The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (23 page)

Let’s say you are in your early twenties. You are a pretty Home Counties sort of girl in flattish shoes with a sensible skirt and nothing too fussy about your jewellery or make-up. You haven’t been to university, but you have good shorthand and can type like the wind.

You could be any one of the dozens of secretaries or literary assistants—of both sexes—that have stood trembling at the bottom of these stairs, over the decades. But let’s say you’ve found a position in the great man’s entourage some time in the 1920s or 1930s; it doesn’t really matter when.

The big red-brick house is always a scene of immense activity when Churchill is there, and the grounds look a bit like a zoo—or a zoo under construction. There are pigs and goats and dogs and cats and mandarin ducks and black and white swans and geese and fishponds,
with giant ornamental goldfish, and men with diggers at work on what looks like a hydroelectric project, with a series of dams being constructed down the slope of the hill.

When you get inside, it is like the opening scene of
The Marriage of Figaro
. There are people rushing everywhere: maids and chauffeurs and footmen and cooks, and smooth young men with an air of scholarship who are carrying sheaves of paper, and a lovely little child with golden hair who seems to be the youngest of the family.

Now you have to go upstairs and attend to the needs of the mind that somehow powers all this motion, and without which it subsides as though turned off by a switch.

‘Hurry up,’ says Inches, and you go up the blue lino stairs with rubber nosing and you knock on the door of what you have been told is the study. There is a muffled shout from somewhere within, as though from a prisoner in a cupboard.

You enter a large high-beamed room, with a black and empty fireplace at one end, beneath a rather gloomy picture of Blenheim Palace. There’s a stand-up desk against one wall, and a sit-down desk against another, and an old pinkish carpet on the floor. There’s a faint smell of cigar—but of Winston Churchill there is no sign.

‘Sir?’ you quaver.

‘Here!’ comes a shout, and then you see a little door in the far corner, which looks as though it might be the entrance to an airing cupboard, or a large drinks cabinet. You go through. You can’t quite believe that these are the sleeping arrangements of one of the most powerful men in Britain.

Someone has whispered that Mrs Churchill likes to spend the night elsewhere, because the couple have radically different biorhythms. This is certainly no bedroom for a lady. It is more like a monk’s cell.

There is a sepia picture of Lord Randolph Churchill on the wall, and a tiny bathroom off to one side; and there in the low bed is a terrifying sight. He is surrounded by books and papers and dispatch boxes strewn all over the place; and by him a big chromium-plated cuspidor, with something nasty at the bottom of it, because a cuspidor is a glorified bowl for spitting into.

There is a glass of what looks like a weak whisky and soda on the bedside table, a marmalade cat on the coverlet, and he is sitting up in bed wearing a red silk kimono and a fierce expression, with his greying strands of hair askew. He champs his cigar and you realise he is saying something to you.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ you say.

‘Get it down,’ he snaps, and you twig that he has already begun dictating.

Quickly you compose yourself, and whip out your notebook or letter-paper, and start recording his words. He breaks off. A terrible scowl comes over his face, like that of a bull meditating whether to charge a rambler in a fluorescent cagoule.

His toes twitch under the bedclothes, and he is making little sibilant noises like a kettle or a saucepan of porridge.

You keep your pen poised above your work, your head down. Then he speaks again, and his tone is startlingly seductive, even lubricious.

‘Daarling . . .’ he says.

You look up in alarm to see that it’s OK: he’s talking to the cat. He goes on, switching from Tango the marmalade cat back to you, and you realise you’re having a slight problem.

Owing to the cigar, and the way he says ‘sh’ instead of ‘s’, you find yourself asking him to repeat things.

‘God’s teeth, girl!’ he exclaims, and you find yourself overcome. It’s all too much. You can’t help it.

The tears begin, and instantly he is transformed. All his attention is focused on you, and he smiles and fixes you with his merry blue eyes. ‘Don’t mind me when I snap,’ he says, and explains that he is not cross with you, not at all; he is just trying to think of what to say, and hates having his flow disrupted.

