Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  Oh doctor, what a life was his! Roused from sleep with a dispatch from Lord Melville; then down to Windsor; then, if he had an hour to spare, trying to swallow something; Mr Adams with a paper, Mr Long with another, then Mr Rose, then with a little bottle of cordial confection in his pocket off to the House until three or four in the morning; then home to a hot supper for two or three hours more, to talk over what was to be done the next day: – and wine, and wine. Scarcely up next morning when ‘rat-a-tat’ twenty or thirty people one after another, and the horses walking before the door from two till sunset, waiting for him. It was enough to kill a man – it was murder.14

  For the next hundred years no Prime Minister comes close to matching Pitt’s alcohol consumption. With his taste for large quantities of strong dark port, he was also a drinker of his time.

  Squiffy Asquith

  The decision to go to war against Germany in 1914 was perhaps the most significant and far-reaching taken by any British Prime Minister in the twentieth century. Sixty-two-year-old Herbert Henry Asquith had been in Number 10 for six years by the time war broke out and his Liberal government had already ensured it would leave a big political footprint on Britain. The 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ increased several direct taxes on the wealthy and triggered a constitutional showdown with peers. The government’s fight with the House of Lords culminated in the Parliament Act of 1911, which stopped peers from interfering with financial bills. In the same year a radical new national insurance scheme was introduced, the foundation stone of the welfare state.

  So who was this man? The clever second son of a chapel-going Yorkshire family, Asquith dazzled at Oxford and practised as a lawyer before going into Parliament. He was known to be a bit scruffy but had a sharp and tidy mind. As Prime Minister he was an effective chairman of Cabinet who could be rather reserved with colleagues. But after his second marriage in 1894 to the extravagant socialite Margot Tennant, Asquith loosened up and started enjoying the fizz of London society and country house weekends. One biographer says that although Margot introduced her husband to the habit of after-dinner brandy, he ‘already fancied himself as a connoisseur of clarets and champagne’.15

  The pre-war diaries and private correspondence of Asquith’s colleagues contain references to his fondness for drink.16 But by 1911 the effects of his drinking were becoming more obvious. One evening during the committee stage of the Parliament Bill, the Prime Minister appeared to be drunk on the government’s front bench. In a letter to his wife on 22 April 1911, Winston Churchill wrote:

  On Thursday night the PM was very bad: & I squirmed with embarrassment. He could hardly speak: & many people noticed his condition. He continues most friendly & benevolent, & entrusts me with everything after dinner. Up till that time he is at his best – but thereafter! It is an awful pity & only the persistent freemasonry of the House of Commons prevents a scandal. I like the old boy and admire both his intellect and character. But what risks to run … The next day he was serene efficient undisturbed.17

  It wasn’t the only time Asquith was seen in the Commons obviously the worse for drink. The MP Arthur Lee (who later gave his Chequers country mansion to the nation for the use of future Prime Ministers) provides this sketch of the well-oiled Asquith appearing opposite him on the government front bench during the committee stage of the controversial Welsh Church Bill:

  The two Ministers on duty were Herbert Samuel and Rufus Isaacs, and at about ten o’clock Asquith, having returned from dinner, very flushed and unsteady of gait, plumped himself down between them on the bench and promptly went to sleep. Whereupon Balfour, who had been cynically surveying the scene, turned to me and murmured ‘I am getting uneasy about this Bill and don’t like at all the idea of the fate of the Church being left in the hands of two Jews who are entirely sober and of one Christian who is very patently drunk!’18

  In April 1911 Asquith was diagnosed with hypertension and his doctor ordered him to slash his alcohol intake. It is claimed that the Prime Minister then moderated his drinking, pouring his energies instead into hundreds of love letters to Venetia Stanley, one of the clever and attractive young women to whom he unburdened himself throughout his life.

  There is no sense that Asquith drank because he was depressed. In fact the golf club-swinging, bridge-playing Prime Minister had a sunny, optimistic outlook and it seems he drank because it made the dinner table more convivial. But it may have been a response to pressure too. As the historian Colin Clifford says, ‘Asquith was never an alcoholic – his alcohol consumption was far less than Churchill’s was when he was Prime Minister – and excessive drinking was as a result of too much wine and brandy at the dinner table to alleviate the strain of having to cope with one crisis after another.’19

  As Britain approached one of the biggest crises of its history, critics inside and outside Parliament were beginning to notice and mock Asquith’s drinking. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘squiffy’ has been used as a slang word for drunk since the mid-nineteenth century, but Asquith’s drinking may have revived its use. Behind his back he was nicknamed ‘Squiff’, and in London’s music halls the wartime Prime Minister was laughed at every night in George Robey’s Bing Boys revue when it came to this verse of his popular song:

