Chapter 28
TO PRODUCE the speeches and books that have enriched the world’s store of important ideas, Churchill begins his work day about 10 A.M. He has breakfast in bed, a nourishing meal consisting, perhaps, of half a cold partridge, several rashers of bacon fried into a curl, a boiled egg, toast and marmalade, and buttered scones and tea — the whole washed down by a bottle of light white wine. Dr. G. A. Goolden, the ship’s surgeon aboard one of the transports on which Churchill made a wartime voyage, says that the Prime Minister’s staple breakfast, that trip, was curried chicken, ham, beef, and a bottle of sauterne. The doctor was impressed by Churchill’s high temper at the slightest sign of muddleheaded-ness on the part of anybody. The morning repast disposed of, he gets out a writing board that he built himself and sets about making notes. The board is somewhat out of the ordinary, having two felt-covered bricks at either end, where Churchill rests his elbows. He lights up a big cigar when he starts — one of the cigars he imports wholesale from dealer John M. Rush-brook in New York[1] — and allows the fire to expire soon afterward. For his cigars, Churchill designed, and an artisan fashioned, an ingenious device that might have commercial value, although he has never tried to market it. His name for the invention is a “fender,” but it could more properly be called a saliva-collector, being, in fact, a sort of spit valve, like that on a trombone. As Churchill chews away on his dead cigar, there is an inevitable overflow and the fender gathers it up. He changes fenders (which look like paper collars) when one fills its office, and his butler, William Greenshields, carries the discardee away to the incinerator on a gold-plated tray.
Churchill calls for his first whiskey and soda of the day when he gets his cigar going. Contrary to many published reports, he does not gulp this down, nor swill a succession of morning whiskeys, but rather sips along very slowly, scarcely finishing the drink by noon. On rare occasions he will have two before the lunch hour. Now and then he grants a brief business conference in the morning. He never gets out of bed; it seems doubtful, acquaintances think, that he would make more than a gesture of arising should the King appear. One of his publishers has visited Churchill several times in the morning. For nearly twenty years, Churchill has been “in process of completing” his epochal History of the English Speaking Peoples. The coming of war, with its rich opportunity for producing a multivolume chronology of those anxious but exciting events, interrupted Churchill’s History. Not long ago, he handed over the material he had finished and said, “Well, there it is, 450,000 words. I’ll be glad to see it published.”
The statesman was asked, respectfully, “Upon what note have you ended it, Mr. Churchill?”
“Why, I’ve brought it up to the death of Lincoln. That seems a capital place to wind it up,” Churchill replied.
“Our contract provides that the History be brought up to the present,” he was told. “The death of Lincoln occurred quite some time ago.”
Churchill grumbled and fumed, and squared the account in various ways. He seldom answered business letters, necessitating frequent trips by the heads of various concerns to Chart-well or to 28 Hyde Park Gate. Several of these people have expressed interest in the way Churchill husbands his cigars. “He keeps several grades on hand,” one visitor says, “and gives them to people in accordance with the standing they are in at the moment.” The day of the above conversation about the contract, Churchill gave the publishing representative what the latter describes as “a filthy Mexican weed that almost killed me.” An hour or so later, perhaps out of penitence, Churchill offered him a drink and invited him to stay to lunch.
In the period of social hubbub preceding lunch, Churchill will have another whiskey and soda, and during the meal he is apt to drink a bottle or two of champagne or some good still wine, depending on the food served. Under this stimulation, he talks with enthusiasm, drawing out the midday meal to more than two hours, as is the fashion everywhere in upper-class England. Immediately after lunch, he retires to his room, undresses completely, puts on his pajamas, and turns in for a two-hour nap. There are various accounts as to the origin of this habit of Churchill’s. Some feel that he acquired it long ago, when, as a supernumerary attached to the Spanish Army in Cuba, he followed the local custom of stretching out beneath a tree to avoid the heat of the day. One story has it that he got the idea from Edison, whose life he admired and who never had an ordinary night’s sleep but took naps whenever he sensed an energy lag. Perhaps the best bet is that he picked up the habit from his former secretary, Sir Edward Marsh, who once advised Churchill that he could greatly prolong the working day by sleeping in the afternoon.
