” the latter said, “we should win this war.”

  To say that a personality is more complex than generalizations allow is a biographical commonplace. To say that disposition conditions rather than causes action is less obvious but no less important. Together these truisms remind us that nuances of personality are sometimes indistinguishable from the means by which they develop. Robert Rhodes James has quoted Lord Randolph Churchill’s shorthand depiction of Disraeli’s career as similar to that of Winston’s: “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph.” Yet Rhodes James’s conclusion has taken the man’s image at face value. This was a source of his many failures, Rhodes James and others have asserted, until events dictated that it became the basis of great success. From the perspective of personality, the verdict could just as easily have been delivered the other way around. “It was Churchill’s greatest deficiency in the 1930s that he was unchanged; it was to be his greatest strength in the ordeal that began on 3 September 1939.” To Churchill, however, some forms of constancy—even in abstract or romantic guise—were a source of strength and merit regardless of circumstance. They allowed a reputation to work for itself. “You will have to forget a great many things,” Churchill once advised Colville. “Be wise rather than well-informed. Give your opinion but not the reasons for it. Then you will have a valuable contribution to make.”