Eleanor and Franklin (144 page)

And the most difficult duty of all:

I've just visited the children & also all hospitals on the coast. Lots of casualties now coming but the rate of killed is 4–1 which seems
appalling to me but is modern warfare. We do wonderful things for the wounded & I was happy to see seven out of the 14 boys in James' Makin Island raid all apparently getting well.
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The illusion of leisure that she had after she left the OCD was quickly dispelled by an inrush of new obligations, and by July she was writing Lady Willert in Oxford, “Somehow I do not seem to have had any free time this summer”; yet she also lamented, “I do not seem to be doing anything useful.” Helen Ferris of the Junior Literary Guild asked her to write something for the Guild's
Bulletin
about her war work. She complied, but reluctantly; she did not think it would appeal to the young.

I try to put as much as I can in War Bonds; to pay my debts; to do what I can for people who write about their friends and relatives in the Services, and to answer the many letters from soldiers themselves. I visit hospitals and see innumerable people from other countries in order to try to find out how they are meeting their problems and pass along the information here which could be useful in meeting some of our problems.

I have tried to help all the women in the Government who are charged with specific problems that touch on the war situation. And I have, of course, given what I could to various war charities.
⁷

As she contemplated the list, it seemed to her “pretty nebulous.” From time to time there had been stories in the press that she might visit England, and Lady Reading had strongly urged her to do so. The papers were talking of her going to England in a bomber, she said to Franklin after he had met Churchill at Argentia. “Are you and Harry cooking up something?” “Winston” had said to give her his regards, Franklin had replied; he had not said he wanted to see her. That was September, 1941. Now, perhaps because he sensed his wife's discontent, he began to encourage the project. “There is a very remote chance that sometime FDR may let me go to England this summer or autumn or winter if by doing so I can serve some good purpose both there and here,” she informed Maude. The British and American people ought to know “a great deal more about each other,” she wrote her Allenswood classmate Bennett. She would like to bring home to some of the women in the United States “what the average household in England is going through.”
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There were problems, too, between American and British troops where she thought she might be helpful, problems arising from the better food served American troops, their higher pay, and the posting of Negro GIs to England, although the latter vexed white Americans more than it did Englishmen. She had heard from several people, she wrote Stimson, that young southerners in England “were very indignant to find that Negro soldiers were not looked upon with terror by the girls in England and Ireland and Scotland. I think we will have to do a little educating among our Southern white men and officers.” When Stimson learned that Eleanor was going to Britain he asked Roosevelt confidentially to caution his wife not to raise the issue during her visit. Roosevelt, Stimson noted in his diary, was sympathetic “to our attitude” and said he would pass the word on to Mrs. Roosevelt.
⁹

By mid-September the visit had been arranged. The invitation from Queen Elizabeth expressed her and the king's pleasure if Eleanor would care to pay a visit to England and see something of the women's war activities, and hoped she would stay a few days with them at Buckingham Palace.

H
ER
M
AJESTY
, T
HE
Q
UEEN:

I am deeply appreciative of your very kind invitation to visit you in England. I shall try to come somewhere around the middle of October. I shall be very happy if I might spend two nights with you and His Majesty, the King, and after that I think I should devote my entire time to seeing all that I can of the British women's war effort, and our own groups over there. It will be a great pleasure to see you again.

Eleanor Roosevelt.

“I think it will be of immense value your going over,” Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, assured her, “and you will have no difficulty in getting the kind of direct impression of typical people in their homes of which you spoke yesterday.” Her English schedule was placed in the highly competent hands of Lady Reading. Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby, who was in charge of the women's auxiliary of the Army, was accompanying her to England. She was not part of the official party, which was to consist only of Tommy and Eleanor, but Eleanor wanted to tour the women's military establishments with Mrs. Hobby. She also asked Ambassador John Gilbert Winant to find her “a simple, inexpensive
hotel” in which to stay after she left Buckingham Palace—“I am afraid Claridge's is too expensive.” Franklin instructed her to see “the Duchess of Kent and my godson, and Queen Mary and Queen Wilhelmina.” She should also see, if they called on her, “King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, King George of Greece, King Peter of Yugoslavia, The President of Poland, Beneěs of Czechoslovakia, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Margaret and Tony Biddle.”
¹⁰

The trip began under condition of secrecy so that the time of her departure should not be known to the enemy. She and Tommy were driven in a Secret Service car to a back entrance at the airport. The curtains were drawn in the flying boat in which they made the journey, and they were permitted to open them only after the autumn-hued coast line of Cape Cod was receding in a reddish-brown haze. It was a smooth twenty-hour journey, but transatlantic travel was still a novelty with some element of danger, and the sense of coming closer to the war was heightened when all on board were sworn to secrecy after they had sighted a convoy with its escorting destroyers zigzagging about like skittering insects. They landed at Foynes. There were many Nazi agents in Dublin, and it was thought prudent to keep the First Lady's arrival secret. Though no one was supposed to know of her presence, as Eleanor came up the gangplank and embraced Maude Gray, an onlooker said, “Why there's Mrs. Roosevelt.” The weather made it impossible to proceed to London, so they spent the night at Kilgobbin, Lord and Lady Adare's great landed estate in County Limerick. The family felt extremely poor, Eleanor learned that night, but in the diary of the trip, she had begun to keep, she observed that “it is one of those cases of comparative poverty.”
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The next day she, Tommy, Colonel Hobby, and the colonel's aide flew to Bristol in a plane that the prime minister sent. Ambassador Winant was there to meet her and to accompany her in the prime minister's special train to London. Eleanor liked Winant very much and had always found him helpful. When Harry Hopkins had told her that in London she did not have to bother with Winant but should deal with Averell Harriman, who was in charge of the Lend Lease operations in the British capital, she became quite angry and during her whole stay in England would have nothing to do with Averell, whom she had known since he was a small boy. As the train approached the end of its two-hour journey, she asked Winant why they had not flown to London. The ambassador was not sure; he had only been told that the king and queen never met anyone at the airport.

