April 21, 2014

Memoirs of Churchill’s Private Secretary, 1940-1955

By SIR JOHN COLVILLE CB CVO
Sir John Colville, known as “Jock” (1915-1987), was an English civil servant who served three prime ministers: Chamberlain, Churchill and Attlee. He was assistant private secretary to Churchill in 1940-41 and 1943-45 and joint principal private secretary in 1951-55. His diaries, Fringes of Power, are a standard primary source. These remarks were delivered at the Pinafore Room, Savoy Hotel, London, on 22 May 1983 during the First Churchill Tour, conducted by the then-International Churchill Society.

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My wife and I are most grateful for your kind invitation here to the Pinafore Room, which as you know is the meeting place of The Other Club. In fact, we only met last a fortnight ago. I should like to introduce the black cat, over on my left. If there should ever happen to be 13 people to dinner at the club (Winston didn’t think 13 was the right number to sit down), the black cat is put at the end of the table to make 14. It doesn’t often happen, but it was Sir Winston’s own idea, and the cat is there all year round primarily for that reason.

In March 1941, Winston Churchill believed that winning the war was the first priority. He received a text from Lord Halifax, our Ambassador in Washington, of an after-dinner speech, which Halifax was proposing to make about war aims. Churchill’s only comment on this long speech was sent by telegram: “It is pretty tough to reshape human society in an after-dinner speech.” The same goes for me in a different context tonight. I know it’s not expected of me to reshape human society, desirable as that might well be. But trying to give you an impression of Winston Churchill in 20 minutes or so is quite a tall order – especially if one considers that by the time it is completed, Martin Gilbert’s official life of Churchill will run to eight million words.

Churchill was certainly the greatest Anglo-American who ever lived, unless you insist that George Washington was an Anglo- American. He had faults, of course. All human beings do. He sometimes pursued with vigour policies that with hindsight we can see to have been mistaken: Especially, I think, with regard to India.

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But it is curious how often, equally with hindsight, we can see that policies savagely criticised at the time were in fact inspirations based on what now seems to have been prophetic wisdom. Gallipoli is an obvious example. Churchill’s unavailing efforts to check the Bolshevik flood in 1919 is another. His opposition to the American plan for a landing on the south of France in August 1944 is a third. I believe that if Churchill’s proposals had been accepted in 1944 the war would have ended sooner.

Tonight I’m going to try to select just a few of Churchill’s characteristics, and to illustrate them. If anybody wants to ask me any questions about them or about the things I have no time to mention, I shall do my best to answer them.

First and foremost Churchill, though he was often petulant and certainly self-centered, and could be most unbelievably inconsiderate, had a deep and genuine humanity that won the affection of all who ever served with or under him. His anger could be like a raging torrent, but he never let the sun go down without making amends. On one occasion—I think it was 1940—he was very angry with me. I forget what I’d done, something that upset him, and he was furious and extremely ill tempered and very unpleasant all day. Then about two in the morning he rang the bell and said, “I want to send a telegram to the President—take it down.” I can’t do shorthand; anyhow he always sent for a shorthand typist, so I suggested this to him. “No,” he said, “it’s very short, you take it down.” I did so, and it was quite short. I handed it to him and he said, “What beautiful handwriting you’ve got—much better than any private secretary I’ve ever had.”

Now that wasn’t true, but it was his way of making amends after having been perfectly beastly all day. It was typically Churchillian. He was a man of contrasts: impatient, yet understanding; obstinate, yet open to conviction; fierce, but never vindictive. When he formed a view he held it firmly, but he knew the importance of flexibility. He once wrote, “The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.” That’s as good an example as I can think of for flexibility.

He was faithful to old friends—sometimes too faithful. He loved young people, and he always talked to them as if they were his contemporaries. I remember in the gunroom of the battleship King George V, Churchill spending an hour with the midshipmen, encouraging them to ask him every sort of question about the war and about politics. They quite forgot he was the Prime Minister, and it was really marvelous to listen to him. He did the same every year with the Harrow boys. He would go round to Harrow for the annual Churchill concert, when they sang the songs he loved, and afterwards he would talk to the boys who’d cluster around him, the senior boys. It was really rather remarkable to listen to him. They lost all shyness and he’d talk to them absolutely as an equal.

He frequently spoke of the kindnesses he had received when he was young, but he never spoke of the snubs and the setbacks, which he received—and there were many of them because he was an exceedingly unpopular young man. When he was at 10 Downing Street there was always laughter in the corridors, even in the darkest and most difficult times.

