The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (43 page)

T
O AVOID THE THREAT OF
submarine and aerial attack in the Mediterranean, Randolph Churchill’s ship, the
Glenroy,
took the long way to Egypt, down the west coast of Africa and then back up, to the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. The voyage was long and tedious—thirty-six days to reach the entrance to the canal, on March 8. Finding little else in the way of distraction, Randolph turned to one his favorite pursuits. “
There was very high gambling, poker, roulette, chemin-de-fer, every night,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in a memorandum about the commando unit. “Randolph lost
£
850 in two evenings.” In a letter to his own wife, Waugh remarked, “
Poor Pamela will have to go to work.”

As the voyage progressed, Randolph’s losses deepened, until he owed his fellow voyagers
£
3,000—$12,000, equivalent to over $190,000 today. Half of that was owed to just one man: Peter Fitzwilliam, a member of one of the richest families in England, soon to inherit Wentworth Woodhouse, a vast mansion in Yorkshire thought by some to be the inspiration for Jane Austen’s Pemberley in
Pride and Prejudice.

Randolph broke the news to Pamela in a telegram, in which he instructed her to pay off the debt in any way she could. He suggested she send each man
£
5 or
£
10 a month. “
Anyway,” he concluded, “I leave it up to you, but please don’t tell my mother and father.”

Pamela, certain now that she was indeed again pregnant, was stunned and frightened. This was “the breaking point,” she said. At
£
10 a month, she would have needed a dozen years just to resolve the debt to Fitzwilliam. The amount was unfathomable, so much so that it brought into focus how fundamentally defective her marriage was. “
I mean, that was the first realization in my life that I was totally on my own and that the future of my son was dependent entirely on me and my future was dependent on me, that I couldn’t rely ever again on Randolph,” she said.

She recalled thinking, “What the hell do I do? I can’t go to Clemmie and Winston.”

Almost immediately, Beaverbrook came to mind. “I liked him enormously, admired him tremendously,” she said. She considered him a close friend and, along with baby Winston, had spent a number of weekends at his country home, Cherkley. He felt the same way, although those who knew Beaverbrook understood that he saw a value in their connection that went beyond mere friendship. She was a conduit of gossip from within the loftiest circle in the land.

She called Beaverbrook and sobbed into the phone, “Max, can I come see you?”

She got into her Jaguar and drove to London. It was morning, the risk of being bombed therefore slight. She drove through streets made drab by destruction and dust but colored here and there by flashes of wallpaper, paint, and fabric from the exposed interiors of houses. She met Beaverbrook at the new offices of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, now situated in a large oil-company building on the Thames Embankment.

She told him about the gambling debt and about her marriage, warning that he was not to divulge any of it to Clementine or to Churchill, whom she knew to be Beaverbrook’s closest friend. Of course he assented: Secrets were his favorite possessions.

She asked him right off whether he would consider giving her a year’s advance on Randolph’s salary. It seemed to her an easy request, one that Beaverbrook would surely fulfill. After all, Randolph’s job with the
Evening Standard
was more sinecure than anything else. With the immediate crisis averted, she could get on with the larger question of how, or even whether, to proceed with her marriage.

Beaverbrook looked at her. “
I won’t advance Randolph a single penny of his salary,” he said.

She was shocked. “I remember being absolutely astonished,” she said later, “It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t. It seemed such a little thing to ask.”

But now Beaverbrook surprised her again. “If you want me to give you a check for
£
3,000,” he said, “I will do it, for you.” But it would be a present, he emphasized, from him, to her.

Pamela grew wary. “Max had to have control of the people around him, whether it was Brendan Bracken or even Winston Churchill,” she said. “I mean, he had to be in the driver’s seat and he just smelled [of] danger for me.” On past occasions, Randolph had warned her about Beaverbrook, telling her never to allow herself to fall under his sway. “Never,” Randolph had stressed. “Don’t you ever get into Max Beaverbrook’s control.”

Now, in Beaverbrook’s office, she said, “Max, I can’t do that.”

She still needed his help, however. She knew she had to find a job, in London, to begin paying off the debts.

Beaverbrook offered a compromise. She could move her son and nanny into his country home, and he would make sure to look after them. She would then be free to move to London.

She accepted the arrangement. She leased her house in Hitchin to a nursery school that had been evacuated from London (and made a profit, charging
£
2 more per week than she herself paid). In London she took a room on the top floor of the Dorchester, sharing it with Churchill’s niece, Clarissa. “
Not as glamorous or as expensive as that might sound,” Clarissa wrote later, “since it was not a popular floor to be on during the constant air raids.” They paid
£
6 a week. Clarissa liked Pamela but noted that she “had no sense of humor.” What she did have was a gift for making the most of a situation. “
She combined a canny eye for chances with a genuinely warm heart,” Clarissa wrote.

