Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  Churchill’s tremendous energies weren’t exhausted by politics and writing, and he enjoyed a hodgepodge of pastimes as well. “To be really happy and really safe,” Churchill believed, “one ought to have at least two or three hobbies.” He was a firm believer in recreation, especially for those with heavy responsibilities:

  Many remedies are suggested for the avoidance of worry and mental overstrain. . . . Some advise exercise, and others, repose. Some counsel travel, and others, retreat. Some praise solitude, and others, gaiety. . . . But the element which is constant and common in all of them is Change. . . . A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it, just in the same way as he can wear out the elbows of his coat.

  Churchill painted only one picture during World War II, of Marrakech, which he considered “the most lovely spot in the world.” He later gave The Tower of Katoubia Mosque (1943) to President Roosevelt.

  Churchill painted only one picture during World War II . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  Some leaders lack the intensity that makes a relaxing hobby necessary, but for those who need it, a pastime provides relief. Churchill’s own activities demonstrate the astonishing range of his character: bricklaying, landscaping, butterfly collecting, horse racing, keeping tropical fish, feeding swans, hunting, and playing polo. What he loved most, however, was painting.

  Restless, gregarious, verbose, he found relief in the solitude and color of his canvas. Churchill discovered painting in the summer of 1915, one of the lowest periods of his life. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he championed the Dardanelles campaign, and its failure led to his shattering expulsion from office. His conviction that his plan could have brought an important victory, and the impotence of watching from the sidelines, drove Churchill to near despair. “In this position I knew everything and could do nothing,” he recalled. “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure.”

  Solace came unexpectedly. One Sunday morning in the country, Churchill became fascinated with experiments with a child’s paint box; four days later, he was completely outfitted for painting in oil. Confronted with a white canvas and gleaming palette, however, even Churchill was daunted. He hesitated, and just then, his neighbor, a painter, drove by. She stopped, slashed Churchill’s pristine canvas with some strokes of blue, and drove away his inhibitions. From then on, from his fortieth until his eighty-fifth year, when in the south of France he set up his easel for the last time, Churchill painted when he could. Despite his sound advice about the importance of relaxation, however, even Churchill didn’t have the time to paint during the frantic days of World War II. He painted only one picture, in Marrakech, which he gave to Roosevelt. (After one illness, Churchill announced that he was strong enough to fight Germans but still too weak to paint a picture.)

  He was proud of his painterly ability, and even in this area drove to excel. “Every ambition I’ve ever had has been fulfilled—save one,” he once admitted. “I am not a great painter.” In 1947, he submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy under a pseudonym. Of the hundreds of pictures considered, the judges included his among the few to hang in the annual exhibition.

  Churchill loved his own pictures—in fact, he almost never gave one away—but he was indifferent to art and didn’t visit galleries or museums. He was only interested in capturing his own impressions and basking in others’ admiration of his work.

  Why did oil paints and canvas appeal so deeply to Churchill? Perhaps because painting gave him an escape from everything that tired him about himself. Churchill was an indefatigable talker and, even as a writer, worked with a large team of typists, researchers, and aides. Painting gave him relief from his own relentless nature: only while painting could he remain silent for long. Few people appear in his paintings. Most of them are sunny landscapes, light on water, Chartwell scenes, or still-life interiors.

  His painting took him out of the gloom of the House of Commons and the antagonisms of public life, into the bright light of nature. It was a relief to turn his attention to the serene problems of shade and color; as he once wrote, “the horrors of war cannot rob the progress of the sun.” He loved bright colors (“I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns”) and sunshine (“Now I am learning to like painting even on dull days. But in my hot youth I demanded sunshine”). It was sunshine that drew him so often to France, the foreign country that he visited far more often than any other. And although in life he was witness to enormous changes in technology, weaponry, and society, in painting he could sink into timeless views.

  He found a deep sensual pleasure in painting: “The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing.” A painter who helped Churchill with his technique remarked of Churchill that “[h]e would have eaten a tube of white he loved the smell of it so.”

  Painting came to his rescue after the shock of the Dardanelles disaster in 1915. Painting was also his great consolation after the ordeal of 1945, when Churchill lost the Prime Ministership in the midst of triumph. Several weeks after the Labour victory, he and his daughter Sarah traveled to Italy. After years of grueling work, constant meetings, and endless red dispatch boxes, Churchill spent his days of enforced leisure in painting and picnicking; the hours in front of the canvas restored some measure of peace after the blow of the election.

  “Happy are the painters,” wrote Churchill, “for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.”

