The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (42 page)

Q
UEEN
C
HARLOTTE’S DANCE WAS HELD
in the underground ballroom at the Grosvenor House Hotel, opposite the eastern border of Hyde Park. The Dorchester was several blocks south; the U.S. embassy, an equal distance to the east. Large Daimlers and Jaguars, their headlights reduced to slender crosses of light, eased their way slowly toward the hotel. Despite the likelihood of an air raid on such a clear, moonlit night, the hotel was thronged with young women in white—150 debutantes—and the many parents, young men, and post-debs who had come to launch them into society with a night of dining and dancing.

Mary Churchill, who had been “presented” the year before, spent Saturday with friends. She shopped with Judy Montagu: “Bought pretty nightdresses & lovely dressing gown.” She found the city busy and thronged with shoppers. “
I do find London shops
so
gay & pretty now,” she wrote. She and Judy and two other friends went to lunch, then attended a rehearsal for the ball’s traditional cake-cutting ceremony, where the new debs practiced curtsying toward a giant white cake. This was no mere curtsy but, rather, a carefully choreographed maneuver—left knee behind right, head erect, hands at side, smooth descent—taught by dance teacher Dame Marguerite Olivia Rankin, better known as Madame Vacani.

Mary and her friends watched in cold appraisal. “I must say,” Mary wrote, “we all agreed this year’s ‘debs’ aren’t much to write home about.”

After the rehearsal, Mary and another friend had tea at the Dorchester (“Great fun”) and later a manicure, then dressed for the ball. Mary wore blue chiffon.

Her mother and two other lofty society women had secured a table for themselves and their families and friends. As the dinner was about to begin, and just as Mary was going down the stairs to the ballroom, air-raid sirens began to sound. Then came “3 loud bangs,” these probably from an emplacement of heavy anti-aircraft guns across the street in Hyde Park, in a glade beyond the trees.

No one seemed to notice or care, though the rising clamor outside certainly provided an extra frisson of excitement that had been absent in prior years. In the ballroom, Mary wrote, “everything was gay & carefree & happy.” Deeming the underground ballroom to be as safe as a bomb shelter, Mary and the other attendees took their seats, and the dinner got underway. The band played; women and the debs’ delights began sweeping across the dance floor. No jazz here: That would come later, at the Café de Paris.

Mary could just make out the muffled sounds of anti-aircraft bursts and exploding bombs, which she described as “odd bumps and thuds above our chatter and the music.”

W
HEN THE RED ALERT SOUNDED,
Snakehips Johnson was having a drink with friends at the Embassy Club, after which he planned to take a cab to the Café de Paris for the start of his turn on the dais. Once outside, however, he found that there were no cabs, the drivers having sought shelter from the raid. His friends told him to stay and not risk going to the café in the midst of what clearly was a major raid. But Snakehips insisted on honoring his commitment to the club’s owner, Martin Poulsen, the cheery Dane, who had given him permission to play ten one-night stands at clubs outside London for some extra income.
He set off at a run, joking as he left about his own very black skin: “Nobody will notice me in the dark.”

Snakehips reached the club by nine forty-five, dashing through the black Blitz curtains at the top of the stairwell just inside the street entrance, and down the steps.

Tables surrounded a large dance floor in the shape of an oval, arrayed along a north-south axis, with a raised platform at the southern end for the band. Beyond this lay a large kitchen, which supplied ration-busting meals that included caviar, oysters, steaks, grouse, iced melon, sole, and peach melba, all to be accompanied by champagne. Two open stairways flanked the bandstand and led up to a balcony that ran along the walls of the club and held more tables, many of these favored by regulars for their views of the dance floor below and secured by large tips to Charles, the headwaiter. There were no windows.

The club was half full but was certain to fill to capacity by midnight. One guest, Lady Betty Baldwin, was the daughter of former prime minister Stanley Baldwin. She and a female friend had come to the club with two Dutch officers. At first peeved at not being given her favorite table, she and her date were now making their way to the dance floor. “
The men, almost all in uniform, seemed extraordinarily handsome, the young women very beautiful, the whole atmosphere one of great gaiety and youthful charm,” she said later.

The couple was just moving past the bandstand when Snakehips arrived, still winded from his run.