When he arises, Churchill digs into his labors. He has made notes in the morning; now he begins to dictate. This may take one of several forms. As in his First World War days, he is keen on bathing, and he may crawl into the tub, station a secretary outside his bathroom door, then, amidst happy splashes and snatches of disconnected song, start bawling out the lively sonorities with which the political world will be entertained. Some days his urge for baths is stronger than others; for example, he appears more bathtub-prone at Chartwell than at Hyde Park Gate. At either place, however, he may take several baths in a row, breaking off only to dry himself and put on a robe. For a lot of his dictation, Churchill has a large and, by now, workable dictaphone in his study. Attached to it is a microphone of the sort used with public address systems. This stands on the floor at the edge of a strip of carpeting which has a deep groove worn down the middle. While dictating, he walks back and forth on the carpet, whose placement is such that, if he steps off, his voice will no longer be audible in the mike. In addition to his dictaphone, his six secretaries, and his “work team,” or high-flown helpers, everything about Churchill’s labors is elaborate and costly. In the preparation of his currently appearing series, a personal narrative of the Second World War, he makes the rough drafts himself, allocates each section to the indicated team-member expert, and then, when they’ve finished, puts it all together and slicks it into his final, characteristic wording. At his own expense, he has the material printed at the Chiswick Press (near Chartwell) in large folio form, each folio measuring about twelve by eighteen inches, enclosed in attractive boxes, and, at last, conveyed up to Cassell’s, the publishing house that is bringing it out in England. After that comes the business of rereading to make it editorially impeccable. Churchill is fanatic on the subject of literary and factual perfection. He will keep his entire staff up till 4 A.M., if need be, to remove a shadow of doubt from any tiny point of reference. Despite his long hours with his white-collar workers, he guards the schedules of his domestics, once halting his butler in the midst of a shoe-cleaning operation. “But you can’t go to Parliament with one boot shined and the other muddy,” exclaimed the butler. “Oh, yes, I can,” replied Churchill, and he snatched up his hat and stick and set off, to attract a great many interested glances.
The heavy work of his day comes in the long hours after dinner. The evening meal is his time for serious drinking. Before dinner he may have several whiskey and sodas, and he downs a hearty quantity of champagne before the dessert, cigars, and brandy arrive. In the period after the ladies withdraw, Churchill’s consumption of fine old French brandy has been praised by virtuosi at the tippler’s art. One of his strongest admirers is Stalin, who, though able to outeat any Britisher on record, probably including Henry VIII, was never able to match Churchill glass for glass. All through the rest of his waking hours — and he works himself and his staff until one, or two, or three o’clock in the morning — Churchill has a glass of brandy and soda close at hand. During these stints, a week of which would hospitalize the average ox, he functions with brilliance while all around him lesser men are falling from exhaustion. In going over a manuscript with Churchill, an editor once said, “You have certainly done prodigious work on these volumes.” Churchill replied, “Yes, and I’ve drunk more prodigious quantities of whiskey in doing them than perhaps any other man in the world could have done.”<
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His industry at his speeches, and in general with the party, is equally conscientious. Gerald O’Brien, who as public relations director for the Conservatives has worked with Churchill for years, finds the assignment a pretty sure method for growing old in a hurry. The business of political campaigning hinges on clockwork appointments. When people assemble for a meeting or an address, they expect to be met or addressed. It is Churchill’s pleasure to start from half an hour to two hours late for nearly all dates and try to make up this time on the road. Often he travels by special train, but he prefers to go in his own car, a black Humber driven by a harried chauffeur named Tom. It is axiomatic that Churchill’s campaign weather will be fine. Nevertheless, O’Brien has frequent nightmares about several of the trips. A typical start will see Churchill and one or two others pile into the Humber around five thirty for a seven o’clock speech at a point a hundred miles distant. Churchill, or his valet-butler, is carrying a supply of emergency brandy. As his chauffeur swings into the high road, Churchill crouches, with a flask, on the edge of the back seat and urges him to greater speeds. “But the machine is traveling at eighty-five miles per hour now, Mr. Churchill,” the chauffeur will protest. “Faster! Whip it up a bit!” comes the answer.
