Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (20 page)

Churchill preferred his Irish stew with “plenty of small onions and not much broth”.
26
Irish stew was on offer at a lunch with General Eisenhower, and when Ike praised the sauce and crust – mostly potatoes and some meat – Churchill promised that “this would be our main dish for the
Tuesday
luncheons. It was.”
27
Irish stew also became a favourite with Eisenhower’s Chief-of-Staff, Walter Bedell Smith, who joined Ike and Churchill for private lunches on Tuesdays in the months before D-Day. We are less sure of why Churchill once complained that someone “forgot to add pineapple chunks” to his Irish Stew”.
28

Churchill’s preference for well-cooked plain foods was not rigidly applied. On 25 September 1985, at a commemorative dinner at the Savoy, The International Churchill Societies (as The Churchill Centre was then called) served a dinner that included what were believed to be Churchillian choices. Here is that menu in full:

Richard Langworth reports that Churchill preferred Stilton to sweet desserts, “but he could easily be persuaded to take both”.
38

Another source tells us that Churchill ordered “off the menu when it came to the dessert course. His choice of Roquefort cheese, a peeled pear and mixed ice-cream never varied,”
39
– although we do know that there were times when Stilton was at least equally preferred to Roquefort.

I have found very few Churchill comments on dessert. At a lunch in 1941, when a baked jam pudding was served, he said: “This is the sort of thing which helps [Minister of Food] Lord Woolton” and expressed great “satisfaction at seeing it on the table”.
41
Note that he did not say anything about the dessert itself or its taste. Lady Williams, who dined frequently with him when serving as his secretary during his second premiership, recalls that he never ate fruits (except at breakfast), puddings or sweets. He did, however, once seem irritated because Mrs. Churchill had apparently “used some of his favourite honey, sent from Queensland, to sweeten the
rhubarb”.
42
No mention that he actually ate the dessert.

Churchill scoops caviar, lunch at Yalta

Churchill did, however, have a “passion for cream”, Norman McGowan tells us, and “would empty the jug himself and then look around the table. “Does anyone want cream?” he would ask rather pugnaciously.”
43

Menus, of course, are one thing, quantities of food
actually
consumed are quite another. Although Churchill loved caviar, and can be seen dipping into a large vat of the
delicacy
at Yalta, Lady Williams notes that he ate only small portions.

It is obvious that some eye witnesses’ reports are at
variance
with others, at least in details recollected. No matter. In the end what does matter for our purposes is that Churchill never allowed his preferences for food and wine to interfere with the main purpose of his dinner gatherings, or with the conviviality of the occasion. People and conversation were always the indispensable items on his menus.

C
HAPTER
11

Champagne, Whisky and Brandy

C
hurchill consumed what by modern standards are large quantities of alcohol. Among his list of essential
provisions
when, not yet 25, he set sail for South Africa in 1899 on a journalistic assignment to cover the Boer War, were some forty bottles of wine and “18 bottles of Scotch whiskey (10 years old), 12 Rose’s Old Lime Juice …” plus packing cases and the correct labelling.
3
How much of this he was
planning
to consume personally we cannot be certain. He might have intended some for entertaining his fellow journalists and officers, or for gifts.

Churchill was a lifelong consumer of whisky,
insisting 
that it be served without ice,
4
and very weak indeed.
5
He drank it so weak that close observers described it as “mouthwash”. For Churchill, whisky was an acquired taste – a drink he initially “disliked intensely” but for which he overcame his early “repugnance”, writing in 1930 that “to this day, although I have always practiced true temperance, I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic standing refreshment of the white officer in the East.”
6

That Churchill enjoyed whisky in the diluted form in which he habitually imbibed it there is little doubt. Confined to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City after being hit by a car in 1931, he asked the attending physician, Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt, to write the following note, which he knew he would need in that era of Prohibition:

A decade later, President Roosevelt’s adviser, Rexford Tugwell, reported that during long evening conversations between Churchill and the President, “quantities of
spirits
disappeared … although Churchill thrived on them.”
8
Another Roosevelt speech writer, Robert Sherwood, noted that “the wine flowed more freely” when Churchill was in the White House.
9