Soon after moving in, Pamela found herself at a luncheon at 10 Downing Street, seated beside the minister of supply, Sir Andrew Rae Duncan, to whom she mentioned her hope of finding a job in the city. Within twenty-four hours, she had one, in a division of his ministry that was devoted to establishing hostels for munitions workers assigned to factories far from home.

Securing meals for herself was a problem, at first. Her room rate at the Dorchester included only breakfast. She had lunch at the Supply Ministry. For dinner, she tried as much as possible to dine at 10 Downing or with well-off friends. She found herself compelled to “hustle” for these dinner invitations, but this proved to be an art at which she excelled. It helped, of course, that she was the daughter-in-law of the most important man in Britain. In short order, she and Clarissa had “friends and acquaintances on every floor,” Clarissa recalled.

The two often sheltered from air raids in the room of another resident, Australian prime minister Menzies, whom Pamela had come to know well because of her connection to the Churchills. Menzies occupied a large suite on the Dorchester’s much-coveted first floor. The women spent nights on mattresses laid out in its windowless entry alcove.

Now came the “tricky” matter of keeping Randolph’s gambling fiasco a secret from her in-laws, “
because I couldn’t really tell Clemmie and Winston why suddenly, from living happily in Hitchin with my baby I suddenly up, separated myself from my baby and wanted a job in London.”

To help cover expenses and begin paying off the debt, Pamela sold her wedding presents, “including,” she said later, “some diamond earrings and a couple of nice bracelets.” In the midst of all this she lost her new pregnancy, and blamed the loss on the stress and turmoil in her life. She knew by this point that her marriage was over.

She began to feel a new sense of freedom, helped too by the fact that soon, on March 20, 1941, she would celebrate her twenty-first birthday. She had no inkling, of course, that in a very short while she would fall in love with a handsome older man living a few stories below, on one of the safest floors in the safest hotel in London.

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK, ON
M
ONDAY
morning, March 10, Averell Harriman boarded the
Atlantic Clipper
at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal, accompanied by his personal secretary, Robert P. Meiklejohn. The skies were clear, the waters of Flushing Bay a hard, crystalline blue, with the temperature at eight
A.M.
a brisk twenty-nine degrees. The plane he stepped into was a Boeing 314 “flying boat”—essentially a giant hull with wings and engines—and, indeed, the boarding process had more in common with climbing onto a ship than an airplane, including a walk over water on a pierlike boarding ramp.

As would have been the case had he been traveling first-class on a transatlantic ocean liner, Harriman received a manifest that identified his fellow passengers.
The list was like something from a novel by the new international literary sensation Agatha Christie, whose bestselling thriller
And Then There Were None
had been published in the States a year earlier. (The British version had the abysmal title
Ten Little
—
—,
the third word being a crude term for blacks in common usage at the time in Britain and America.) The manifest included Antenor Patiño, identified as a Bolivian diplomat, but better known the world over as “the Tin King,” and Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., who had been ambassador to Poland during the Nazi invasion and was now to serve as envoy to various exiled governments in London, traveling with his wife and secretary. There were other British and American diplomats on the list, as well as two couriers and various staff members. A passenger named Antonio Gazda, described as an engineer from Switzerland, was in fact an international arms dealer, engaged in selling guns to both sides.

Each passenger was allowed sixty-six pounds of luggage free of charge. Harriman and his secretary brought two bags each; Ambassador Biddle brought thirty-four bags and shipped another eleven on a separate flight.

The
Clipper
pulled away from its moorage, entered Long Island Sound off Queens, and began its takeoff run, bumping across a mile-long fetch of open water before at last lifting off, shedding water like a breaching whale. With a cruising speed of 145 miles per hour, the plane would need about six hours to reach its first stop, Bermuda. It flew at eight thousand feet, which pretty much ensured that it would encounter every cloud and storm in its path. There would be turbulence but also luxury. White-jacketed stewards served full meals on china in a dining compartment with tables, chairs, and tablecloths. At dinner men wore suits, women dresses; at night the stewards made up beds in curtained berths. Honeymooners could book a private suite in the plane’s tail and swoon at the moonglade on the sea below.

As the plane approached Bermuda, stewards closed all the shades, a security measure to keep passengers from surveying the British naval base below.
Anyone who peeked was subject to a $500 fine, about $8,000 today. Upon landing, Harriman learned that the next leg of his flight would be delayed until the next day, Tuesday, March 11, owing to bad weather in the Azores, where Clippers had to land on an exposed stretch of the Atlantic.

As Harriman waited for the weather to improve, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill into law.

