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Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

Page 2

by Cita Stelzer


  In this room during the Second World War his Majesty the King was graciously pleased to dine on fourteen occasions with the Prime Minister Mr. Churchill, the Deputy Prime Minister Mr. Attlee and some of their principal colleagues in the National Government and various high commanders of the British and United States forces. On two of these occasions the company was forced to withdraw into the neighbouring shelter by the air bombardment of the enemy.

  The menu at a small lunch there on 6 March 1941 was: “Fish patty, tournedos with mushrooms on top and braised celery and chipped potatoes, peaches and cheese to follow. The drinks were sherry before lunch, a light white wine (probably French) during lunch and port and brandy afterwards as well as coffee. Saccharin as well as sugar was on the coffee tray”.5

  A reinforced dining room fit for a king

  Churchill’s relationship with the King deepened as the war went on and they enjoyed each other’s company. At one lunch in 1943, the King surprised the Prime Minister by serving him a special French wine from 1941, but would not reveal how he was able to obtain a bottle from what was then behind enemy lines.6 Mrs. Churchill remembered that at one lunch with the King and Queen, the Prime Minster had “tried to interfere with the menu” but she was able to stop him and recalled that the lunch turned out very well indeed.7

  Churchill often said he felt more comfortable with some one with whom he had broken bread, and not necessarily at dinner. Even a tea break would serve his purpose. Early in his career, when Minister of Munitions, Churchill had to deal with a serious strike in a munitions factory. Striking workers had been deported from their homes in Glasgow. Churchill agreed to meet one of the strikers and suggested, according to the returned deportee: “‘Let’s have a cup of tea and a bit of cake together.’ What a difference so small a thing can make! We debated over the teacups”.9 The issue was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both parties.

  Churchill seemed to like Tuesdays for his regularly scheduled meals: when he was reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1939, he instituted another one of his Tuesdays, dinner at Admiralty House for some fourteen Cabinet colleagues and others, breaking “the ice by a Swedish milk punch”.8 And, later in the war, he had regular Tuesday lunches with General Eisenhower at which Irish stew was always served.

  Of course, for really serious dealings, dinner was the preferred venue. “If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all,”10 Churchill told Field Marshal Montgomery during a picnic lunch on the Normandy beaches a few days after D-Day, one of several informal picnics that Churchill held with his military commanders.

  A few months later, just after D-Day, the Prime Minister asked Field Marshal Montgomery if he could visit the front, promising: “We shall bring some sandwiches with us.”11 Early in the war, Major General Montgomery had been invited to lunch on the Prime Minister’s train but replied testily to Churchill: “The right place for an A.D.C. to lunch is in a ditch, off sandwiches.”12 But Churchill insisted and the General lunched on the train.

  Strategy al fresco

  Churchill had definite views on sandwiches, insisting that “the bread must be wafer-thin, nothing more than a vehicle to convey the filling to the stomach”, as he munched happily on some cold beef sandwiches he had brought with him.13 Because of Churchill’s sometimes troublesome indigestion, Dr. Hunt, his gastroenterologist, had, in 1936, recommended eating sandwiches before going to bed, a suggestion to which Churchill agreed.14

  So here is a tale of some dinners – and other meals – at which Churchill changed history, and others at which he failed to do so. Dr. Leon Kass wisely sums up:

  So too with friendship, whose beginnings are made possible by dinner, the shared meal itself grounds our being together. Amiability and friendliness are required and shared around the table. But it is the community of stories and conversation that is the true communion. Fellow diners get to know each other’s minds and hearts, even though no one is explicitly baring his soul or trafficking in personal matters. We are drawn to those whose tastes and tales we find admirable and charming. We arrange to dine with them again on another occasion.15