At this moment, twenty-one cooks and helpers were at work in the kitchen. Ten showgirls were preparing to dance out onto the floor. A waiter on the balcony pulled a table away from the wall in order to seat a newly arrived party of six. Harry MacElhone, the bartender, the former proprietor of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, now in exile, was in the midst of mixing drinks for a group of eight. A woman named Vera Lumley-Kelly was putting coins into a pay phone to call her mother and warn her to stay in the hall of her home until the raid was over. The band began to play a rousing jazz piece, “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” A guest named Dan wrote a special request on a menu. “Ken,” it said, meaning Snakehips. “
It is my sister’s birthday. Do you think you can squeeze in ‘Happy Birthday’ in a foxtrot? Thanks, Dan.”

Snakehips approached the right side of the bandstand. As always, he wore a sleek tux and a red carnation. Poulsen, the owner, and Charles, the headwaiter, stood together on the balcony.

A woman on the dance floor did a brisk dance step, jabbed her hand into the air, and called out, “Wow, Johnny!”

A
T THE
G
ROSVENOR
H
OUSE
H
OTEL,
Queen Charlotte’s ball continued without pause.

Mary wrote: “
It seemed so easy to forget—there in the light & warmth & music—the dark deserted streets—the barking of the guns—the hundreds of men & women ready at their posts—the bombs & death & blood.”

Outside, the raid worsened. The night sky filled with aircraft, and with sallow beams of light, as hot bright daisies flared against a black velvet canvas. The bombers dropped 130,000 incendiaries and 130 tons of high explosives. Fourteen high-explosive bombs fell across Buckingham Palace and Green Park, immediately to the north. Twenty-three bombs fell on or near the city’s Liverpool Street train station, including one that landed between platforms 4 and 5. An unexploded bomb forced doctors at Guy’s Hospital to evacuate the surgical ward. Another destroyed a police station in the City—the financial district—killing two, wounding twelve. Fire brigades reported encountering a new kind of incendiary: Upon landing, it launched flaming rockets two hundred feet into the air.

One bomb, weighing 110 pounds, fell through the roof of the Rialto Cinema, penetrated all the way to the basement dance floor of the Café de Paris, and exploded. It was nine-fifty
P.M
.

N
O ONE IN THE CLUB
heard the detonation, but everyone saw it and felt it: a bright flash; an extraordinary flash; a blue flash. Then a choking cloud of dust and cordite, and coal-black darkness.

A saxophone player named David Williams was torn in two. One of the Dutch officers in Betty Baldwin’s party lost his fingers. Six guests at one table died with no sign of external injury, and remained seated. The headwaiter, Charles, was thrown from the balcony to the floor, where he came to rest against a pillar on the other side of the room, dead. One young woman had her stockings torn off by the blast but otherwise was fine. Vera Lumley-Kelly, about to dial her mother on the pay phone, calmly hit the button marked “B,” which returned her change.

At first there was silence. Then came muffled voices and the sound of shifting debris as survivors attempted to move. Pulverized plaster filled the air and turned hair white. Faces were blackened with cordite.

“I was blown off my feet,” said one guest, “but the sensation was that of being pressed down by a great hand.” A band member named Yorke de Souza said, “I was watching the dance floor through half-shut eyes when there was a blinding flash. I found myself covered with rubble, plaster and glass on the band stand under the piano. I was choking on cordite. It was black as night.” His eyes adjusted. A light came from the kitchen. De Souza and another band member, named Wilkins, began looking for survivors and came across a body lying facedown. “
Wilkins and I tried to lift him up but the top of his body came away in our hands,” de Souza said. “It was Dave Williams”—the saxophonist—“I was violently sick as I let go of him. My eyes were blurred. I was walking in a haze.”

Lady Baldwin found herself sitting on the floor, with one foot pinned under debris. “It felt very hot,” she said. “I thought I was pouring with sweat.” Blood spilled from a jagged wound in her face. “A light appeared at the top of the stairs and I could see people going up the staircase carrying victims on their backs.” She and her Dutch officer found a cab and directed the driver to take her to her doctor’s office.

The driver said, “Kindly don’t bleed on the seat.”

The twenty-one kitchen workers survived unhurt, as did the ten dancers waiting to perform. An initial count placed the death toll at thirty-four; another eighty were injured, many maimed and gashed.

Snakehips was dead, his head severed from his body.

A
T LENGTH, THE DANCE
at the Grosvenor House Hotel subsided and the all clear sounded; the basement ballroom began to empty. Mary, with her mother’s permission, set out with friends and several mothers (not Clementine) to continue the fun. They headed toward the Café de Paris.