I
N
L
ISBON,
H
ARRIMAN FACED
another delay. The KLM flight to Bristol, England, was in high demand, and passengers with the most senior official rank, like Ambassador Biddle, took priority. The delay lasted three days. Harriman did not suffer, however. He stayed at the Hotel Palácio, in Estoril, on the Portuguese Riviera, known both for its luxury and for being a cradle of espionage. Here, in fact, he met briefly with Colonel Donovan, who was now, after his Sunday at Chequers, on his way back to Washington, where he would soon become head of America’s top wartime spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services.

Ever striving for efficiency, Harriman decided to take advantage of the delay by having the hotel clean his traveling clothes, against the advice of secretary Meiklejohn, who later wrote, ruefully, “
Mr. Harriman in a rash moment sent his laundry out while he was at the hotel, first receiving a solemn promise that it would be returned before his departure for England.”

At some point, Harriman went shopping. Given the nature of his mission, he was more aware than most people of the intricacies of Britain’s food shortages and rationing rules, and bought a bag of tangerines to give to Churchill’s wife.

C
HEQUERS AND ITS FULL-MOON SURROGATE,
Ditchley, were by now a regular weekend ritual for Churchill. These brief sojourns took him away from the increasingly dreary, bomb-worn vistas of London, and salved that need within his English soul for trees, hollows, ponds, and birdsong. He planned to return to Chequers on Friday, March 14, just three days after his last stay, there to receive Roosevelt’s latest emissary, if the man ever managed to arrive.

Meanwhile, there was much afoot to cause him worry. Bulgaria had just joined the Axis, and soon afterward German forces entered the country, making a feared invasion of Greece, on its southern border, much more likely. After a period of anguished debate, Churchill decided to honor an existing defense pact with Greece and on March 9 dispatched British troops to help fend off the expected onslaught—a risky venture, for it weakened British forces still in Libya and Egypt. The expedition seemed to many to be a lost cause, but at least an honorable one, and—as Churchill saw it—an important assertion of Britain’s loyalty and its will to fight. As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden telegraphed from Cairo, “
We were prepared to run the risk of failure, thinking it better to suffer with the Greeks than to make no attempt to help them.”

Meanwhile, a new German general had appeared in the deserts of Libya, with hundreds of panzer tanks at his command and with orders to bolster Italian forces and win back territory lost to the British. General Erwin Rommel, soon to be nicknamed “the Desert Fox,” had already proven himself in Europe, and now commanded a new army group, the Afrika Korps.

H
ARRIMAN AT LAST SECURED
a seat on the flight from Lisbon to Bristol on Saturday, March 15. His laundry had not been returned. He left instructions with the hotel to forward his clothes to London.

As he walked to his plane, a KLM DC-3, he had what he called an “eerie experience.” He spotted a German aircraft on the tarmac, his first visible marker of the war. Painted black from nose to tail, save for a white swastika, the plane was a jarring presence in that otherwise sun-struck landscape, like a blackened tooth in a gleaming smile.

I
N
G
ERMANY,
H
ERMANN
G
ÖRING
took advantage of a period of fine weather to launch his new campaign against the British Isles, with massed raids that ranged from southern England to Glasgow. On Wednesday, March 12, a force of 340 German bombers carrying high-explosive bombs and incendiaries attacked Liverpool and its surrounding districts, killing more than five hundred people. Over the next two nights the Luftwaffe struck Clydeside, the region encompassing Glasgow, killing 1,085. These raids demonstrated anew the capricious nature of death from the air. A single parachute mine, drifting aimlessly with the wind, destroyed a tenement building and killed eighty-three civilians; a lone bomb killed eighty more when it penetrated an air-raid shelter at a shipyard.

Joseph Goebbels, writing in his diary on Saturday, March 15, exulted. “
Our fliers are talking of two new Coventrys. We shall see how long England can put up with this.” To him, as to Göring, the fall of England seemed more likely now than ever, despite the new show of support from America. “We are slowly choking England to death,” Goebbels wrote. “One day she will lie gasping on the ground.”

None of this distracted Luftwaffe chief Göring from his pursuit of art. On Saturday, March 15, he oversaw delivery of a vast shipment of works seized in Paris and packed onto a train that comprised twenty-five baggage cars, transporting four thousand individual pieces ranging from paintings to tapestries to furniture.

H
ARRIMAN ARRIVED IN
E
NGLAND
on Saturday afternoon, five days after departing LaGuardia. His KLM flight landed at an airfield outside Bristol at three-thirty, in bright and clear weather, as barrage balloons drifted over the adjacent city. He found that Churchill had engineered a surprise. Harriman was supposed to transfer to a British passenger plane for the final flight to London, but instead Churchill had arranged to have him met by his own naval aide-de-camp, Commander Charles Ralfe “Tommy” Thompson, who tucked Harriman into Churchill’s favorite aircraft, his Flamingo. Escorted by two Hurricane fighters, they flew through the waning light over English countryside softened by the first buds and blooms of spring, direct to an airfield near Chequers, where they arrived just in time for dinner.