  Notes

  1. Churchill to the House of Commons, 3 November 1953, Hansard HC Deb 5s., vol. 520, col. 29

  2. D’Este, Carlo, Warlord, p. 386

  3. CHAR 2/240B/70, and CHAR 2/240B/152

  4. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume V, p. 617

  5. Gilbert (ed.), The Churchill War Papers, The Ever-Widening War, Volume 3, p. 320

  6. Bradford, Sarah, George VI, p. 450

  7. Soames, Mary Clementine Churchill, p. 445

  8. Gilbert, Churchill, Finest Hour, 1939-1941, Volume VI, p. 160

  9. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 1917-1922, Volume IV, p 35

  10. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Road to Victory, 1941-1945, Volume VII, p. 664

  11. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume VII, p. 802

  12. Pawle, The War and Colonel Warden, p. 69

  13. Pawle, p. 190

  14. CHUR 1/285

  15. Kass, The Hungry Soul, Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, p. 182

  SECTION 1

  CHAPTER 1

  The Importance of Dinners

  “As Churchill’s life unfolds, it becomes an unending succession of meals with bigwigs.”1

  “Food in diplomacy can be a lubricant.” 2

  Dinner parties were an important means by which Churchill rewarded friends, won over rivals and gathered information on all subjects, from diplomatic secrets to social gossip. He also hugely enjoyed them. His meals had the advantage over most other more formally scheduled encounters of being easily extended, even into the early hours of the morning, the time of day when Churchill would gather strength while others were flagging. His daughter, Mary, reports that “mealtimes tended to prolong themselves far into the afternoon or evening”, with luncheons lasting until half past three or even four o’clock, and dinners going on “endlessly” after the ladies had withdrawn, to the increasing annoyance of her hostess-mother.3

  After Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, these extended dinners were more than ever an important part of the day’s work. At Chequers, the country house used by British prime ministers, a typical Churchillian evening during the war would run:

  From eight-thirty until nine we had drinks with Mrs. Churchill and perhaps one or two of the daughters were there. Then we went into dinner. Dinner was from nine until just after ten. Then the ladies left the room and the most amusing part of the evening started as Winston held forth in his own inimitable manner until about ten-thirty to ten forty-five. Then we would go up and join the ladies … and marched up to the library where he ran a cinema film. About half past midnight we’d come down for a nightcap with the ladies. Finally at about 12:45 or 1 a.m. we’d go up to the main room where we used to meet. We would sit down and he would say, “Now, down to business”. And then he worked there until two, or three or four in the morning.

  Other guests were “Sometimes a chief of staff … sometimes a Cabinet minister, sometimes a visiting foreigner”.4

  From his earliest days Churchill was able to captivate his dinner companions. Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of H.H. Asquith, later a Liberal Prime Minister, dined with the leading figures of the day. In 1906 the nineteen-year-old found herself seated next to the 31-year-old Churchill and was:

  spellbound … I was transfixed, transported into a new element … There was nothing false, inflated, artificial in his eloquence. It was his natural idiom. His world was built and fashioned in heroic lines. He spoke its language.5

  John Maynard Keynes, a man not easily impressed with the eloquence and intelligence of others, wrote to his mother in September 1940, contrasting Churchill with a First World War Prime Minister, David Lloyd George:

  Last night I went to my Other Club and was put next to Winston, so I had some two or three hours’ conversation with him and listening to him. I found him in absolutely perfect condition, ext
remely well, serene, full of normal human feelings and completely un-inflated. Perhaps this moment is the height of his power and glory, but I have never seen anyone less infected with dictatorial airs or hubris. There was not the faintest trace of the insolence which LL.G., for example, so quickly acquired.6

  The Pinafore Room: home of the Other Club

  The Other Club, a dining club, was founded in 1911 by Winston Churchill and his very good friend, F.E. Smith, a member of the Conservative Party at a time when Churchill was a Liberal, to accommodate the men they deemed worthy of joining. The Pinafore Room at the Savoy was the location then as it is today. Churchill always sat in the middle of one of the longer sides of the table. Membership was limited to 50 but would include not fewer than 24, and its only purpose was “to dine” on alternate Thursdays, at 8:15 punctually, when Parliament was in session. Members’ names were secret (and are to this day), but the club rules are not. There were to be no speeches. The last rule reads: “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.”7

