September 5, 2013

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 38

BY ALLEN PACKWOOD


RECENT revelations from the Public Record Office about British plots to assassinate Hitler in 1944 raise intriguing questions about the possibility of German plots to assassinate Winston Churchill. Some interesting correspondence relating to the testing of Churchill’s cigars survives among his papers at the Churchill Archives Centre.

Churchill’s penchant for cigars and fine drink was known throughout the world. His Private Office was regularly offered gifts of alcohol and tobacco. Clearly there was a risk of poisoning that had to be taken seriously. In the early part of the war such gifts appear to have been intercepted and passed to Scotland Yard for testing and safekeeping.

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In January 1941 the Maceo Society of Camaguey, Cuba presented the British Legation in Havana with two boxes of cigars for the Prime Minister. These were sent by the Foreign Office to Scotland Yard, who in turn passed them to the senior official analyst at the Home Office, one Roche Lynch, an expert in poisons working at die Department of Chemical Pathology at St Mary’s Hospital in London. Lynch offered to perform his routine tests but observed that, “…it is impossible for me to test the cigars for every known poison especially when it is possible that they could have been treated with some tropical poison not seen in this country.”

Lynch added: “If an attempt on the life of anyone is to be made with cigars, I would suggest that the poison is not likely to be inhaled in the smoke as the heat of combustion would destroy nearly all the poison. However, a poisoner could achieve his goal by incorporating poison into the mouth end of the cigar, which would come directly into contact with the intended victim. He pointed out that a number of poisons have a fatal dose of less than one grain, and that “From photographs of the P.M., I should say that he probably chews the end of the cigar which would make this possibility more easy.” Lynch confirmed that he could detect no signs of tampering and had found nothing of a “noxious nature.” The brave analyst had also smoked a single cigar from each box “with no untoward effects.”

Scotland Yard’s advice was that while the risk was “infinitesimal,” the Prime Minister ought not to take it and the cigars should remain with them. This appears to have been the end of this particular matter, but keeping such gifts from the Prime Minister was not always so easy.

In the spring of 1941 Churchill was offered two large consignments of cigars from Cuba, one set from the pro-British paper Bohemia and the other, complete with a decorative cabinet (which now adorns the painting studio at Chartwell), from the Cuban National Tobacco Commission. This clearly caused some consternation among his own staff, and led to the following minute of 22 April from John Colville to Private Secretary Eric Seal: “When these arrive, I think it will be very difficult to do as Mr. Bracken suggested and suppress them! The Prime Minister is quite likely to ask what has become of them and in any case they represent a gift of considerable value. Would it not be best for you to ask Mr. Bracken and Mrs. Churchill to represent strongly to the Prime Minister that they should not be smoked?”

Eric Seal was worried enough to raise the matter the following day with Professor Lindemann, Churchill’s close friend and adviser in all things scientific. In a hand-written note to the professor he concludes: “In short, is there any watertight examination by means of which we could make sure the cigars are OK?”

Professor Lindemann contacted Lord Rothschild at M.I.5, who agreed that “some security measures ought to be laid on” and offered to make the necessary enquiries without anyone knowing as he imagined that “this is the sort of thing which the Prime Minister would not like very much if he knew about it.” We know from Jock Colville’s diary that a conference to discuss this matter then took place in Desmond Morton’s room at Downing Street on 29 May, with both Lindemann and Rothschild in attendance.

First contact with the security services had been established, and on 2 June Colville wrote to Rothschild asking whether in future, it would be desirable for small boxes of cigars and chocolates, “and other things of the same kind,” to be sent to M.I.5 instead of Scotland Yard. Colville wryly observed that “we might stand a better chance of getting them back if they were innocuous!”

In his reply two days later Lord Rothschild argued that it was unfair to deprive Scotland Yard of the chocolates as he imagined that they ate them or fed them to dogs, but that cigars were a trickier problem and M.I.5 had a bacteriological expert on the spot.

THE cabinet of cigars from the Cuban National Tobacco Commission did not arrive until late September. In the meantime, Colville had sent three minutes to the Prime Minister, on 22 April, 18 June and 23 September, all warning him about the potential risk of poisoning from such gifts and advising him not to smoke anything. M.I.5 finally took possession of one cigar from each box on 24 September, and proceeded to examine them for bacteriological and toxicological contamination. This appears to have been accomplished by either injecting mice with a broth derived from the cigars or exposing the poor creatures to their fumes. In the words of the technical report, “To clinch the innocence of the exhibits small fragments of the material were placed on the observer’s tongue for 30 seconds and when, in two days no evil had befallen, much larger samples. Four days elapsed without mishap.”

The conclusion was that the sample was innocuous. Although, as Lord Rothschild observed in a letter of 9 October to Churchill’s office, nicotine was itself “very poisonous indeed and there are few things which the smoking end of a cigar could be treated with which might be more harmful.”

The report may have been reassuring, but it was not conclusive. Only a small percentage of the Cuban cigars had been tested and M.I.5 now recommended that all those remaining should be visually examined for puncture marks and stains. Churchill’s trusty bodyguard, Inspector Thomson, agreed to perform this time-consuming task. Lord Rothschild returned the tested cigars to Downing Street with the technical report as an exhibit to prove that he had not just smoked them, “after the number of jokes that Colville and I had about Special Branch eating No.10’s chocolates.”

The supreme irony in all of this is that there is evidence that Churchill, ignoring Colville’s anxious minutes, had already smoked some of the cigars before they had even been received by M.I.5! Lord Balfour of Inchcrye wrote an article for The Times in September 1965, quoted by Martin Gilbert in the official biography, describing a meeting of the Defence Committee on 19 September 1941. According to Balfour, who was then an Under-Secretary of State at the Air Ministry, Churchill took all the committee members to see his new Cuban cigar cabinet:

“Turning to the waiting Ministers, he addressed us thus: ‘Gentlemen, I am now going to try an experiment. Maybe it will result in joy. Maybe it will end in grief. I am about to give you each one of these magnificent cigars.’ He paused. He continued with Churchillian rolling of sound and digestive enjoyment of the spoken word. ‘It may well be that these each contain some deadly poison…'”

The problem facing those trying to protect the premier was immense. The only way they could be absolutely certain that a cigar was safe to smoke was by exposing it to a testing process that would destroy itโ€”a situation that was clearly unacceptable to the Prime Minister.

The answer was damage limitation. It became the policy of Churchill’s Private Office not to accept small gifts, while larger consignments of cigars were individually assessed for the risk they posed. If the source was considered respectable the consignment could be referred to M.I.5 for random testing. But when the source was considered unreliable the cigars clearly had to be disposed of.

On 7 November 1941, John Martin, Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, sent the Prime Minister a minute relating to two recent gifts of cigars from Brazil. He noted that, “In view of the German record in matters of this kind, there is undoubtedly an element of risk…and it does not seem to be a risk which you should take.” He suggested three alternatives: the cigars could be exchanged at a reputable dealer’s for reliable stock and sold to unsuspecting customers; they could be exchanged with cigars owned by Lord Rothschild and smoked by him; or they could be destroyed or smoked by any of Churchill’s staff who were prepared to take the risk.

From his marginal annotations, it is clear that Churchill considered the first option to be “lousy” and the second to be unacceptable. He minuted back, “If these cigars are not thought safe for me, they are not safe for anyone, and had better be destroyed.”


Mr. Packwood ([email protected]) is Exhibitions Officer and Archivist at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. The correspondence cited in this article is reconstructed from file CHAR 2/434 in the Churchill Papers collection at C.A.C.

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