Churchill and Clementine welcomed Harriman with warmth, as if they had known him forever. He presented the tangerines he had bought for Clementine in Lisbon. “
I was surprised to see how grateful Mrs. Churchill was,” he wrote, later. “Her unfeigned delight brought home to me the restrictions of the dreary British wartime diet.”

A
FTER DINNER,
C
HURCHILL AND
H
ARRIMAN
sat down for their first detailed conversation about how Britain was holding up against Hitler. Harriman told the prime minister that he could be useful in promoting Churchill’s interests only to the extent that he understood Britain’s true condition and the kind of aid Churchill most wanted and what he planned to do with it.

“
You shall be informed,” Churchill told him. “We accept you as a friend. Nothing will be kept from you.”

Churchill proceeded to assess the threat of invasion, noting how the Germans had assembled fleets of barges at ports in France, Belgium, and Denmark. His biggest concern for the time being, however, was the German submarine campaign against British shipping, which he called “the Battle of the Atlantic.” In February alone, U-boats, aircraft, and mines had destroyed four hundred thousand tons of shipping, he told Harriman, and the rate was increasing. Losses per convoy were running at about 10 percent; the rate at which ships sank was two to three times faster than the rate at which Britain could build new ones.

It was a dire portrait, but Churchill seemed undeterred. Harriman was struck by his resolve to continue the war alone, if need be, and by his frank avowal that without America’s eventual participation, England had no hope of achieving a final victory.

A sense of great and fateful change imbued the weekend, and left Mary Churchill feeling a kind of awe at being allowed to witness such grave talk. “
The weekend was thrilling,” she wrote in her diary. “Here was the hub of the Universe. For many billions of destinies may perhaps hang on this new axis—this Anglo-American–American-Anglo friendship.”

W
HEN
H
ARRIMAN AT LAST
reached London itself, he found a landscape of contrasts. In one block, he saw untouched homes and clear sidewalks; in the next, mounds of rubble and vertical claws of wood and iron, and half-broken houses with personal belongings splayed across their facades like the battle flags of a lost regiment. Everything was coated with light gray dust, and the scent of combusted tar and wood suffused the air. But the sky was blue, and trees were starting to green, and mists rose off the grass of Hyde Park and the waters of the Serpentine. Commuters streamed from tube stations and double-decker buses, carrying briefcases, newspapers, and lunchboxes, but also gas masks and helmets.

The ambient sense of threat insinuated itself into everyday choices and decisions, such as the importance of leaving work before nightfall, and identifying the nearest shelter, and Harriman’s selection of the Dorchester Hotel. The hotel first assigned him a large suite on its sixth floor, rooms 607 through 609, but he deemed this too near the roof (there were only two stories above him), as well as too large and too expensive, and asked to be moved to a smaller suite on the third floor. He directed his secretary, Meiklejohn, to haggle for a cheaper rate. Meanwhile, Meiklejohn quickly found that even his “cheapest room” at Claridge’s was beyond his means. “
Will have to move out of this place…or starve to death,” he wrote in his diary, after his first night in the hotel.

He moved from Claridge’s to an apartment that seemed likely to withstand attack. In a letter to a colleague back in the States, he described his satisfaction with the place. He occupied a four-room flat on the eighth floor of a modern building made of steel and brick, with a protective shield of two more floors above. “I even have a view,” he wrote. “Opinion differs as to whether it is safer to go in a cellar and have the building fall on you in a raid or live upstairs and fall on the building. At least if you are upstairs you can see what hits you—if there’s any comfort in that.”

He had expected the nightly blackouts to be particularly daunting and depressing but found this not to be the case. The blackout did make life easier for the pickpockets who frequented train stations and for the looters who plucked valuables from damaged homes and shops, but otherwise, bombs aside, the streets were fundamentally safe. Meiklejohn liked walking in the darkness. “
Most impressive thing is the silence,” he wrote. “Almost everybody walks about like a ghost.”

H
ARRIMAN ACTED QUICKLY TO
establish his office. Although news accounts portrayed him as a lone paladin striding through chaos, in fact, the “Harriman Mission,” as it became known, soon became a minor empire, with Harriman, Meiklejohn, seven more senior men, and a battalion of staff that included fourteen stenographers, ten messengers, six file clerks, two telephone operators, four “charwomen,” and one chauffeur. A benefactor loaned Harriman a Bentley, said to cost
£
2,000, or $128,000 today. Harriman specified that some of the stenographers and clerks had to be American, for handling “confidential matters.”