It is, however, a long way from enjoying whisky – and other alcoholic beverages – to doing so to excess. The evidence on Churchill’s alcohol consumption is not
straightforward
,
since many contemporary observers have left us differing accounts, and Churchill himself was no stranger to myth-weaving. Like the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who knew the value of her image as a no-nonsense gin-and-tonic-drinking woman, Churchill saw political profit in portraying himself as a whisky, champagne and brandy lover. Captain Butcher, one of Eisenhower’s top aides, wrote after the war: “Ike had the impression that the PM rather relishes his reputation as a heavy smoker and drinker, but actually is much more moderate than rumour would indicate.”
10
Unfortunately, there were times when the myth was not useful: before he met Churchill, Roosevelt had heard tales of his later-to-be comrade-in-arms’ fondness for alcohol, and felt constrained to ask Wendell Willkie, his Republican presidential rival who later became his emissary, on the latter’s return from a visit to Britain in 1941: “Is he a drunk?”
11

The short answer to that question should have been “No”. For one thing, to use the vernacular, Churchill could hold his liquor, Tugwell’s comment that he “thrived” on quantities of spirits being only one of several such
observations
. Robert McCormick, publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
and Churchill’s host during his 1932 visit to Chicago, told his own doctor: “The only man I know who can drink more liquor and hold it better than I is Winston Churchill.”
12
And after a meeting at Chequers in the summer of 1941, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, wrote in his diary:

Roosevelt’s speech writer, Robert Sherwood, noticed that Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours without visible effect”.
14
And Michael Reilly, head of presidential security, was “open mouthed in awe” at “the complete sobriety that went hand in hand with his drinking”.
15

One of Churchill’s wartime private secretaries, John Peck, writing to Sir Martin Gilbert, reported: “Personally, throughout the time I knew him I
never
saw him the worse for drink.”
16

Another reason for disbelieving reports that Churchill drank to excess is that many come from political
opponents
or unhappy political allies, or are simply
implausible
. In the former category we have comments from a diverse group: Adolf Hitler, Lord Reith, supporters of Neville Chamberlain, and Oliver Harvey.

H
ITLER
: A report, cited by A.N. Wilson, states that Hitler referred to Churchill as that “super-annuated
drunkard
supported by Jewish gold”.
17
Whether Hitler was the
victim
of over-zealous intelligence reports or wishful thinking, or both, we do not know. That it was not based on first-hand evidence we do know: the German Führer and the British Prime Minister never met.

R
EITH
: No fan of Churchill, the ill-humoured Lord Reith, former head of the BBC, wrote in his diary for 14 April 1940, after a lunch with Churchill at the Admiralty, that he “looked as if he had been drinking too much – as he did last Wednesday”. Reith’s report was undoubtedly coloured by Churchill’s barrage of criticisms of the BBC,
perhaps best summarised by these remarks to Lord Moran:

C
HAMBERLAIN
: It obviously suited Churchill’s
political
opponents, and he of course accumulated many over his long career in politics, to engage in a bit of character
assassination
. Andrew Roberts’ research reveals one such instance: Chamberlain’s supporters played up Churchill’s drinking as “part of their general air of moral superiority”.
19

H
ARVEY
: Churchill’s relations with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, were always fraught, in part
because
of Eden’s impatience to move into No. 10. Which might explain why, in December 1944, Oliver Harvey, then Private Secretary to Eden, wrote in his own war diaries, “at 10:30 last night Churchill, Eden and others met in the bowels of the earth. P.M. in his boiler suit and rather sozzled, A.E. in his bottled green smoking coat … P.M. bellicose and
repetitive
, repeating snatches from the long speeches to the Poles we heard in Moscow.”
20

Then we have the implausible tales. One such comes to us from Stalin’s Marshal of the Air Forces, A.E. Golovanov, who described Churchill’s behaviour at a dinner with the Soviet leader on 14 or 15 August 1942:

