Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Winston Churchill

  An Informal Study of Greatness

  Robert Lewis Taylor

  © Robert Lewis Taylor 1952

  Robert Lewis Taylor has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1952 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  “The Soldier”, from Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, is copyright, 1915, by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. Published by permission of Dodd, Mead & Company, and Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., London.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 1

  THE LAST of the great statesmen, Winston Churchill, a man of multiple genius, will be devotedly remembered as one of the most exasperating figures of history. For seventy-seven years he has flashed over the public scene, a beckoning, outsized diamond in a trumpery world. Before moments of British crisis, he has been so uniformly right that his incandescent prescience has itself become a burden to his colleagues and to his countrymen at large. Though frequently tossed aside, Churchill has never permitted himself the luxury of humility. He inherited superior gifts of impatience. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant, impetuous fellow, once established a high-water mark of nonchalance by hiring a waiter to listen to the end of an anecdote by a club bore. The son is no less reluctant to be harried by prolixity. During one interminable debate in the House of Commons, when a speaker was presenting a dramatic list of statistics on Brussels sprouts, Churchill observed an aged member, toward the rear, desperately leaning forward with an old-fashioned ear trumpet. In a voice clearly audible over the House, Churchill said to Anthony Eden, “Who is that idiot denying himself his natural advantages?” He was chided by the Speaker, but without visible effect.

  By now, Churchill has developed an immunity to censure. Indeed, some of his acquaintances feel that the times when he has been assailed by self-doubt might be counted on the fingers of one hand. His clothing is a case in point. Churchill’s costumes have provoked reactions ranging from shock to indignation nearly everywhere in the world. Visiting an anti-aircraft gunnery display, in 1940, he wore a pair of gum boots, a naval topcoat, and a yachting cap. The unit, logging his tour and gamely attempting a military description of his dress, finally wrote in, “No uniform other than Churchillian.” At a shoot arranged by the Duke of Westminster, Churchill’s hat, in the words of a British correspondent, “attracted a great deal of unfavorable comment.” It was a homburg of his own design, in a sickly green, with a pork-pie crown and with a sort of flapping brim turned up all around. It was remarked that the duke, though sportingly silent, was very considerably off his aim throughout the afternoon. Churchill also went contrary to ritual at an upper-class boar hunt in Normandy, in 1927: he smoked a cigar without removing the band, one of the deadliest sins of the chase. The French were mollified when they had a close-up look at his garb, which consisted of a scarlet coat with a green collar, fawn breeches, top boots, and a peaked black velvet cap. He also had on a fur-trimmed greatcoat and carried a gold-headed cane. On one of his transatlantic crossings, on the old Berengaria, the other passengers, after a succession of Churchillian sartorial tableaux, made up a pool on his probable headpiece at the ship’s fancy dress ball. The money was redistributed when the subject turned up in a red fez, a gift of several years previous from an admiring Turk.

  The Churchills have a family tailor, on Savile Row, in London, whose establishment has for years swathed the normally impeccable line. It is only under extreme prompting by his wife, however, that Churchill will consent to step in for a new outfit. He considers that, creatively, he is the equal of any tailor on record, and besides, he cares very little one way or another. His gabardine “siren suit,” which he concocted in the early part of the last war, was a familiar sight to the thousands who saw him in person and to the millions who knew him as a heartening staple of the newsreels. When one of his friends, pressed for an opinion, commented that the siren suit, to him, seemed “pretty damned dull,” Churchill made one of his rare bows to criticism; he ordered a pin-striped siren suit. The friend was unmoved by the improvement. The Russians in particular were dismayed by the siren suit and eyed it with deep Slavic suspicion, which is believed to be one of the deepest kinds known. Upon his celebrated return from Moscow, in August 1942, Churchill remarked to greeters, with immense good cheer, that his ensemble “didn’t go down very well.” His tone lacked contrition and even indicated that he would probably wear the siren suit if he went back.

  As a rule, when Churchill needs new attire he sends his butler-valet, William Greenshields, who has been with him for years, down the street, any street, to buy something off a rack. According to Brendan Bracken, his closest friend and adviser, Churchill never inquires whether these spot acquisitions cost five pounds or fifty but slips them on with abstracted docility and proceeds to whatever function is at hand. Happily, so unerring is Greenshields’ judgment that the master thus outfitted always looks faultlessly groomed. But, as indicated, there have been critical times when, proceeding on his own, he has failed to give unanimous pleasure. In 1908, when Churchill married the beautiful Clementine Hozier, a granddaughter of the Scottish Countess of Airlie, the usually fair-minded British journal, Tailor and Cutter, recorded an aggrieved comment on the groom: “We cannot congratulate Mr. Churchill on his wedding outfit; it was not a success. It did not fit him, neither did it suit him. The sleeves were too short and too backward hanging and consequently creased badly when the arms were brought forward. It was too long and heavy for a morning coat and too short and skimpy for a ‘frock.’ It was neither fish, flesh nor fowl.”