  The architect Basil Ionides, a member of the famous Victorian art-collecting family, was commissioned to sculpt a black cat. The statue would be used to fill out the table in case the diners numbered the awkward 13. This lucky cat, named Kaspar, was to have a napkin tied around his neck, and be served as if he were a regular diner, with the usual champagnes and wines and appropriate silverware.

  One day Kaspar disappeared. He had been stolen in a prank but was later found to be resting comfortably somewhere in Lincolnshire. Other sources say he was found in Hong Kong. No matter. Although all conversations are secret at The Other Club, it is known that the Prime Minister was glad to have his Kaspar cat back at the table.8

  Harold Macmillan, many years later to be Prime Minister, recalled the dinner meetings with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and young Conservative backbenchers in the late 1920s:

  All the rest of us would sit around, sometimes late into the night, smoking, drinking, and arguing and of course listening. The flow of Churchill’s rhetoric once it got under way was irresistible. Nevertheless, he quite happily allowed rival themes to be put forward.9

  One guest, at a family lunch, reported that the Prime Minister “gave a short lecture on the various invaders of Russia, especially Charles XII”.10 Churchill undoubtedly inherited and absorbed from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, his skills as a brilliant conversationalist and dinner-party organiser. His mother organised a dinner party so that Winston could meet Ivor Novello whose song “Keep the Home Fires Burning” Churchill admired.11 She, like her son, planned dinners to include both good conversation and beautiful surroundings.

  Churchill also displayed his talent for the theatrical, using the dinner table and its settings as props. James Lees-Milne, the noted diarist, dined at Chartwell in 1928 and remembered that:

  One evening we remained at that round table till after midnight. The table cloth had long ago been removed. Mr. Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought. It was a thrilling experience. He got worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.12

  Churchill’s interest in recreating battlefield tactics extended to the American Civil War. One biographer noted that Churchill “using salt shakers, cutlery, and brandy goblets … can re-enact any battle in that war, from Bull Run to Five Forks”.13

  The greatest tribute to Churchill’s ability to enthrall in company comes from as renowned a conversationalist as Franklin Roosevelt, the man whom the historian Andrew Roberts describes as being, like Churchill, “stratospherically self-confident”.14 On the occasion of a dinner for Churchill, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and others during Churchill’s December 1941 visit to the White House, the President “willingly turned the show over to Star Boarder Winston Churchill, leaned back and listened to the leader of another fighting people carry the conversational ball”.15

  But Churchill was interested in more than merely the exercise of his rhetoric and the airing of his ideas at the dinner table: he was perpetually in search of information, and used lunches and dinners to pick the brains not only of political allies and opponents, but also of specialists and academics, including many not necessarily in tune with his own views.

  During the First World War, when Churchill was Minister of Munitions, his office on the Western Front was at Chateau Verchocq in north-west France. In August 1918 he was there with his brother Jack, Sir Maurice Bonham Carter and several political and military figures. Churchill’s pilot, Lieutenant Gilbert Hall, reports:

  In the evening we all assembled in the dining room for a meal … At that first meal Mr. Churchill sat at the head of the table and acted as host. Food was not too plentiful in the fourth year of the war and the first course was a plain and wholesome Shepherd’s pie. Mr. Churchill, with characteristic brio, referred to it as “minced meat under a glorious cloud of mashed potatoes”, and it tasted all the better for that.16