  18

  CHURCHILL THE SPENDTHRIFT

  A Weakness

  Money dictates the circumstances of a subject’s life, and no biography can ignore it. Churchill, it happens, was habitually careless with money. This unattractive fact about Churchill shouldn’t be neglected, however, because it sheds light on other important aspects of his personality: his disdain for other people’s opinions, his massive productivity, his expectation that his needs be met, his demand for beauty and comfort.

  One of Churchill’s most obvious qualities was his self-absorption, and one of the most obvious manifestations of this quality was his persistent trouble with money. Churchill was one of those heedless people who never thinks much about expenses and trusts that any difficulties will remedy themselves. He had a clear view of what his standard of living should be, and he spent as he needed, not as he had.

  In this, he was like his spendthrift father and mother: he exhibited the worst habits of careless British aristocrats and American nouveaux riches. Randolph and Jennie indulged in extravagances they couldn’t afford, and their son followed their example. It is the privilege of the aristocrat to ignore his bills. Six years after joining the Fourth Hussars, Churchill was still stalling the tailor who made his first uniforms. He ignored stacks of bills for wine, books, equipment. With lordly disdain for shopkeepers, he wrote his mother in 1897, “If I had not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills I should have the money now.”

  Churchill always managed to live well—“throughout his life the bells he rang were always answered”—but because his parents spent most of their money on themselves, he had to earn his own way. He didn’t, however, resort to the solution, then popular with impoverished British aristocrats, of marrying an heiress. Although descended from one of Scotland’s great families, Clementine had grown up in genteel poverty.

  While becoming the head of a family often has a steadying effect, it didn’t change Churchill. His carelessness was an unceasing irritation for the frugal, nervous Clementine. In the early days of their marriage, for example, she was shocked by how much he spent on underclothes—finely woven silk of pale pink, required, he claimed, by his sensitive skin.

  Despite their financial straits, Churchill refused to scrimp. His periodic attempts to impose a family budget didn’t h
elp, because it was he who wouldn’t economize. He dismissed his wife’s anxieties with the nonchalance of one who perpetually disregards the trouble he causes. He wrote to Clementine in September 1928:

  [D]o not worry about household matters. Let them crash if they will. All will be well. Servants exist to save one trouble, & shd never be allowed to disturb ones inner peace. There will always be food to eat, & sleep will come even if the beds are not made. Nothing is worse than worrying about trifles.

  This, from a man who didn’t tie his own shoelaces or dry himself after his bath but instead depended on his valet; who often lost money gambling; who spent freely on travel, liquor, paint, and his country house; who expected to entertain several times a week; who only once in his life would take the Underground. It seems unlikely his letter had the intended soothing effect.

  Though profligate, Churchill did manage to support himself and his family. “I have always had to earn every penny I possessed but there has never been a day in my life when I could not order a bottle of champagne for myself and offer another to a friend.” How? By writing. He earned a huge amount for his work and, furthermore, didn’t shrink from exploiting his famous name. In the particularly lean period of the 1930s, he was driven to writing for popular magazines on unserious topics such as “The American Mind and Ours,” “Iced Water,” and “Is There Life on the Moon?” He was paid more than £300 an article to retell famous stories, such as Anna Karenina and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, given that he paid an aide only £25 to write the pieces, earned him a tidy profit.

  Churchill was able to earn. The problem was that while he earned a fortune writing, he spent a still larger fortune. The family’s finances took a blow when Churchill bought the country house Chartwell in 1922. Churchill loved Chartwell, but for Clementine (whom he hadn’t consulted about the purchase), it was an unending source of worry. In addition to the expense of the payroll alone—cook, farmhand, groom, three gardeners, nanny, nursery maid, odd-jobs man, two housemaids, two kitchen maids, and two pantry maids—Churchill was constantly dreaming up money-consuming projects. Stock-market reverses and gambling losses also took a toll. From youth until after the Second World War, Churchill was almost continually in debt.

  In fact, only months before the Munich crisis in 1938, Churchill’s money troubles drove him to consider quitting Parliament, a move that would have blocked him from the Prime Ministership in 1940. He even considered selling his beloved Chartwell. In one of the fairy-tale solutions that periodically blessed Churchill—as in 1921, when a relative died in a train crash and left his entire Irish estate, worth more than £50,000, to Churchill—an expatriate South African tycoon bailed him out. Even so, Churchill spent much of the critical prewar period holed up at Chartwell, writing (or rather, dictating) as fast as he could to earn money. After the war, finally, his memoirs’ success solved his money problems.

  Because Churchill liked to enjoy the finest wines, cigars, and surroundings, with wonderful scenery to paint, he lent his prestige to anyone who had a well-appointed villa, private railcar, or yacht. Churchill also willingly accepted lavish gifts, a habit that today, at least, seems quite inappropriate for a politician. One controversial financier paid to furnish his drawing room; another time, a group of friends pitched in to buy him a car; more than once, he was rescued from financial distress by a wealthy patron.

