The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (42 page)

They kept telling him just to leave the file there, and someone would deal with it in the morning. He said no, and he would refuse to go until he had seen someone of flag officer rank.

Finally someone senior came down, and took the file—and of course it was the battle orders for Anzio.

Well, the War Cabinet was called the following day, and they
had to work out how serious the security breach was, and whether they could proceed with the Anzio landings.

They looked at the file carefully, and decided that it had only been in the water for a few seconds, and that the cleaning lady’s story was true—and so on balance they decided to go ahead with the invasion of Italy.

Churchill then turned to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and he said, ‘Pug, how did this happen?’ Ismay told him about the woman, and her son, and as he did so, Churchill started to cry.

‘She shall be a Dame Commander of the British Empire!’ he said. ‘Make it so!’

His Private Secretary Jock Colville followed up, and he got on to Tommy Lascelles, the King’s Private Secretary, to see if he could push it through. It was one of the few things the King got wrong, because when the Birthday Honours came out she got an MBE.

But I tell you something, when he finally lost office in 1945, there it was in his own resignation honours. Number five on that list was the MOD cleaning lady—DBE.

That story, alas, has withstood all my efforts to verify it at the Churchill Archive or elsewhere. But it illustrates a fundamental truth. Winston Churchill liked to get his way. And thank God he did.

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L
IKE THE GENERATIONS
of leaves, so are the generations of men, says Homer. That seems about right to me: we are like leaves not only in our mortality, but in our similarity.

I have always thought that an alien looking cursorily at this planet
might conclude that we human beings are not strictly speaking individuals, but all really part of the same organism: like leaves connected by invisible twigs and branches.

We look very much the same, we rustle together, we are blown about by the same winds, and so on. It is easy to see why so many historians and historiographers have taken the Tolstoyan line, that the story of humanity is not the story of great men and shining deeds.

For several decades now it has been fashionable to say that these so-called great men and women are just epiphenomena, meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history. The real story, on this view, is about deep economic forces, technological advances, changes in the price of sorghum, the overwhelming weight of an infinite number of mundane human actions.

Well, I think the story of Winston Churchill is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.

It is easy to think of a few other people who have made a colossal impact on world history—but almost always for the worse: Hitler, Lenin, etc. How many others can you think of who have been decisive for the better, who have personally tilted the scales of fate in the direction of freedom and hope?

Not many, I bet; and that is because when history needed it, in 1940, there was only one man who possessed the Churchill Factor; and having spent quite some time now considering the question, I am finally with those who think there has been no one remotely like him before or
since.