In late June 1940, with France collapsing and Britain braced for invasion, Clementine Churchill sat down at Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, and wrote a letter to her husband. She wrote it, tore it up, and days later gave it to him anyway. She had been warned by one of his most devoted friends that Winston was making himself disliked by the very colleagues and subordinates he depended on, and the cause was his manner. She did not name the friend, and the sources that survive do not name him either.
She signed herself his loving, devoted, and watchful Clemy. No written reply was ever found. Clementine knew the man she was addressing better than anyone alive. They had been married for almost thirty-two years and had exchanged roughly 1,700 letters over a lifetime, learning to say their hardest things on paper.
She began gently, telling him she had noticed a deterioration in his manner and that he was not so kind as he used to be. Then she set out the charge plainly. A devoted friend had come to her with a blunt warning: the people Winston relied on most were coming to dislike him because of his rough, sarcastic, and overbearing manner. She reminded him of the extraordinary power he held.
As prime minister in wartime, he could dismiss almost anyone in the land, except the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Speaker of the House of Commons. With that terrific power, she wrote, he must combine urbanity, kindness, and if possible, Olympic calm. She quoted back to him a maxim he once used himself: one rules the souls of others only through calm. She warned that his contemptuous treatment of ideas in conference would soon stop good ideas from being offered at all, and that his irascibility and rudeness would breed either dislike or a slave mentality.
She had seen the danger from inside; it was not the opinion of a hostile press or political rivals. It was the warning of a devoted wife and a loyal friend who genuinely feared that the man who might save the country was making himself impossible to work for. Seven weeks earlier, on 10 May 1940, Winston Churchill had become prime minister. Those seven weeks were among the most frightening in British history.
By their end, France had fallen. Churchill was sixty-five and regularly worked eighteen-hour days, driving his staff hard and driving himself harder. Many in the establishment had never wanted him. On the day he took office, the diplomat Rab Butler had muttered that the good, clean tradition of English politics had been sold to the greatest adventurer in modern political history.
Yet the moment demanded an adventurer, and the qualities that had made the establishment distrust him were the ones the crisis required. The people who now had to work for him were about to experience those qualities at close quarters. Clementine’s warning was practical. A prime minister surrounded by frightened men would hear only what he wanted to hear, and in the summer of 1940 a single unheard warning might decide the war.
Their daughter Mary believed the couple talked the matter over in person, as a long marriage learns to do. The letter now lies in the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge. Whether it changed him is impossible to say with certainty. The testimonies of those who served him suggest the pattern of his manner never fully changed.
What the record does show is that the problem was seen from inside at the very start, by the one person he could not dismiss. The pattern of Churchill’s private behaviour had been forming all his life. Born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, the grandson of a duke, he grew up hungry for the approval of a father who rarely gave it. Lord Randolph Churchill wrote him crushing letters, warning that if he did not mend his ways he would degenerate into a shabby, unhappy, and futile existence.
His mother seemed to him unkind. He learned early what it was to receive a wound in writing. The fury his secretaries would meet decades later had old roots, and he rarely examined them. His appetite for action was visible to everyone around him.
He was impatient with those who moved slowly and charming to those who amused him. In 1911, as Home Secretary, he stood in a London street in a top hat and fur-collared coat watching a house burn during the Siege of Sidney Street, authorizing soldiers and stopping the fire brigade while the cameras turned. He admitted the criticism of his presence was not altogether unjust. He wanted to be at the centre of events, directing them himself.
The need never left him. In 1940 it would help save a country. In 1911 it made him look like a man who had wandered onto a stage. That same year, in the Welsh mining valley of Tonypandy, he intervened in a way that would follow him for forty years.
Miners were on strike and rioting. Churchill stopped a troop train, sent only cavalry to Cardiff, and sent police from London instead. Then, as the situation grew worse, he allowed the cavalry to move in. No soldier ever fired a shot, and one man, a minor named Samuel Rees, died of a head wound.