  Churchill required that he get everything he wanted, and as a result, a pressing need for money was one of the shaping forces of his career.

  19

  CONFLICTING VIEWS OF CHURCHILL

  How Others Saw Him

  When we judge Churchill, we see his life whole, but his contemporaries judged him without the benefit of hindsight. What did they make of Churchill? Did they respect him, or not? Trust him, or not? Like him, or not? Evidence in the record supports contradictory conclusions.

  Churchill himself observed, “One mark of a great man is the power of making lasting impressions upon the people he meets.” For better or worse, Churchill certainly did so.

  About Churchill, contemporary accounts tell us . . .

  That many foresaw his great destiny:

  I feel certain that I shall someday shake hands with you as Prime Minister of England. You possess the two necessary qualifications: genius and plod.

  —CAPTAIN PERCY SCOTT, IN 1899

  That many expected he had no future in public life:

  He is absolutely untrustworthy as was his father before him, and he has got to learn that just as his father had to disappear from politics so must he, or at all events from official life.

  —LORD DERBY, IN 1916

  That he was much like his father:

  He is most tiresome to deal with & will I fear give trouble—as his father did—in any position to which he may be called. The restless energy, uncontrollable desire for notoriety & the lack of moral perception make him an anxiety indeed!

  —SIR FRANCIS HOPWOOD, IN 1907

  That he didn’t measure up to his father:

  Grimthorpe, a friend of Lord Randolph Churchill, compared the father and son. “It is just the difference between great capacity and genius. Winston has great ability, but he has not the genius of his father.”

  —LORD GRIMTHORPE

  That even his critics admitted he had great qualities:

  First impression: restless—almost intolerably so, without capacity for sustained and unexciting labour—egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality—not of intellect, but of character.

  —BEATRICE WEBB, IN 1903

  That even his admirers admitted he had many limitations:

  He has the defects of his qualities, and as his qualities are large, the shadow which they throw is fairly large also; but I say deliberately, in my judgment, in mental power and vital force he is one of the foremost men in our country.

  —ANDREW BONAR LAW, IN 1915

  That he was a gifted strategist:

  So far every step he contemplates is good, and he is brave, which is everything! Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness.

  —LORD FISHER, IN 1912

  That he was a poor strategist:

  A complete amateur of strategy, he swamps himself in details he should never look at and as a result fails ever to see a strategic problem in its true perspective.

  —GENERAL SIR ALAN BROOKE, IN 1944

  That he could captivate a crowd with his eloquence:

  To listen to him on the platform or in the House is sheer delight. The art of arrangement, the unexpected turn, the flashes of sparkling humour, and the torrent of picturesque adjectives combine to put his speeches in a class by themselves.

  —NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, IN 1928

  That he could weary a dinner party with his monologues:

  For nearly four hours a figure out of history had talked to us without reserve, and yet those who heard him appeared half asleep.

  —LORD MORAN, IN 1945

  That he was admired by those who served under him:

  The man’s as brave as six, as good-humored, shrewd, self-confident & considerate as a statesman can be: & several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanlike course & do the honest thing instead.

  —T. E. LAWRENCE, IN 1921

  That he was disliked by those who served under him:

  One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner . . . you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.

  —CLEMENTINE CHURCHILL, IN 1940

  That he showed tremendous powers of oratory:

  I have heard Mr. Churchill in the House of Commons at intervals over the last ten years. . . . To-day, he was different. There was little oratory; he wasn’t interested in being a showman. He spoke the language of Shakespeare with a direct
urgency such as I have never before heard in that House. There were no frills and no tricks.

  —EDWARD R. MURROW, OF THE JUNE 4, 1940, “WE SHALL FIGHT ON THE BEACHES” SPEECH

  That he sometimes failed to harness his powers of oratory:

  How I wish Winston would not talk on the wireless unless he is feeling in good form. He hates the microphone, and when we bullied him into speaking last night, he just sulked and read his House of Commons speech over again. Now, as delivered in the House of Commons, that speech was magnificent, especially the concluding sentences. But it sounded ghastly on the wireless.

  —HAROLD NICOLSON, OF THE JUNE 18, 1940, “THIS WAS THEIR FINEST HOUR” SPEECH

  That he had a deep understanding of the British people:

  By dramatising their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, [he] transformed cowards into brave men.

  —ISAIAH BERLIN

  That he had little affinity for ordinary men and women:

  His background (combined with the British caste system) made him a person who expected to be approached with great respect by those who worked for him. He was careful to keep each stratum in its proper place.