As the cars carrying Mary’s party neared the club, they found their approach blocked by bomb debris, ambulances, and fire engines. Air-raid wardens diverted traffic onto adjacent streets.

Among Mary’s group, the pressing question became, If they couldn’t reach the Café de Paris, where then should they try instead? They drove to another club and spent the rest of the night dancing. At some point, they learned about the bombing. “
Oh it was so gay our party…and suddenly it all seemed wrong & a mockery,” Mary wrote in her diary.

Until now, the guns, the crews manning them, and the distant sounds and flashes had all seemed very remote, outside the bounds of daily life. “Somehow,” she wrote, “these last did not seem real—of course it is only a terrible dream or figment of the imagination.

“But now—it is real—the Café de Paris hit—many fatal & serious casualties. They were dancing & laughing just like us. They are gone now in a moment from all we know to the vast, infinite unknown.”

One friend in her group, Tom Shaughnessy, sought to place the tragedy in context: “If those people who have been killed at the Café suddenly came back now & saw us all here—they would all say, ‘Go on—strike up the band—Carry on London.’ ”

And so they did, dancing, laughing, and joking until six-thirty on Sunday morning. “
Recalling it now,” Mary wrote years later, “I am a little shocked that we headed off to find somewhere else to twirl whatever was left of the night away.”

In the night’s incident report, London civil defense authorities called it “the worst raid since early January.”

A
T THREE A.M.,
H
ARRY
H
OPKINS
telephoned Chequers from Washington, D.C., and told John Colville that the U.S. Senate had passed the Lend-Lease Bill. The margin was 60 to 31.

F
OR
C
HURCHILL, THE CALL FROM
Harry Hopkins was welcome indeed, “
a draught of life.” The next morning, he cabled Roosevelt: “
Our blessings from the whole British Empire go out to you and the American nation for this very present help in time of trouble.”

His high spirits reached full blaze that evening, despite his bronchitis. Though plainly ill, he had worked all day at his usual heroic pace, reading papers and the latest intercepts from Bletchley Park and firing off various minutes and directives. Chequers was packed with guests, some of whom had stayed the night, others who’d arrived that day. Most of Churchill’s inner circle was present, including the Prof, Pug Ismay, and Colville. Here, too, were Churchill’s daughter Diana and her husband, Duncan Sandys, and Pamela Churchill. (Pamela typically left baby Winston back home in the Hitchin rectory, with his nanny.) An American observer, Colonel William Donovan, came on Sunday; Charles de Gaulle left that morning. The loftiest guest was Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, who stayed the weekend. Mary and Clementine returned from London, bearing accounts of the horrors and glories of Saturday night.

The party was in full swing, without Churchill, when just before dinner he at last came downstairs, wearing his sky-blue siren suit.

Over dinner the talk veered wildly, with what Colville described as “a lot of flippant conversation about metaphysics, solipsists and higher mathematics.” Clementine skipped dinner and spent the evening in bed; according to Mary, she had a bronchial cold. Mary was concerned, as well, about her father’s health. “
Papa not at
all
well,” she wrote in her diary. “V. worrying.”

But Churchill stormed on. After dinner, fueled with champagne and brandy, he fired up the Chequers gramophone and began to play military marches and songs. He brought out a big-game rifle, probably his Mannlicher, and began to march to the music, one of his favorite evening pastimes. He then executed a series of rifle drills and bayonet maneuvers, looking in his rompers like a fierce pale blue Easter egg gone to war.

General Brooke, commander in chief of Home Forces, found it both startling and hilarious. “
The evening remains very vivid in my mind,” he wrote later, in an addendum to his published diary, “as it was one of the first occasions on which I had seen Winston in one of his real light-hearted moods. I was convulsed watching him give the exhibition of bayonet exercises with his rifle, dressed up in his romper suit and standing in the ancestral hall of Chequers. I remember wondering what Hitler would have thought of this demonstration of skill at arms.”

For Churchill, this was an early night, his sole concession to his bronchitis. His guests were grateful. “
To bed at the record hour of 11:30 
P.M
.,” Colville wrote in his diary. General Brooke observed: “
Luckily PM decided to go to bed early and by midnight I was comfortably tucked away in an Elizabethan four poster bed dated 1550. I could not help wondering, as I went to sleep, what wonderful stories the bed could tell of its various occupants during the last 400 years!”

I
N
B
ERLIN,
J
OSEPH
G
OEBBELS
made note in his diary of the new “punishing attacks” on London, adding, “
There will be worse to come.”