The car is overhauled by police with regularity. On a recent trip, it was doing eighty around a slight curve when one of the rear tires blew out. There was nothing for Tom to do but pull up. Almost the instant he did, a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles. Their equanimity was restored as soon as they identified their distinguished quarry; they even helped fix his tire. Churchill stood off to one side of the road, serenely puffing at a cigar. He made no sign of apology but only got in and cried “Drive off!” when the tire was fixed. The constables saluted humbly. On another such occasion he transferred to the police car, whose driver had offered to rush him ahead, and spent the rest of the ride egging on the policemen exactly as he had been doing Tom. For a campaign trip to Cardiff, Churchill started so late that O’Brien was in a pitiable state of nerves. Mrs. Churchill accompanied the group. In one of his blandest humors, Churchill became immersed in his conversational gift and passed the brandy back and forth with such frequency that his wife got annoyed. She was also outraged at the reckless bursts of speed to which her husband had succeeded in exhorting Tom. Finally she cried, “Please let me out. I refuse to continue this ride.” With the utmost courtesy, Churchill drew up at a country railroad station and escorted her to the platform. Then he climbed back into the car and, plying the brandy bottle, lit out down the road like a bat out of hell for Cardiff. By the time they arrived, what with the brandy and his nerves, O’Brien was done up — out practically cold. Churchill supervised the laying out of his public relations officer on a table in the rear of the hall. Then he went ahead and made a rouser of a speech. Afterward, returning to the rear, he appeared confused about the origin of O’Brien’s trouble, and expressed the opinion that it was “probably something he ate.”
O’Brien has always had trouble trying to get Churchill to prepare a speech on time. When pressed about its possible contents, the statesman is apt to be vague. Advance copies for the papers quite often are not forthcoming. Nevertheless, Churchill attends carefully to his remarks. He either writes out the speeches in longhand, or dictates them to a secretary; then he has notes typed up on pieces of white cardboard, each about four by six inches in size. His arrangement of the notes on these is undoubtedly unique; nobody seems to know why he does it. The top line of type runs full length across the card, but the second is shorter, and the third shorter yet, until, in the bottom line, only one or two words remain:
It painful to me see as
have seen in journeys
about country small
British house
or business
smashed
*
Regardless of the notes, he memorizes his speeches and has always done so, except for one short-lived experiment. Moreover, he rehearses them before a mirror, studying his gestures, and records them on a machine, which enables him to play them back and edit them for clarity, voice inflection, tone quality, and general structure. Churchill worries a good deal about people going to sleep during his speeches — he himself has enjoyed some grand naps while bores droned on — and he keeps saying, as he works, “Now we’d better have some comic relief here — I’d better drop in a joke to wake them up.” One of his most effective customs is to insert local allusions, for which he has a freak memory. He will mention casually some hero of the area, or one of its cherished events, and raise a wild storm of applause. As a rule, he can summon such references without aids, but he has his staff check each one to be sure. O’Brien has never yet run across an error of so much as a word in any of them. “What would you do if you lost your notes, Mr. Churchill?” the publicity director once asked. Churchill’s reply was, “I do not take out fire insurance on my house because I feel very strongly that there’s going to be a fire.”
Conservative leaders feel that, if he lost his notes and his memory failed, an address by Churchill would hardly come up to scratch. Actually, he is a poor speaker extemporaneously and will invent the most ingenious excuses to avoid being thus trapped. He needs time to build the balanced edifice of his message. This is in singular contrast to his firecracker wit in the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate. When suddenly confronted by newsreel cameras and microphones, he will choose his words with almost painful deliberation. His voice is considered “classless” in England, having no identifying accent of school or university, caste or locality. The old trouble with the lisp is still occasionally noticeable, but he contrives his sentences with such skill that nearly all sibilants are avoided. Although Churchill dislikes being cornered for impromptu remarks, he never worries about approaching deadlines for speeches. Once, on a train with O’Brien, he had not yet written a single word, and everyone was apprehensive. However, their fears were groundless, since the candidate began to talk at about the midway point in their trip and talked the whole speech out before he finished. The final product, when delivered that evening, was a verbatim repetition of Churchill’s conversation on the train. “With identically the same gestures,” says O’Brien.
