Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  The British Parliament is divided into two Houses: the House of Lords, made up of peers, and the House of Commons, made up of elected representatives. Members of the House of Commons are elected at a general election; if a Member of Parliament (MP) dies or retires between elections, the constituency elects a new MP at a by-election. Unlike the United States, where a candidate must live in a place to represent it, a candidate need not have lived in the constituency to “stand” for election there.

  The British system doesn’t follow a rigid schedule of elections. A parliament may (but often doesn’t) last as long as five years; it also has the power to extend itself. For example, rather than hold a general election in wartime, the parliaments elected in 1910 and 1935 prolonged their lives, year by year, until 1918 and 1945, respectively. Thus, for example, Harold Nicolson was an MP—after winning a slender majority in a single election—for ten crucial years, from 1935 to 1945.

  In the United States, the executive and the legislative branches are distinct. The U.S. President is elected separately from the members of Congress, and he chooses whomever he wants to serve in his cabinet (subject to Senate confirmation).

  In Britain, the executive and the legislative functions are intertwined. The British Prime Minister is not elected as such but generally takes that office as one who commands a majority in the House of Commons (usually, but not necessarily, the Prime Minister is head of the majority party); the Prime Minister appoints ministers who are, with virtually no exception, drawn from the House of Commons or the House of Lords (as if, in the United States, the President could appoint only Representatives and Senators to cabinet positions). This circumstance makes individual ministers more independent from the Prime Minister than American cabinet members are from the President.

  Subject to Senate confirmation, a U.S. President has the power to appoint not only cabinet secretaries but also a huge number of their deputies, assistants, and other officials. By contrast, a Prime Minister appoints only the heads of the different branches. Ministers are intended to set broad policy outlines and leave the actual administration of their departments to the permanent civil service.

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  CHURCHILL AND SEX

  Too Interesting to Ignore

  Biographers often justify their prying into a subject’s intimate life by making more or less plausible leaps from private to public: Jefferson’s conduct influenced his attitude toward slavery; Picasso’s lovers inspired his art; a philandering politican may cheat the public; a closet homosexual may have more to hide.

  But we don’t need to justify our curiosity with the unconvincing fig leaf of public relevance. If the goal is to understand a subject’s character, sexual life is too interesting to ignore.

  In many cases, the facts about a subject’s intimate life confound our expectations. We expect personalities to be unified, but sex often proves how unpredictable people can be. In Churchill’s case—given his high energy, his urge to dominate, his attraction to luxury and beauty, and his disdain for other people’s opinions—perhaps the surprise is the apparent decorousness of his intimate life.

  Along with Karl Marx, the greatest contemporary intellectual influence of Churchill’s era was Sigmund Freud. Although the Freudian revolution—with its emphasis on how sexuality determines character—seems to have had little effect on how Churchill viewed the world, Freud changed how the world views Churchill. A modern biography must examine the issue of Churchill and sex.

  Churchill didn’t show much interest in sex.

  Often great leaders are flirtatious and promiscuous; they touch and hug, seduce and abandon. Their predatory sexuality charges their charisma.

  Churchill lacked this quality. He was sufficient for himself and indifferent to sexual distractions. Unmoved by the flirtatious banter of a dinner party or the heady seduction of a crowd, he sought the company of men and was happiest in an atmosphere of cigars, port, newspapers, and political talk. A close friend described him as without “strong sexual desires.” Churchill himself reportedly joked that “the reason I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in bed.”

  Historians William Manchester and A.J.P. Taylor maintain that Churchill was “undersexed” and hypothesize that his mother’s promiscuity stunted his sexual development. This seems a bit rough on Jennie; while she certainly had many affairs, as was common in her set, Churchill doesn’t seem to have been particularly disturbed by that fact. The belief or suspicion that syphilis caused his father’s humiliating, wasting death at age forty-five seems a more likely explanation. In any case, whether Churchill was in fact “undersexed” is disputable; after all, Churchill and Clementine were married less than a month after announcing their engagement, and Clementine was pregnant within a month of their wedding, or even before, and she became pregnant six times (one pregnancy ended in miscarriage).

  Over the course of Churchill’s long life in the public eye, almost inevitably a few rumors of sexual impropriety swirled around him. Most improbable was the charge, in 1895, that he was guilty of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.” These accusations were withdrawn, and his accuser apologized. He was also rumored to have fathered illegitimate children. Brendan Bracken, one of Churchill’s most loyal supporters, encouraged the rumor that he was Churchill’s son, and because of Churchill’s fondness for that somewhat limited man, many people believed it. However, there’s no evidence that Churchill had an illegitimate child.