He loved animals, which I always think is a good sign in anybody. He had a succession of what I thought were perfectly revolting poodles. I’m sure Mr. Golding will remember Rufus—he was a horror. And then there were his favourite black swans on the lake at Chartwell. There were those huge goldfish in the pond out of doors that used to come when he tapped on the stones. There were the tropical fish in glass tanks inside, and always at least one cat about. His favourite was the “marmalade cat.” (I called it a ginger cat but he always called it the marmalade cat.)

I remember one day in 1941, when things were going very badly. We’d had to evacuate Greece; Crete was falling; Lord Beaverbrook was being difficult; we’d lost several ships in the Mediterranean. I was alone at Chartwell with Churchill, in the cottage he’d built with his own hands—the big house had been closed up for the war. We were at lunch and Churchill was in a very sombre mood. He got hold of the marmalade cat and he put it on a chair on his right-hand side, and put me on his left-hand side. (The cat had precedence.) All through lunch he was really thinking about a very important speech he was going to have to make in the House of Commons the next day, and under his breath I could hear him almost rehearsing this speech. But in the top of his voice he was talking to the cat. He was saying, “Dear cat, it’s so sad that in wartime I can’t give you any cream and that sort.” He didn’t address a word to me throughout lunch. The cat was the only object of his conversation. He once said to his daughter Mary, as he was gently prodding a pig in the sty at the farm at Chartwell, “You know, dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but pigs treat you as an equal.”

He was of course famous for his eloquence and the quickness of his wit. Of his eloquence I have no need to remind you. But I did have the good fortune to listen to almost all his 1940 speeches in the House of Commons at the time he delivered them. I have to admit that when he dictated these great speeches he always dictated straight onto the typewriter. He used to correct them in red ink or blue ink, and then they would be typed out in a special way [WSC called it “Speech Form”-Ed.], sort of like the Psalms—the way he liked to read them out in the House of Commons. He always insisted that the original be thrown into the wastepaper basket, and this was more than I could bear. One day I just stole one of these speeches out of the basket. It happened to be the one in which he said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Although my conscience did not let me take out the last few pages I took the first 12, and those words were on one of the last few. However, I have the rest of the speech. My conscience pricked me and years later after the war I confessed what I’d done. I said I’d give it back, for the archives. Winston looked at me across the table—I was lunching with him alone at Hyde Park Gate—and he said, “I do believe you are one of the wise virgins.” And of course I was, because that speech is unique. Nobody else has got it or any other speech of that kind.

Those speeches stirred men’s souls with the fire of great poetry. They were poetry. I think in that connection it is appropriate to quote the words spoken by another very great English Prime Minister, the Younger Pitt: “Eloquence is like the flame; it requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns.” There’s nobody to whom that can be more appropriately applied than Winston Churchill.

There are, of course, countless examples of his wit. A lot of them, I must say, are entirely apocryphal. Yet I will just mention two. 

On one occasion, which I think I did put in my book [The Churchillians in UK; Winston Churchill and his Inner Circle in USA.-Ed.] was the night before Hitler invaded Russia. I was at Chequers with Churchill and I was walking with him up and down the croquet lawn, trying hopefully but unsuccessfully to get him to sign some dreadfully dreary documents, which he wouldn’t look at. He’d been reading the Ultra signals—we called them “Boniface” but the Admiralty called them Ultra—the decrypts of the German Air Force code. He said, “It is quite evident now, and there is no doubt about it, that that man is going to invade the Soviet Union.” So I, for want of anything better to say, said, “Well, that’s going to be difficult for you, because after all you were the person who tried to raise an army against the Bolsheviks in 1919, and are well known as the leading anti-Communist in the western world. Won’t it be very difficult for you to say something in support of them?”

“My dear boy,” he said, “if Hitler were to invade Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons!” That was his immediate response. The other one I always liked, and I did happen to hear it, was in the House of Commons, when a rather nice Labour former cabinet minister called Wilfred Paling was so incensed by something Churchill said in one of his speeches that he shouted across the floor of the House: “DIRTY DOG!”. Churchill paused and said, “The Rt. Hon Member should remember what dirty dogs do to palings.” That was I think very quick!

Sometimes Churchill seemed to me to have the characteristics of the Old Testament prophets—Isaiah perhaps, but certainly never Jeremiah. He occasionally had an uncanny prescience about the future. In 1925, 20 years before it happened, he wrote about nuclear weapons and pilotless aircraft. And I had the most uncanny experience myself.