A B.B.C. engineer who worked with Churchill on broadcasts during the war thinks that he at first had great contempt for radio speaking, because of the absence of gestures. It often took persuasion to keep him from hammering on the table with his fist, giving rise to an earsplitting racket over the air. He also objected to the announcements preceding his talks. “Surely everyone knows I’m going to speak,” he kept saying. The people in the broadcasting studio felt that, of the two microphones before him, he identified the one on his left as Hitler and the other as Mussolini. He would turn his head to snarl his insults at these two liberators at the appropriate times, dividing his attention fairly. Churchill liked to wear his siren suit to the broadcasts, and he sat in a relaxed posture far back in a chair as he spoke. He never missed a cue, lost his place, or stumbled in any way. “In twenty-six years I have never seen anyone so massively composed at the microphone,” the engineer says.
Even though everybody else in his vicinity is going to pieces, Churchill remains unbothered in political crises. There are frequent signs of temper but never any hint that he is rattled. He also keeps his own counsel despite the heaviest pressures. On the pivotal campaign trips by train, he is about the only member of the company never dismayed by mishaps, delays, misplaced documents, and the like. On one trip to the north of England, when nobody could find the advance copies of an important speech which had been promised to reporters riding in the next car, Churchill sat reading Huckleberry Finn, having a calm and conspicuously detached good time. This was despite the fact that the reporters were clamoring, in the emergency, to be permitted to approach him for personal notes. Churchill has never been co-operative with the press. On the contrary, he is probably the least accommodating public
figure within the memory of man. Walter Graebner, whose job in London with Life is more managerial than journalistic, said that he had never, in ten years, been able to get a Time or Life correspondent in to see Churchill. Many reporters in London for the American newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, have never been able to wangle an interview with the statesman at any time during their stay abroad. This gives rise to a certain amount of natural annoyance. Raymond Daniell, the well-known chief of the Times’ London bureau, tried to approach Churchill when one of the latter’s recent books appeared, to get an autographed copy for Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the owner of the paper. Daniell was able to reach him at last, by telephone, and found him affably disposed, perhaps because the Times, together with the London Daily Telegraph and Life, has been serializing The Second World War for a total sum somewhat in excess of a million dollars. In a sudden burst of friendliness, Churchill said, “No doubt you would like me to autograph one for you, too?”
Daniell was able to say, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t bought a copy.”
There was a brief silence, and then the conversation was ended in formal tones.
Aboard the campaign train, Churchill never speaks to the reporters, English or American; O’Brien does not think that he knows any of their names. Neither, as head of the state for years, did he hold press conferences in the fashion of American Presidents. Except for brief shipboard sessions when he came to America for aid, he held himself aloof from journalists. The reason for this apparent rudeness is that Churchill decided, long ago, that he himself would exploit whatever literary material lay in his remarks. He has often growled to secretaries, “They [reporters] can easily follow what I do by listening to my speeches and reading the papers,” a statement that certainly contains a remarkable incongruity, as an American writer recently pointed out: “It’s difficult for a reporter to catch up on Churchill in the papers without first catching him to have something to put in the papers.” The statesman is also uncooperative with biographers and magazine contributors. This, too, among his circle, is understood to be based on an eagerness to continue making money himself in sufficient quantities to support his family in style. At a recent lunch in London, an American biographer was asked by Lord —, a naval officer high in the Admiralty, “Tell me, have you found Winston helpful?” When told no, he said, perhaps facetiously, “Now, then, why don’t you offer him a hundred pounds?”
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 43