  Mr Asquith says in a manner sweet and calm,

  ‘Well, another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.’20

  None of Asquith’s biographers conclude that the Prime Minister’s imbibing impaired his judgment at this critical time. As Churchill remarked after the war, Asquith’s mind ‘opened and shut smoothly and exactly, like the breech of a gun’.21 And in September 1916, with the war bogged down in the graveyard of the Somme, Sir Douglas Haig wrote to his wife after receiving the Prime Minister at his headquarters for dinner that Asquith’s ‘legs were unsteady but his head quite clear … indeed he was quite charming and alert in mind’.22 Roy Jenkins, another claret-loving liberal, wrote in his sympathetic biography of Asquith that ‘no one has ever suggested that his mind lost its precision or that there was any faltering in his command over what he did or did not want to say.’23

  But in 1916 the war was going badly on all fronts and by the end of November there were 415,000 British casualties from the battles of the Somme. Compared with the ferocious energy of the man masterminding the munitions effort, David Lloyd George, Asquith’s reputation as a rather mellow inebriate was now causing him political harm. Churchill complained to his brother in May 1916 that ‘Asquith reigns sodden, supine, supreme.’ The claret-quaffing bonhomie of the years before 1914 jarred with the grim misery of war. Lytton Strachey described meeting Asquith at a party, in a letter from May 1916:

  He seemed much larger than he did when I last saw him (just two years ago) – a fleshy, sanguine, wine-bibbing medieval-Abbot of a personage – a gluttonous, lecherous, cynical old fellow – I’ve never seen anyone so obviously enjoying life … One looks at him and thinks of the war … On the whole, one wants to stick a dagger in his ribs … and then, as well, one can’t help liking him – I suppose because he does enjoy himself so much.24

  Asquith’s fondness for drink was also at odds with the drive for national sobriety being pioneered by Lloyd George. So concerned was Lloyd George with drunkenness among munitions workers that in a speech on 28 February 1915, he explicitly linked the problems of armaments production with those of drink: ‘Drink is doing us more damage in the War than all the German submarines put together.’25 Alcohol consumption was reduced after the creation of the Central Control Board later in the year and Lloyd George tried to persuade government ministers to set an example by giving up booze for the duration of the war. But the ‘King’s Pledge’ scheme was a flop; only Kitchener and the King himself seem to have kept their promise of abstinence. According to Roy Jenkins, ‘Asquith, like Churchill, took not the slightest notice of the gesture, and even Lloyd George, who was a very light drinker, with skilful opportunism regarded himself as exempt from his own scheme.’26 It cannot have escaped the noti
ce of workers being told to cut their drinking that the man leading Britain’s war effort refused to do the same.

  By the autumn of 1916 Asquith’s drinking and clear enjoyment of life were viewed as frivolous by critics who encouraged the impression that he was an out-of-touch toper. Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers increased the pressure on the beleaguered Prime Minister, blaming him for the war’s mistakes. In December the Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law pulled his support for Asquith and it fell to Lloyd George to assemble a new War Cabinet; there was no place for Asquith, who resigned on 5 December. If the war had been going better, if Asquith had risen to the demands of wartime leadership with more confidence, his drinking might not have mattered. But in the search for scapegoats it was a stain on his character that harmed his authority, contributing to the fall of a man of whom it had been said (by Bonar Law to the chief whip in December 1911), ‘Asquith drunk can make a better speech than any of us, sober.’

  Winston Churchill

  And so to Downing Street’s champion drinker. While Asquith’s intake was mocked and judged indecent during the First World War, the brandy-loving, champagne-swigging, whisky-sipping exploits of Britain’s Second World War Prime Minister have been affectionately celebrated as evidence of the great man’s exceptional character and physical stamina. Not only could he lead the nation in a victorious fight against Germany, the story goes, but he could do so with a daily alcohol intake that would make even the captain of a rugby team wilt. The reputation for alcoholic excess seems to have obsessed and irritated even his teetotal enemy. Hitler variously described Churchill as an ‘insane drunkard’, ‘whisky-happy’ and a ‘garrulous drunkard’.27

  It was a reputation that Churchill himself was happy to embellish, firing off a number of memorable bon mots that are among the most famous drink-related anecdotes ever uttered. ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me,’ Churchill mused one night at Chequers during the war.28 Then there is his famous encounter in 1946 with the pugnacious Labour MP Bessie Braddock, who accused the former Prime Minister of being drunk as he was leaving the House of Commons. To which Churchill replied: ‘Bessie, you’re ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.’29

  It was not the pressures of war that drove Churchill to drink. He had been absorbing huge quantities of alcohol for decades. When, as a young journalist, he sailed to South Africa to cover the Boer War in 1899, along with his pith helmet Churchill packed eighteen bottles of Scotch whisky and almost forty bottles of wine bought from wine merchant Randolph Payne in Pall Mall.30 By the mid-1930s he was drinking very heavily; when the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere offered him a bet that he could give up alcohol for 1936, Churchill refused the wager saying that ‘life would not be worth living’.31

  The diaries and memoirs of people who knew and worked with Churchill through the war are peppered with accounts of his alcohol consumption. They have led some historians to conclude that Churchill was an alcoholic, while others have judged that his booze-soaked reputation is wildly overstated. So who is right? Here is one of the fullest descriptions of a day observing Churchill drinking that I have found. It is by General Sir Ian Jacob, who worked in the military wing of the War Cabinet secretariat during the war:

  He drank a great deal. At breakfast he had coffee and often orange juice, although I have seen him drink white wine for breakfast on occasion. During the morning he would often have a glass of iced soda-water by him which he sipped from time to time. He didn’t drink cocktails or sherry, but drank a good deal at lunch, often champagne followed by brandy. He didn’t have tea, but about tea-time or later, according to when he had his sleep, he would start drinking iced whisky and soda. He probably had two or three glasses, not very strong, before dinner, and then at dinner he always had champagne, followed by several doses of brandy. Then during the late evening and night he had more whisky and soda.