The prime minister's special train, the knowledge that she was to be met by the king and queen and spend two nights at Buckingham Palace, the appearance, as the train drew to a halt in Paddington Station, of the station master, as formally dressed and dignified as a lord of the realm, suddenly roused the insecurity she had suffered when as a bride of Franklin's they had stayed at some of the great houses in England. Why, she asked herself, had she ever let herself in for this? But outwardly she was serene and poised, and from the moment “she jumped from the train to grip the Queen's hand to a final informal chat sitting on the edge of a chair in the American Service Club in Edinburgh, 21 days later,” noted the
London Daily Mail
after her departure, she created the image “of a personality as symbolically American as the Statue of Liberty itself.”
¹²
The king was in a powder-blue uniform of an air marshal, the queen in a coat of black velvet, and Eleanor in a long, back-flared coat with a blue-fox scarf and a feathered hat of red, green, and white. “I hope you left the President in good health,” the king, who seemed less at ease than the two women, said. “Yes, he is in very good health and wished that he could have come himself.” “We welcome you with all our hearts,” the queen added. Eleanor then presented Tommy, Colonel Hobby, and the aide, and proceeded to say a few words to the rest of the group who were assembled on the red carpet to greet her—Lady Reading, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral Harold R. Stark.

As the royal limousine, a big Daimler, drove out of the station, a loud cheer went up. An alert reporter noted that through the whole welcoming ceremony the First Lady was carrying a large book,
Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column
. At Buckingham Palace, which, like Paddington Station, had its quota of bomb scars, the king and queen showed her to her rooms, apologizing for the windows, which had been blown out and replaced either by wooden or isinglass panels. Eleanor had an enormous suite and a bedroom which Elliott, when he saw it, compared to the long corridor in the White House.

She had tea with the king and queen around a set table, “as I used to have in my childhood,” and met Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She found Elizabeth to be “quite serious and a child with a great deal of character and personality. She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions.” Tommy, in the meantime, had had tea with the ladies-in-waiting in their sitting room. Afterward she and Tommy did a little work—diary,
column, and correspondence—before dinner at 8:30. Although the guests included some of the highest dignitaries in the realm—Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, General Smuts, Winant, the Mountbattens, and Elliott, whose reconnaissance squadron was based seventy miles outside of London—dinner was a three-course wartime meal. Eleanor sat between the king and Churchill. “I found the P.M. not easy to talk to, which was my experience in Washington,” she noted. She got along well with the king, as she did with the queen. They still seemed to her, as they had in Washington, to be a young and charming couple who were doing a remarkable job of setting their people an example of character and devotion to duty. After dinner the company saw Noel Coward's film
In Which We Serve
and then Eleanor had a long talk with Elliott, until about two in the morning, and was pleased to note that his hostility toward the English was changing to admiration. “It is very good for the young to learn that their rather harsh, snap judgments are not always correct.”
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The next morning there was a press conference at the embassy. Eleanor was visibly startled by the turnout, “a very formidable group but it went well, I was told.” At lunch the queen brought together the heads of the women's organizations. Colonel Hobby was there, and, noted Eleanor, she “curtsied to the King and Queen.” Altogether there were fourteen women alone with the king, he “seemed to take it with great calm.”

That afternoon she began her round of inspections, tours, speeches, and receptions. “Hustle, did you say?” a British reporter wrote later; “she walked me off my feet!” She walked “fifty miles through factories, clubs and hospitals,” reporters estimated later when, “glassy-eyed and sagged at the knees,” they returned from a seven-day tour of the Midlands, Ulster, and Scotland.
¹⁴

That first afternoon she went with the king and queen to view the destruction. The “City” was gutted. St. Paul's gaped open to the skies, and the dean told her that he and other church officials slept in the crypt during the bad blitzes in order to put out the fires more quickly. They toured London's East End and the queen remarked that the only solace in the destruction was that new housing would replace the slums that had been leveled. Eleanor stood aghast before the Guildhall ruins, and as she spoke with the different types of civilian-defense personnel who were gathered there—decontamination squads, fire-fighters, policewomen, many of whom were decorated for bravery—it was
again borne in on her how England's home front was literally part of the battlefront.

That evening was Labor's night at the Palace. Ernest Bevin, the bluff and well-muscled minister of labor, was a guest, as was Lord Woolton. “He's your only Socialist peer, Sir,” Bevin remarked to the king. Conversation with the Labor men was easier than with Churchill. Bevin told her about “Bevin's boys”—the three hundred Indian workers whom he had brought to England to teach skills and trade unionism. Woolton interested her because as a young man he had gone into the slums to experience conditions there and then had gone into business to prove that one could provide decent wages and good working conditions and still make money.

On Sunday the king, queen, and princess saw her off at the door after breakfast, more like friends saying good-by than any formal leave-taking, and she moved into the apartment the Winants had made available to her. She then went to visit the Washington Club, the American Red Cross Club in Mayfair. It was crowded, and the soldiers and sailors “mobbed” her. “Hi, Eleanor,” some called out, and soon she was involved in a question-and-answer session. There were complaints about the slowness of the mail and the lack of American-style food in the messes, and the Red Cross ladies were concerned about the lack of woolen socks; the boys wore “cotton ones and their feet were blistered.” She took that up with General Eisenhower the next evening. He had had his supply people check, he wrote her later: