September 4, 2022

The Art of Being Winston Churchill: Imbibing

By BARRY SINGER

In September 1941, while visiting Manston Aerodrome in Kent to inspect No. 615 Fighter Squadron, his own honorary RAF unit, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was offered tea proudly prepared by the airmen. “Good God, no,” he replied, “my wife drinks that, I’ll have a brandy.”

“The Prime Minister is an austere man, who works night and day,” wrote Lord Beaverbrook to a friend in March 1942. “It is said that he drinks. But this is not true. I drink every day, or have in the past taken more to drink every day than the Prime Minister—yet I am known as an abstemious man. I do not know a fault of his life, save only a too strong devotion to his friends.”

Barry Singer is proprietor of Chartwell Booksellers in New York City and author of Churchill Style (2012).