  He had obviously been accustomed to this kind of routine for years, and yet he was never the worse for drink in my experience, and, as far as I could see, he never felt the slightest ill-effects in the morning. This was the more peculiar in that he took no exercise at all …

  It is not for me to explain this phenomenon, but it is obvious that his body must have been capable of disposing of alcohol and its waste products with unusual efficiency.32

  Here we have evidence of Churchill’s extraordinary consumption – including sometimes wine for breakfast – but also proof that he used plenty of soda water to dilute the whisky that he supped during the day. ‘It was really mouthwash,’ Churchill’s private secretary Sir Jock Colville told the historian Martin Gilbert.33 Churchill’s post-war valet Norman McGowan said the first whisky and soda would be ordered about an hour after breakfast: ‘For the rest of the day the tumbler was never empty, but he drank very slowly, absent-mindedly sipping it from time to time and making each glass last about two hours. It was literally drowned in soda at the outset and as ice cubes had to be in it, which melted long before he had finished, the drink was a very innocuous one.’34 Another of Churchill’s biographers, Roy Jenkins, describes his subject as a ‘sipper not a guzzler’, who had a metabolism that could cope with large quantities of alcohol. Churchill, Jenkins says, ‘did not drink as much as he was commonly thought to do, although this is not incompatible with him being a fairly heavy and consistent imbiber’.35

  During the war, Churchill spent a huge amount of time travelling abroad. Colville records the dinner on the third night of his voyage across the Atlantic to the Quebec conference in September 1944; on that occasion the Prime Minister managed to get through ‘oysters, consommé, turbot, roast turkey, ice with cantaloupe melon, Stilton cheese and a great variety of fruit, petit fours etc, the whole washed down by champagne (Mumm 1929) and a very remarkable Liebfraumilch, followed by some 1870 brandy’.36

  Churchill’s talent for absorbing huge quantities of booze while apparently remaining sober came into its own at the big wartime summits. Secret intelligence files released in 2013 give an account of an epic drinking session between Churchill and Stalin at the Kremlin in August 1942. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, described the scene at one in the morning when he was summoned to join the two leaders:

  There I found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who had joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: Food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable bottles. What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine. Everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell.

  Even though he held that there was nothing more awful than a Kremlin banquet, Cadogan thought the boozy atmosphere fostered frank questions and candid answers. ‘Conditions have been established in which messages exchanged between the two will mean twice as much, or more, than they did before,’ he concluded approvingly.37

  The same diplomat noted that at the Yalta conference in February 1945 the Prime Minister seemed well, ‘though drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man’.38 As the future of post-war Europe was carved up over the dinner table, discussions between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were lubricated by a succession of Russian toasts. But while Churchill knocked them back, the American President was careful not to down each drink and Stalin was seen surreptitiously weakening his vodka with water.39

  What effect did this heavy drinking have on Churchill? Most contemporary accounts support Roy Jenkins’ view that alcohol energised and exhilarated the Prime Minister rather than addled him. But it might also have been used to calm his depressive, sometimes manic temperament. The author Michael Dobbs has written extensively about Churchill and believes the drinking was a form of self-medication: ‘It was enjoyable for him but it evened out a lot of the highs and lows he suffered from including his black dogs,’ the melancholic slumps that descended regularly throughout Ch
urchill’s life.40 David Owen agrees that despite the copious quantities Churchill drank it did not appear to do him much harm, but believes it was nevertheless a dependency.41

  On only a handful of occasions do Churchill’s contemporaries say that drink had a detrimental effect on his behaviour. On 6 July 1944, for instance, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, one of Churchill’s closest advisers, wrote in his diary:

  At 10pm we had a frightful meeting with Winston which lasted till 2am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the Commons concerning flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped.

  But this is one of the very few suggestions of inebriation. ‘Personally, throughout the time I knew him I never saw him the worse for drink,’ remembered John Peck, one of Churchill’s private secretaries. ‘The glass of weak whisky, like the cigars, was more a symbol than anything else, and one glass lasted him for hours.’42

  So, other than watered-down Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky, what did Churchill like to drink? His preferences have been well chronicled by Cita Stelzer, and it is clear that he had no taste for beer or cocktails. For instance, when Churchill finally arrived at Quebec for his meeting with Roosevelt he turned down the offer of a second mint julep, the bourbon-based cocktail from Kentucky.43 A mint julep, while refreshing, is not a Churchillian drink. Champagne, however, he drank with delight, and it was served from the beginning to the end of dinner. In 1898 Churchill wrote: ‘A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced: the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble.’44