  Citing only “personal information,” Manchester hints darkly at a single act of infidelity, sometime before 1932, “with a divorced, titled Englishwoman whose seductive skills and sexual experience far exceeded his.” Also, in his last years, Churchill frequently visited Emery Reves and Wendy Russell at their luxurious French villa, and some observers—including Clementine—were uncomfortable with the affection between Churchill and his hostess. Noël Coward bitingly described Churchill as “absolutely obsessed with a senile passion for Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace, staggering like a vast baby of two who is just learning to walk.” But these episodes stand as exceptions. Churchill was a faithful husband.

  Churchill’s writings reflect his lack of interest in sex and its influence. Although he was fascinated by personality, his Victorian-style biographies and character sketches don’t speculate in modern fashion about their subjects’ sexual drives.

  If he chose, Churchill certainly had occasion to comment on the carnal influences on public figures. For example, he forbore to mention Prime Minister Asquith’s passionate—and politically indiscreet—relationship with Venetia Stanley, even though this relationship had had serious consequences for Churchill. While Churchill’s Dardanelles campaign was being executed, the sixty-two-year-old Prime Minister was writing love letters during Cabinet meetings to twenty-seven-year-old Venetia. When, in May 1915, Asquith learned that his soul mate had become engaged to another man, his anguish distracted him from public affairs at a moment of political crisis; otherwise, he might have been able to save his government. Instead, he formed a coalition government—and a condition of the coalition, imposed by the Conservatives, was Churchill’s removal at a time when his great campaign, and his reputation, were at stake. Nor did fascination with T. E. “Lawrence of Arabia,” with his flowing robes, charisma, and abandonment of powerful position to become an ordinary soldier under assumed names, induce Churchill to speculate about the dark desires haunting (quite obviously) Lawrence’s extraordinary personality. In Marlborough, Churchill did expand on the romantic passion between John Churchill and his wife, Sarah, and on Princess, later Queen, Anne’s “strangely intense affection” for Sarah. Even here, however, Churchill accepted appearances and didn’t probe for hidden impulses.

  Churchill took his sport not from flirtation or dissipation but from wall building, lake digging, and painting. He was preoccupied with military and political battles, with the known lives of great figures and the development of h
istoric institutions. His pleasures, and his anguish, came from grand public dramas rather than from intimate episodes.

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  CHURCHILL AS HUSBAND

  A Happy Marriage?

  Winston Churchill Had a Happy Marriage

  Winston and Clementine met in April 1908, and in September, they married; he was thirty-three years old, she, ten years younger. They had five children and were married for more than fifty years.

  Although they had very different temperaments, they were devoted to each other. Consider this pair of letters, exchanged in March 1916, while Winston was at the front in France during World War I. Clementine wrote of her hope that at their next meeting they would find time to spend alone, before their love had been replaced by “friendship”—“peaceful but not very stimulating.”

  Winston’s letters reveal an understanding of himself and his limitations, and his love for Clementine. He wrote back:

  Oh my darling do not write of “friendship” to me—I love you more each month that passes and feel the need of you & all your beauty. My precious charming Clemmie—I too feel sometimes the longing for rest & peace. . . .

  Sometimes also I think I wd not mind stopping living vy much—I am so devoured by egoism that I wd like to have another soul in another world & meet you in another setting, & pay you all the love and honour of the gt romances.

  During a lifetime of exceptional strain and anxiety, they were each other’s best comforters and staunchest supports.

  Winston Churchill Did Not Have a Happy Marriage

  Winston’s memoir My Early Life ends like a fairy tale, wrapping up the events that absorbed his life “at least until September 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.” Characteristically, he preferred the bold and romantic version of history to the more complicated truth. Winston and Clementine had a difficult marriage, in large part because Winston was such a demanding husband.

  They had very different natures: Winston was free-spending, luxury-loving, inexhaustible; Clementine was austere, high-strung, a perfectionist who often became depressed and agitated. They had different tastes in people, in hobbies, in the hours they kept, in the holidays they enjoyed. Soon after they married, they stopped sharing a bedroom (“Breakfast should be had in bed, alone,” said Winston), and Clementine often went to sleep hours before her husband.

  Winston’s commitment to the marriage never wavered. Their daughter Mary, however, reports that Clementine did briefly fall in love with another man in 1935. On a yacht cruise without her husband, she had a romance with a fellow passenger, but it ended when they returned. Clementine suggested another trip, but her husband wouldn’t permit it.

  Winston and Clementine, a week before their marriage in September 1908. This photograph is the first known picture of them together.

  Winston and Clementine, a week before their marriage . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  As time passed, the two spent more and more time apart. Winston loved to spend time at their country house, Chartwell, but Clementine disliked it: Winston had bought it without consulting her, and she never forgave him for it. She visited mostly on weekends and took long trips apart from her family. The two generally took separate vacations. As Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins observed, “it was almost incredible how Clementine managed to be absent at nearly all the most important moments of Churchill’s life.” Winston apparently didn’t much object.