I think it was in 1953. I went up to his bedroom one morning to talk about something, and he was shaving. He said to me, “Today is the 24th of January.” I said yes, and he said, “It’s the day my father died.” I said something suitable, and he went on, “It’s the day I shall die, too.”

There wasn’t any comment I could make. I just said yes and went on with whatever it was he wanted me for. But I remembered it—it stuck in my memory. Well, 12 or 13 years later, I think it was on the 10th of January 1965, they rang me up from Hyde Park Gate to say that he’d had a stroke—a big, final stroke — and that the doctor said there was no chance of his surviving. My wife will bear me out, as she was in the room—I said, “He won’t die until the 24th.” This was on the 10th. Ten minutes later they rang up from Sandringham, because the Queen’s private secretary didn’t want to bother Hyde Park Gate in case things were happening. They thought that I might know something, since I was executer and trustee. The private secretary said, “Do you know the latest about Sir Winston?” I said yes, I’d heard from Number Ten, and again I said that he wouldn’t die until the 24th. Martin Charteris who was the secretary remembers to this day that I said that.

Churchill lay in a coma for 14 days and on the 24th of January he died. I can’t explain it—it may be coincidence. But it is, I think, the oddest single experience I’ve ever had in my life.

As I’m speaking to a largely American audience, I should like to say something about Churchill’s love of and very close relationship with the United States. First let me say that here again he had the gift of prophecy. In 1938 he broadcast to a still largely isolationist America this question: “Can peace, goodwill and confidence be built upon submission to wrongdoing backed by force?” Of course he was thinking of Hitler—but today the United States and the United Kingdom are one in asking that very same question in relation to the Soviet Union. Last year we had strong American support in replying to the same question asked by an arrogant South American dictatorship in the South Atlantic.

Years ago there was published a very popular and highly amusing satire on English history called 1066 And All That. I sometimes wish an entertaining American satirist—and you’ve got a great many in your country—would write a book entitled 1776 And All That. It would have been a particularly useful exercise in the early 1940s, for it was the American obsession with colonialism, which in the later stages of the war almost led to a breakdown of our close friendship and alliance, though it never fatally affected the personal relationship of Churchill and Roosevelt.

At the end of 1943, after the Teheran Conference, and of course still more at Yalta 14 months later, Churchill sadly noted that the State Department and even the President himself were becoming obsessed with the idea that Britain’s principal war objective was the maintenance and perhaps even the extension of the British Empire. This was, I honestly think, an historic prejudice, dating from “1776 And All That.” Because we didn’t really think that at all, and certainly Churchill didn’t, although he had a blind spot, I’ll admit, about India.

The most remarkable ambitions were ascribed to us in Washington—that we wanted to “take over Greece,” and things like that, even by friends such as Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS. These ideas were not believed by the American chiefs of staff, who were entirely sensible over the whole thing. The British Empire was in any case sure to be dissolved. I think we all realized that. But it had to be done peacefully—and peacefully it indeed was dissolved.

Some may now think, as Churchill did, that the process was a little too rapid. Indeed, the anarchy that prevails in parts of Africa today, consequent on the abdication of our authority and the suspension of the laws we brought with us to these countries, tells its own sad tale. But toward the end of the war, what upset Churchill was the growing conviction, in Washington and particularly in the State Department from 1944 onwards, that the most powerful and trustworthy American ally of the future was the Soviet Union; and the belief—not too much concealed—that the road to peace and prosperity was cooperation with Russia.

Now this was something that pained Churchill more, I think, than anything else. At Yalta, when the American delegation discussed with the Russians the future of Hong Kong without even telling us—and after all it was a British colony—Churchill realized that this curious fantasy, unchecked by a dying President no longer in full command either of himself or his government, was a formidable menace to the western world. He came back from Yalta. I didn’t go with him, but I met him at the airport and asked, “How did it go?” He said, “It’s a tragedy. And it’s a tragedy because my dear friend President Roosevelt is a dying man.”

I tell you that story, and don’t think I’m telling it in any anti-American way, because I just think it shows how misunderstandings can arise on a totally false basis of belief. It was fantasy—although it certainly never affected Churchill’s deep affection for America, or his belief in the destiny of what he called “The Great Republic.” He told me again and again that he believed the future to be held in the hands of the United States. And that, as Lend-Lease and Marshall Aid proved, the generosity of their spirit if not always the wisdom of their government was the main hope of mankind in the future.