In the valley, a different story took hold, that Churchill had sent troops to shoot the miners. It was a legend, but it was believed for generations. He never let it go, and his own defence went too far when he later claimed no one had been hurt at all. In 1915, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he pushed his plan to force the Dardanelles against half-hearted and hesitating expert opinion.
The naval attack failed, the Gallipoli campaign cost hundreds of thousands of casualties, and he was forced out of office. Clementine later said he thought he was finished and that she thought he would die of grief. He went to the trenches in France to command a battalion, then returned to politics to face a commission of inquiry that found he should have made his naval advisers’ doubts plain to the council. In 1919, as Minister for War, he wrote a minute saying he did not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas and that he was strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.
His defenders argue he meant tear gas, a weapon that frightened more than it killed. The minute itself survives, and it says what it says. Fourteen months later he condemned the Amritsar massacre in the plainest language, calling it an extraordinary event, a monstrous event without precedent in the modern history of the British Empire. Both documents are his, and both are genuine.
Through the 1920s and 1930s he bought and rebuilt Chartwell, a house he could not afford, spending more than three times the purchase price on renovations while his debts mounted. He gambled on the stock market, borrowed heavily, and was rescued by rich friends more than once. In 1938, owing his stockbrokers £18,000, Chartwell was put up for sale. A South African financier, Sir Henry Strakosch, paid the debt and took the house off the market.
In 1931, a car struck him on Fifth Avenue in New York, leaving him badly injured with cracked ribs and pleurisy. The same year, he publicly called Gandhi a seditious Middle Temple lawyer posing as a half-naked fakir. He fought Indian self-government for years with the same fierce certainty he brought to his warnings about Hitler, and the campaign nearly destroyed his credibility. By the late 1930s, the man who was warning that Germany was rearming under Hitler had been dismissed by his own party as a has-been.
In December 1936, he gave one of the most disastrous parliamentary performances of his life, rising in the House of Commons to defend King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. Members shouted him down. He left the chamber muttering that he was finished. Within four years he would hold the fate of the country in his hands.
Wartime secretaries left the clearest record of what working for him meant. Elizabeth Nel, called in her first night to take dictation at ten o’clock, typed a speech in single spacing when he had demanded double. He exploded, called her a fool and an idiot, and ordered her out. She was so shaken she could not work for him again for days.
Later, when she was in tears, he turned to her and said she must not mind him, that they were all toads beneath the harrow. She spent four years at his side and remembered him with deep affection. The pattern repeated across the accounts: the fury first, then the praise, the compliment offered instead of an apology. He almost never said sorry in words.
He made amends with charm. His working day ran from a bed and a bath. He woke late, worked from bed in a red dressing gown with a cigar and a cat named Nelson, and dictated to secretaries who worked in relays until two or three in the morning. His bath was run at ninety-eight and two-thirds degrees Fahrenheit, and secretaries took dictation there too.
One private secretary recorded that watching him compose a telegram was like being present at the birth of a child. Another wrote that he was impatient yet understanding, obstinate yet open to conviction, fierce but never vindictive. The generals who served him met the other half of the sentence. Sir John Dill, the head of the army, was nicknamed Dilly-Dally and eased out of his post at the end of 1941.
General Wavell was removed from the Middle East after a failed offensive. General Auchinleck, pressed again and again to attack, learned he was being replaced when a staff officer delivered the prime minister’s letter. The officer wrote that he felt as if he were going to murder an unsuspecting friend. Brooke, who replaced Dill, absorbed Churchill’s nights for the rest of the war and wrote the verdict in his private diary.
He called him a genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision, the most difficult man to work with he had ever struck. After one terrible meeting he wrote that he had never admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. England, he wrote, was lost without him and on the verge of disaster with him. Years later, reading his own diaries again, Brooke felt ashamed of the abuse he had poured on him and concluded it had been worth every difficulty for the privilege of working with such a man.