It is quite possible that Stalin was boasting to his colleagues of his ability to out-drink Britain’s Prime Minister. Other reports of the same meeting suggest that Churchill avoided excessive consumption of alcohol even on that very liquid occasion. “Every five minutes throughout the dinner,” Lord Moran wrote, “we were drinking somebody’s health.”
22
The “list of toasts appeared interminable”,
23
but even after an added round of post-dinner liqueurs with Stalin, Churchill took his leave at such a pace down the Kremlin’s long
corridors
that, according to Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (then British Ambassador to the Soviet Union), Stalin had to “trot, for he had to be brisk in order to keep pace with Mr. Churchill …”
24
That report is separately confirmed by Lord Moran, and is hardly consistent with the description of Churchill walking out “unsteadily”.

It does seem that Churchill meant it when he wrote that excessive drink “causes a comatose insensibility”.
25
“Whatever Churchill’s consumption of alcohol”, writes one Churchill historian, “it was a lifetime habit, not a
temporary
response to the pressure and tension of wartime
leadership
. There is no credible evidence that Churchill’s drinking persistently affected his policies during the war, or, for that matter, his policies before the war.”
26
A careful study of the minutes of the various international meetings he attended, and of diaries of those who dined with him, furnishes no reliable evidence that he ever became what is now called “impaired” in circumstances where that would be dangerous to the interests of his nation or interfere with the
performance 
of his various jobs. My own interviews with people who knew Churchill well confirm historian Robert Rhodes James’s conclusion that Churchill’s drinking has been “
grossly
exaggerated”,
27
a view borne out by Lord Alanbrooke.

In his diaries, the Field Marshal was quick to condemn some of Churchill’s friends and colleagues for drinking more than they should have, but only once suggests that Churchill over-indulged. Alanbrooke writes on 6 July 1944 that the Prime Minister “was very tired … and had tried to
recuperate
with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offense at anything,
suspicious
of everybody and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans”. If correct, and it is not impossible that such instances occurred, but rarely, it should be remembered that this was only a month after D-Day, on a day during which he had already given a speech in the House on the “flying bombs, and had a meeting that lasted from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m.”
28
One can easily imagine that he would have been
exhausted
. “It is surprising that there are only three or four places where the [Alanbrooke] diary criticizes [Churchill’s] practice [of drinking daily] while three other personages are labelled outright drunks: the American Admiral King, Australian Commander in Chief General Blamey, and senior Soviet General Voroshilov.”
29

Despite the weight of the evidence, the myth of Churchill regularly drinking to excess persists. Even the voluntary
docents
at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park residence in New York
perpetuate
the myth, telling visitors that Churchill used to walk around “all day with a drink in his hand”. Not so. When I
visited
Hyde Park with Lady Williams, she corrected the guide in no uncertain terms. “This tale is false,” she said. “The Prime Minister would not have walked around throughout
the day with a glass in his hand. It was not his style.”

Then there are the anecdotes, as colourful as they are contradictory. Even the most casual student of Churchill is familiar with the never-confirmed tale of Bessie Braddock’s charge, “Winston, you are drunk,” to which Churchill is
alleged
to have responded: “Bessie, you are ugly. But
tomorrow
I shall be sober.”
30
The popularity of this anecdote, in which Churchill seems to acknowledge inebriation, adds to the myth of his alcoholic excesses, a myth he did nothing to dispel. Note that even on this occasion – assuming there had been such an occasion – Churchill was quite capable of a lucid and cutting answer to a critic.

Churchill must be considered culpable for contributing to the myth-making, for reasons mentioned earlier. He enjoyed entertaining his guests with comments on his drinking habits. At a dinner given by Roosevelt on his yacht,
Williamsburg
, in 1942, Churchill asked his scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, whom he called “Prof”, to whip out his ever-present slide rule and do a calculation. The Prime Minister estimated that in 62 years he had on average consumed a quart of wine and spirits a day. Question: if all of those drinks were poured into the salon in which they were dining, how deep would they be? The response from the teetotaller Prof was: “Just under two-and-a-half feet.” This, the future US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, reported, was “very disappointing to the Old Man. He had expected that we would all be
swimming
like goldfish in a bowl, whereas it would hardly come up to our knees”.
31