  Clementine kisses Winston on his return to London from a week’s visit to the United States in May 1959.

  Clementine kisses Winston on his return to London . . .

  Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos

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  CHURCHILL’S ISLAND STORY

  His Myth

  “There is some one Myth for every man,” wrote William Butler Yeats, “which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.” Churchill’s myth was England. He described it in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: the longbow, bastard sons, trial by battle, soldiers on horseback. Only by considering Churchill’s vision of the Island story can we understand the moral and historical framework through which he viewed events in his own time.

  All his life, Churchill was dazzled by the splendor of England. He loved its traditions and landscapes, its ordered hierarchies, its sailing ships and cottage homes. He had an emotional, even mystical, faith in its power.

  Churchill offered his version of his country’s past in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, in which he explained how English institutions arose from time, battle, and tradition. His account neglected religion, literature, art, philosophy, economics, and science to dwell on politics and war, the aspects of history that preoccupied him.

  Churchill praised England as the foundation of all that was best in society and government, and yet some of his most decided views contradicted its professed political ideals. For one thing, despite his respect for Parliament and representative government, Churchill was an ardent royalist. For his loyal soul, England and all its glory were embodied in the Crown. With a veneration that seems archaic, after meeting a two-year-old Princess Elizabeth in September 1928, he wrote, “She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” Clementine confided “that she thought [Winston] to be the last believer in the Divine Right of Kings: she felt reasonably sure the King was not.” Churchill, however, didn’t allow his showy reverence for his sovereign to interfere with his championship of other political principles.

  More difficult to reconcile are Churchill’s paeans to liberty and his bitter fight to maintain Britain’s grip on its colonies, especially India. He glorified British political traditions—how, then, did he justify keeping India a subject nation? With Roosevelt, Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter—endorsing the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”—but immediately denied that the document applied to India.

  This contradiction—seeming to exalt freedom while promoting unfreedom—didn’t exist in Churchill’s mind, because he held to a single goal: the glory of England. Naught shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true. Churchill revered his sovereign as the personification of English history. Churchill held to the Empire because England, tiny in land and population, needed its possessions to secure its place among nations. Churchill was never one of those who pretended that the British were in India purely out of kindness, that they endured voluntary exile for the welfare of the natives. For Churchill, India was Britain’s indispensable prop, and this reality dictated the proper policies. Without India, without its vast Empire, England wasn’t much more than an outcropping off the northern coast of Europe (after all, Britain and Ireland together amount to less than 125,000 square miles). Therefore, Churchill maintained that India was not the proper inheritor of English freedoms—at least, not yet.

  But within his lifetime, Churchill’s version of the Island story came to an end. He didn’t realize it immediately. Consider his stubborn insistence on giving English pronunciation to foreign names, as he argued to the Foreign Office in 1945. He adopted a joking tone but in fact was dead serious when he declared that the names of foreign cities should not be pronounced to suit “the whims of foreigners living in those parts.” This memo reveals just how out of touch Churchill was by the end of the war. He didn’t understand that political reality, and the popular mood, required him to be more accommodating of the non-British point of view.

  As Churchill watched, the world he knew disappeared. When he was born, the bearer of the title Duke of Marlborough held immense authority and prestige; by the end of Churchill’s life, the current Duke had opened Blenheim Palace to the public and was complaining about the consequent wear on his carpets. Churchill had been alive when Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1877 and when the Viceroy’s House employed six thousand servants, and he was still alive when King George VI relinquished his Indian title and dropped the “I” for Emperor of India from his ro
yal signature. He watched as power—and with the power, much pageantry—were swept away. What alarmed Churchill was that few seemed to see clearly, or mind much, what was being lost—he was not, he declared, one of those who “on waking up in the morning wonder what part of the British Empire could be given away during the day.”

  In one of his most important speeches, Churchill vowed, “We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be.” Churchill’s Island—whose advancement was at the heart of all he did—was not the actual Britain, smaller than Oregon, with its General Strike, abdicating king, rioting Indians, Labour Party, or slackening grasp on the Empire. It was Shakespeare’s island:

  This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house,

  Against the envy of less happier lands,

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

  Churchill had his medals, his plumed hats, his ancestral portraits, horses stamping at the touch of his reins. This wasn’t the diminished England, confined to an island, but an England imperial, expansive, and traditional. Of course it must end. But he refused to believe it.

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  CHURCHILL IN PHOTOGRAPHS

  How He Changed Through Time

  No matter how vivid a biography, we also demand to see pictures; words can’t substitute for an actual look at a subject. It’s not clear what we think we learn from seeing a person’s face and watching it change over time, but it’s clear we crave to do so. For this desire, photographs, with their detail and apparent scientific accuracy, are more satisfying than painted portraits.