In 1943, the province of Bengal in British India began to starve. The number of dead is fiercely disputed, with estimates ranging from one and a half million to more than three million. The causes were many: Burma had fallen to Japan, a cyclone had struck, the local administration made grave mistakes, and shipping was desperately short everywhere. Churchill’s war cabinet rejected requests for food and offered only token shipments.
The most damaging evidence comes from the private diary of Leo Amery, his own Secretary of State for India, who recorded Churchill speaking of Indians breeding like rabbits and once writing that he was not sure whether Winston was really quite sane. Amery also recorded Churchill calling the Hindus a beastly people with a beastly religion. Even his most devoted defender concedes that in those fraught weeks Churchill said things off the record that were unworthy of him. His son Randolph was the private tragedy of his life.
Spoiled and indulged as a boy, brilliant, charming, rude and loud, he never won a contested election in his life. He gambled, drank and quarrelled ferociously with his father. Once, in 1944, when the Yugoslav leader Tito said to Churchill, you have sent us your son, tears rolled down Winston’s cheeks. Randolph himself put it most sadly: I do so very much love that man, he said of his father, but something always goes wrong between us.
He died in 1968, three years after his father. After the war, Churchill was voted out of office in July 1945. He was seventy, with no war to run and no office to command. He said he could not live long without champagne, in victory he deserved it, in defeat he needed it.
He came back to power in October 1951, a month short of his seventy-seventh birthday. Within a year, a state of emergency was declared in Kenya against the Mau Mau uprising. More than a million people were moved into supervised villages, torture and forced labour were regular occurrences in the detention camps, and more than a thousand people were hanged. The record of Churchill’s own words on Kenya is thin.
His critics answer that he was prime minister and the camps ran on his watch. In 1953, at a dinner for the Italian prime minister, Churchill suffered a stroke. He sat down abruptly, found he could not move easily, and his speech was slurred. The next morning he chaired the cabinet, and nobody noticed.
His doctors drafted an honest bulletin, but senior ministers changed it. The public was told only that the prime minister was in need of a complete rest. The word stroke was never spoken. The press barons who knew the truth kept the secret.
The world learned of it only in 1966, from the published memoir of his doctor. He resigned at last on 5 April 1955 at the age of eighty. His portrait for his eightieth birthday, painted by Graham Sutherland, was called filthy and malignant in private. His wife had it hidden in a cellar at Chartwell, and a loyal secretary had it burned in a garden at night.
The world did not learn of its destruction until after Clementine’s death. Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965 at the age of ninety. He was given a state funeral and buried at Bladon beside his parents. The witnesses then began to speak.
The doctor who published first proved the least reliable. The general who wrote the harshest words was the most ashamed of them. The secretaries who suffered most directly from his temper were the slowest to speak and the kindest when they did. Elizabeth Nel’s verdict was a list, and she let the contradictions stand: impatient, kind, irritable, crushing, generous, inspiring, difficult, alarming, amusing, unpredictable, considerate, seemingly impossible to please, charming, demanding, inconsiderate, quick to anger, and quick to forgive.
Difficult to work for, yes, mostly lovable, always amusing without fail. His wife saw it first and put it best. With this terrific power, she wrote, you must combine urbanity, kindness, and if possible, Olympic calm. He found it in flashes at two in the morning when the storm had passed and the compliment arrived, but it never became his nature.
The fury that his secretaries met had old roots, and the certainty that made him unbearable to work for was the same certainty that made him unbreakable in 1940. Brooke knew both sides and said it in his diary: England was lost without him and on the verge of disaster with him. The people in the room had to live with both. Nearly every harsh word about him from inside his circle was written in private by people who went on serving him.
The secretaries were called fools and stayed for years. Clementine tore up her letter, delivered it anyway, and stayed at his side for another quarter century. She believed he could be better, and she knew no one else would dare.
For fifty-six years she was his loving, devoted, and watchful Clemy.