Now he is off again. The toes are twitching as he crafts every sentence so as to find the natural cadence of the language, rhythmical, musical; and now it is over. He brings his hand crashing down, like a conductor signalling the end of a Beethoven symphony.

‘Gimme!’ he says—and you hand over the memo or letter.

He reads it, and then takes out a fountain pen and—holding it quite high on the barrel—he initials it; and that’s it. You are gone, dismissed—until half an hour later you are mysteriously summoned again. It seems he has thought of something else.

This time both the study and the bedroom are empty, and there is a sploshing from the little bathroom. Golly, you think. In between his spongeing and sluicing he instructs you to draw up a little chair next to the door and begins dictating another letter, and then you muffle a shriek as he emerges, with a tiny towel around his waist that seems to fall off him as you close your horrified eyes . . .

When you open them, he’s half decent, and dictating again. ‘
KBO’, he concludes this letter—which you later discover means ‘Keep Buggering On’, an injunction he often uses to his colleagues.

So it goes on throughout the day, with Churchill dictating streams of material to his helpers of both sexes. He seems to be working on several books at once, not to mention newspaper articles, speeches and further memoranda.

He has a generous booze-fuelled lunch, and then a nap, and then he is either painting or doing a spot of bricklaying with his bricklaying tutor, Mr Kurn, or even playing bezique, a card game with which
he has become almost obsessed. Then it is announced that he has to go to London, and you sit crushed in the back of the brown Daimler, with your noiseless typewriter on your lap, and on one side the dispatch boxes, on the other a large tan-coloured poodle called Rufus, with his tongue in your ear, and the cigar sending gusts of smoke backwards in your direction.

For the next two hours he proses away, and you marvel at the lushness of his vocabulary, the endless synonyms, the tautologies, the pleonasms. He goes to Parliament, he goes to the Treasury; he deals in the course of the afternoon and evening with huge quantities of text and produces thousands more words of every kind and every one of them minutely conserved by his helpers, as if they were worker bees collecting royal jelly from the queen.

By now you are beginning to flag. He is not. He is still at it after dinner—though you have gone to bed, relieved by another secretary. He whirrs on into the night as though his battery is made of some superior mixture of chemicals, unknown to other men. By the time he finally gets his head down in his London flat, it is as late as 3 a.m. And he is going to repeat the whole thing the following day; and by then you realise what
they say about him is true: that the closer you get to Winston Churchill, the more convinced you become of his genius.

—

P
ERHAPS THE BIGGEST
mistake you can make about Churchill is to think that he is some kind of orotund frontman, a mere impresario of ideas—a Ronald Reagan with a cigar. Reagan once famously joked of his own approach to life, ‘They say hard work can’t kill you—but I figure, why take the chance?’

That was emphatically not Churchill’s maxim. It is not just the
books—he produced thirty-one of them and of those fourteen were ‘proper’ or original publications, rather than compilations of material already published.
Try counting his innumerable entries in the parliamentary record: dozens of speeches and interventions and questions every month, in a career that lasted almost uninterrupted for sixty-four years. His published speeches alone run to eighteen volumes and 8,700 pages; his memoranda and letters comprise a million documents in 2,500 boxes.

He presented five budgets as Chancellor, and would speak for three or four hours (modern Chancellors do no more than an hour).
And he had no speech writer.
He did it all himself; and when he wasn’t dictating, or writing, or dominating some conversation, or painting, or laying bricks, he was putting on more intellectual weight.

He had read at least five thousand books, and had committed so much poetry to his elephantine memory that people took him to be a kind of jukebox. You just pushed his button and out it came. When he was staying with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at Shangri-La, he impressed the US President by being able to give him the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear.

Then Roosevelt quoted some famous lines from the patriotic American poem ‘Barbara Frietchie’ by John Greenleaf Whittier: ‘shoot if you must this old grey head/ But spare your country’s flag, she said’.

Churchill stunned the presidential couple by giving them the whole darn thing—astonishing, since it is a conspicuously American poem, and hardly the kind of poem he would have learned at Harrow; and masterfully diplomatic it was of Churchill to pull it out of his hat. ‘
My husband and I looked at each other,’ said Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘for each of us could have quoted a few lines, but the whole thing was quite beyond us.’