  Tailor and Cutter, in 1908, was only taking early note of what later would be adjudged the most notably independent spirit of modern times. By a simple process of giving full credence to his own opinions, Churchill has attained immortality as conservative statesman, liberal statesman, orator, historian, biographer, wit, war correspondent, and brandy drinker, and has established somewhat lesser records as artist, bricklayer, novelist, aviator, polo player, soldier, and race-horse owner. A comparison of him to the multifaceted hustlers of the Renaissance is inevitable. Leonardo da Vinci painted masterpieces, designed war machines, and built an airplane that flew several dozen feet off a rooftop before crashing. Later history has also had its men of incongruous gifts. Raleigh, the elegant pirate, wrote masterly verses, and Paderewski, perhaps the greatest pianist after Lizst, served very successfully as President of the essentially discordant Poland. But it is in Churchill that the triumphal accomplishments of the well-rounded celebrity have found their most felicitous meeting. It is wholly possible that he is the liveliest personality yet produced by the upper vertebrates.

  In any study of a foremost man it is of vital interest to ponder the probable causes of his rise above the mediocr
e and the merely talented. The people who know Churchill best believe that his motive-power derives from a blend of three main ingredients: matchless energy, a combination of intelligence and memory, and the pushiest ambition since Alexander’s wistful complaint about the scarcity of worlds to conquer. Eminent physicians have decreed that energy is born and not made, that humans, through the secret formulas of heredity, receive an impetus at birth which sets the pace for their bumpy journey across the mortal span. In a general way, then, the life-force is influenced more by ancestors than by vitamins. Churchill has been fortunate in both departments; his ancestors could hardly have been selected with greater profit, and his successes with nourishment have been a source of international amity. The Russians in the late war, while disgruntled at his funny suit, were enormously impressed by Churchill at the board. The impunity with which he absorbed caviar and vodka convinced the Soviet leaders that they were fighting on the right side. Hitler, a bilious ascetic, had drunk next to nothing and picked at his food like an anxious raccoon. As wartime Prime Minister, Churchill displayed bursts of energy that occasionally gave rise to modest snarls. During the London blitzes he was usually persuaded to stay downstairs in his headquarters, where he continued working. It was a difficult station for him to maintain; all too often, in the wardens’ view, he would clamber up to the roof and watch the show. One night in the midst of an especially savage raid, he went up and took a seat on a tile and thrust a dead cigar into his mouth. Ten minutes later, a worried A.R.P. officer appeared through the trap door, then retired when Churchill glared at him. He reappeared in a few minutes and was stared down again. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister was concentrating on the fiery spectacle, though he was puzzled by what sounded like a flock of geese honking somewhere down below. He had just shrugged this off as impossible when the A.R.P. officer popped through the trap door for the third time and cried out, “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Young man,” said Churchill, “what the deuce is the matter with you?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the officer, “but you are sitting on the smoke vent and the people downstairs are suffocating.”

  The fathomless wellsprings of energy that drive Churchill have led to interesting alterations in his home of Chartwell, a red brick, nineteen-bedroom farm establishment he acquired in 1923, near the village of Westerham, in the county of Kent. Not long after he bought the place, with his literary earnings, he went down to watch some bricklayers patch things up here and there. He quickly conceived the notion, not entirely foreign to him in other connections, that here was an enterprise at which he could readily excel. He got a trowel and a barrowful of bricks and set to work on a crumbling outhouse. The head bricklayer thereupon advised him that laying brick was not something one went around doing promiscuously but involved joining a union. With a little help, Churchill practiced up in secret, to the point where he was laying, as he said, “two bricks a minute,” then he applied for membership in the Southern Counties Division Building Union. The application provoked a genuinely heart-warming row. One local branch went on record as considering the gesture a piece of “dangerous and degrading buffoonery,” and another suggested that all bricklayers desist from drinking beer, so as to withhold beer-tax funds from the Exchequer, of which Churchill was then Chancellor. In the face of this picturesque resistance, it was expected by many that the highborn amateur would retire, leaving the field to professionals. But they had reckoned without their man; Churchill imperturbably pushed his membership through, paid his first week’s fee of nine shillings, and returned to the outhouse, from which he soon advised that he had accelerated his tempo to three bricks a minute — no mean figure, if accurate.