  Churchill energetically quizzed the group on a wide range of topics, including how to get tanks, “the new surprise weapon”, across rivers, and attitudes on the home front towards the progress of the war.17 More than ten years later, Churchill played host to Harold Laski, called by his biographers “everyone’s favourite socialist … the enduring conscience of the British left”,18 among a company that included an admiral, several other naval officers and a young civil servant. Churchill had an opportunity to note how well (or poorly) the naval men handled a debate Laski initiated on “the meaning of maritime rights”; and to learn from the civil servant something about Radclyffe Hall, the author of the just-published lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.19 R. A. Butler (“Rab”), President of the Board of Education during the war years, contended that dinner parties were a good source of information which he could not get sitting in his office. “Wives talk …”.20

  Joseph E. Davies, when serving as American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, dined with the Churchills in their London apartment in May 1937 and recorded in his diary:

  He plied me with questions … He … wants to know the facts … He asked about the strength of the Soviet industry and the army … He impressed me as a great man.21

  At these lunches and dinners, Churchill acquired and improved relationships that would stand him in good stead at some later point in his career. Even the dinner he organised at Claridge’s in 1932 to celebrate his son Randolph’s “coming of age” included what one guest described in his note of thanks as “Men who have made history and others who will no doubt figure equally prominently in the future”.22 Another commented: “It will be a very long time – if ever – before I find myself in a gathering of people such as these …”23 The bill from Claridge’s came to £135 16 shillings and 8 pence*. The dinner was on 16 June, the hotel billed Churchill on 17 June and was paid promptly on 22 June.24

  Churchill also used dinner parties to advance his financial interests. In 1929 he visited the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who arranged a lunch for 200 guests at the MGM bungalow of his mistress, Marion Davies, in Churchill’s honour and a lunch for 60 at the exclusive Montmartre Restaurant in Los Angeles.25 This resulted in several remunerative journalistic assignments.

  Financial wizard Bernie Baruch, whose advice Churchill often sought about money matters, and who later became an important adviser to President Roosevelt, was another important dinner companion. When Baruch visited Britain in 1933, Churchill organised a dinner in his honour at Claridge’s – dress to be white tie and tails – carefully choosing between the two “specimen” menus offered and selecting as accompaniment his favourite Pol Roger, of which six magnums were consumed by Churchill, Baruch and their eighteen guests.26 He also asked Baruch for sufficient advance notice so that he could be certain to gather an interesting group. “As much trouble should go to considering the
guests” as considering the food at dinner parties, agreed Woodrow Wyatt, Labour Member of Parliament elected in 1945 (later Lord Wyatt).27

  Randolph’s 21st birthday, 1932

  Churchill was sensitive to the needs of his guests, in this case Baruch’s need for privacy. So when The New York Times requested permission to photograph the guests on the night, Churchill refused.28

  In the early 1930s, Churchill wrote a letter to The Times protesting at the habit that was then developing of taking photographs at banquets while people were eating. He felt strongly that this was an intrusion, and that photographs should be taken only at the start of the formal proceedings.29

  Protecting his guests’ privacy was just one example of Churchill’s careful discharge of his duties as host. One guest described him as a “meticulous host. He would watch everyone all the time to see whether or not they wanted anything”.30 Another commented:

  It is a marvel how much time he gives to his guests … He is an exceedingly kind and generous host, providing unlimited champagne, cigars and brandy.31

  And still another, Anthony Montague Browne, described Churchill “as a generous and entertaining host and dinners with him always fun and gastronomically agreeable”.32

  Joan Bright, who throughout the Second World War organised overseas travel for Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff, said he had lovely manners.34

  Do not confuse his meticulous attention to details for dinner parties with any culinary skills, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Once, when Chartwell was closed, and Mrs. Churchill told him it would be impossible to spend the weekend there because there was no one to cook for him, he replied: “I shall cook for myself. I can boil an egg. I’ve seen it done.”33 Brave talk. Lady Williams told me that Churchill “certainly never, to my knowledge, looked at a grill or could boil a kettle”. Churchill was interested in dining not in cooking. And this despite his determination to acquire other practical skills like bricklaying.

 

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