The Aga Khan had the same sort of floaty feeling when Churchill
began quoting huge chunks of Omar Khayyam. Had this man learned it to impress him? No, he just happened to have it in his head. He kept and stored these literary delicacies for years, perfectly pickled in the alcohol-washed runnels of his brain. He could pull them out at any moment: the
Lays of Ancient Rome
for the cabinet, Shakespeare for his children. Even in his eighties he was able suddenly to summon obscure lines of Aristophanes for Sir John Colville.

If you have a spare fifteen minutes, go on YouTube, and look at the sublime out-takes of Churchill’s only televised party political broadcast, from 1951. He sits there gazing at the camera with utter savagery, while they make him repeat his script over and over again. Finally, he breaks off from being tormented by the producers and gives them what for by reciting a long section from Gibbon about the spread of Christianity.

This is important, this gift of memory, because it meant that he could hold the data in his head that enabled him to win arguments and dominate his colleagues. In 1913 Asquith complained to his love-object Venetia that they had just had a three-hour cabinet, two and a quarter hours of which were occupied by the remarks of Churchill. He became the natural go-to man for a complex negotiation, partly because of his charm and friendliness but mainly because he grasped the subject so deeply that he was fertile in expedients and compromises. He handled the negotiations on everything from the partition of Ireland to the creation of Israel to the General Strike; and the reason he was so central to these formative twentieth-century events was not so much that he muscled his way to centre stage, but that his colleagues simply recognised that he was the man with the wattage to do it.

His wasn’t a notably mathematical or financial brain. As he admitted during the controversy over whether or not to go back on the Gold Standard, he had ‘
limited comprehension of these extremely
technical matters’ (like his father, also Chancellor, who complained about all these ‘
damned dots’); and after a session with a load of bankers he complained that they were all ‘
speaking Persian’. For this he can surely be forgiven. The history of the last 100 years is full of occasions when it is perfectly obvious that the bankers themselves haven’t the faintest understanding of what they are trying to say.

What he had was stamina, power, sheer mental grunt. ‘
There comes Winston Churchill, with his hundred horsepower mind,’ said someone before the First World War, when 100 horsepower was a lot.

Some people have very quick analytic brains, but no particular energy or appetite for work. Some people have loads of drive, but limited talent—and most of us, clearly, have our own moderate portions of each. Churchill had the lot: phenomenal energy, a prodigious memory, a keen analytic mind and a ruthless journalistic ability to sort his material so as to put the most important point first. He also had the zigzag streak of lightning in the brain that makes for creativity.

His psychological make-up (need to prove himself to father, partial megalomania, etc.) meant that he
had
to work; he was incapable of idleness. Much has been made of his so-called depression or ‘
black dog’, as he called it—using an expression that already existed at the time. Others think this has been overdone, and I am inclined to agree.

He certainly got a bit blue in the 1930s, when he was out of office, but in general he was well used to managing what is for many people the creative cycle: depression—exertion—creativity—alcoholically enhanced elation—depression and so on. He just spanned the cycle faster than anyone else, as though he had a higher RPM, and his output was consequently enormous. He was like Dr Johnson, in that he made tremendous demands of himself, with his superego
flagellating him onwards. He explained what it was like: ‘
You know, I hate to go to bed at night feeling I have done nothing useful in the day. It is the same feeling as if you had gone to bed without brushing your teeth.’

He was in one way archaic in his attitudes—driven by a lust for glory and praise, and a fear of public shame. But there was also plenty of post-Christian guilt in the mix. Whatever the exact composition of the fuel, the Churchill engine was perfectly suited to the complexities of government. He was a Whitehall warrior, and he was a details man, sometimes maddeningly so.

At the Treasury he would busy himself with such minutiae as the cost of Foreign Office telegrams. When he arrived back at the Admiralty in 1939 he was making inquiries about the number of duffel coats issued to individual ships. He took it into his head to order that backgammon, not cards, should be played on Royal Navy vessels.