  His work with the bricks convinced Churchill that he was a stonemason as well, and he started building his own swimming pool, in 1929. Wearing waders and other extravagant pieces of apparel, he supervised the digging of a sizable hole, then laid the concrete floor himself. He rocked up the sides and devised an ingenious but only partly successful system of heating the water by natural means. To fill the pool, the water trickles down over a long series of shallow rock steps, acquiring, it is always hoped, sufficient warmth from the sun to make it suitable for swimming on any uncloudy day. But England is a northern land, made habitable mainly by a thoughtful Gulf Stream, and swimming there is a brisk exercise at the best. Churchill later installed a mechanical aid to the laggard sunshine — an outbuilding containing a furnace and a boiler. Between the two systems, the pool in the swimming months is kept at a temperature which increases slowly each year, since Churchill has given out that he prefers to swim in water whose temperature is precisely the same figure as his age. “Actually, it isn’t a very good pool,” says one of his neighbors, John Pudney, the well-known British poet, who was invited with his family to enjoy it one afternoon a couple of years ago, or when the water was at seventy-five degrees. “The bottom is irregular, being homemade, as it were, and one is forever stepping into pits and declivities.” On this particular afternoon, Churchill arrived on the scene wearing a Roman toga and a sombrero, which he removed and hung on a bush. “All of a sudden, he mounted a board and rather flung himself into the water, it seemed to me,” recalls Pudney. “My young daughter was in the pool at the time, and I thought for a moment he’d dashed her up on the ledge. But then I saw her — she was quite frightened but swimming strongly for the ladder.” Once in the water, Churchill executed what Pudney describes as “a series of perfectly inexplicable front and back somersaults. Then he got out, took up his toga and hat and disappeared toward the house. I fancied he was busy whacking out one of those books of his.”

  Chartwell was thrown open briefly to the public in 1950, for the first time. It was a busy and gala day, only slightly marred by several of those minor slip-ups that are the bugaboos of famous-house showings. To start off, some resurrected special buses were run down the twenty miles or so from London, and a number of them gave up en route. The weather turned uncommonly cold, rather considerably too cold for the heating provisions made at Chartwell. Mrs. Churchill, badly embarrassed and in no way at fault, spent most of the day apologizing for the clammy conditions inside the house. The English are a hardy race, inured to inadequate defenses against a hostile climate, and the crowds trundled joyously through the residence in which their war leader was preparing his memoirs. It had been decided to levy a fee of two shillings inside the house for those who wished to view the master’s paintings, which were exhibited on the ground floor. So immediate was the interest in these that the queues, knotting up, proved too bulky for the toilet arrangements upstairs. One of the secretaries suggested that some of the art crowd be diverted to a downstairs toilet. But by bad luck, the secretary in charge of the downstairs overflow thought he had been assigned to sell tickets, and he charged the excited throng two shillings a head to use the toilet. When it came time to check up, at the end of the day, it was found that the secretary at the toilet queue had taken in almost as much as the chaps upstairs, but a few of the visitors were mildly piqued; they pointed out that they had never paid more than a penny, or tuppence at the best, in the subway and that two shillings was a little steeper than they would care to go, for the most part.

  Nearly all visitors to Chartwell exclaim over the ambitious handiwork of its owner, in the related divisions of painting and bricklaying and in other fields of his catholic selection. Churchill is incapable of approaching any new enterprise at half throttle. He is the prime exponent of the restless philosophy of “whole hog or nothing.” At the age of twenty-three he produced an ornate novel called Savrola, a Tale of the Revolution in Laurania. Of the central character, he wrote, with a disarming lack of self-consciousness, “Ambition was the motive force, and Savrola was powerless to resist it.” After fifty years, the thought can be taken as a true and valid motto of Churchill’s own career. He has always known where he was going, and he has forged on without that false modesty which acts to the detriment of so many lesser men. On the occasion of his first public address, at a
Conservative rally at Bath, shortly after the novel, the London Morning Post permitted him to correct the story of the speech as reported by one of its veteran correspondents. The editor thought it augured well for the young man’s future when he crossed out the parenthetical word “cheers.” A moment later, the editor realized that the young man was marked for stardom when he wrote in, over the elision, “loud and prolonged cheers.” One of the best examples of Churchill’s dutiful attention to the long objective was his famous and well-authenticated utterance during England’s war in the Egyptian Sudan, which he joined as a young and thrustful soldier-correspondent. “Keep cool, men,” he cried to his troops, who were being hotly pressed by the Dervishes. “This will make excellent copy for my paper.”

  An anonymous reporter for the London Daily Mail (lately revealed as G. W. Steevens, himself a noted war correspondent) wrote a stunningly clairvoyant eulogy of Churchill in 1898, after his Sudan exploits and before he had actually entered politics. “In years he is a boy”; wrote Mr. Steevens, “in temperament he is also a boy; but in intention, in deliberate plan, purpose, adaptation of means to ends, he is already a man. In any other generation but this he would be a child. Any other than he, being a junior subaltern of Hussars, would be a boisterous, simple, full-hearted, empty-headed boy. But Mr. Churchill is a man, with ambitions fixed, with the steps toward their attainment clearly defined, with a precocious, almost uncanny judgment as to the efficacy of the means to the end.

  “At the present moment he happens to be a soldier, but that has nothing whatever to do with his interest in the public eye. He may and may not possess the qualities which make a great general, but the question is of no sort of importance. In any case, they will never be developed, for, if they exist, they are overshadowed by qualities which might make him, almost at will, a great popular leader, a great journalist, or the founder of a great advertising business.