June 10, 2013

FINEST HOUR 134, SPRING 2007

BY WARREN F. KIMBALL

Dr. W. F. Kimball is Professor of History at Rutgers, Visiting Professor at The Citadel, and a Churchill Centre Academic Adviser.

ABSTRACT
“DINNER AT THE WHITE HOUSE (DRY, ALAS!); with the Sultan….After dinner, recovery from the effects of the above.” —WSC to Harry Hopkins, Casablanca, 21 January 1943 (The Prime Minister always referred to FDR’s Casablanca villa as “the White House,”)

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No talk or story about Churchill is complete without anecdotes about his drinking—tales he himself often repeated and embroidered. His classic retort was: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

A frequent tableau was when Churchill would ask his science adviser and crony Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, to estimate how much champagne and spirits, which he drank every day, he had consumed in his life, and what level it would reach to in the railroad car or room where they were seated. “The Prof” would duly take out his slide rule and then announce that it would fill only a small fraction of the space. Churchill, visibly disappointed by this attack on his lusty Elizabethan self-image, would usually remark, “How much to achieve, how little time remains.”

Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, who was present on one of these occasions, quipped that the Old Man “had expected we would all be swimming like goldfish in a bowl.”¹ Late in World War II, during a discussion of health, Churchill vigorously asserted that he “could still always sleep well, eat well and especially drink well.” Describing a meeting with the Sultan of Morocco, Churchill wrote:

“Dinner….(Dry, alas!)… .After dinner, recovery from the effects of the above.”

Many of his close aides labeled tales of his heavy drinking as exaggerations, noting (correctly according to Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins) that Churchill watered his whisky—a weak “mouthwash” according to his personal secretary, Jock Colville, despite the occasional “stiff whisky and soda, at 8:45 a.m.,” as reported by Anthony Eden. But Colville did not deny that Churchill drank steadily, and more than just whisky.

Champagne was a ritual at dinner, as was brandy afterwards. As White House speechwriter Robert Sherwood put it, Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours without visible effect.”

Offered tea for breakfast at 7:30 a.m. at the Cairo Embassy after an eleven hour flight from Marrakesh, the Prime Minister declined, asking instead for some white wine—which he drained in a gulp. He then remarked (perhaps in jest, perhaps not): “Ah! that is good, but you know I have already had two whiskies and soda and two cigars this morning.” A British diplomat observed him at Yalta “drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man.”

Even before Churchill and Roosevelt held their first conference, at Argentia Bay in August 1941, the President expressed reservations about the Englishman’s antiquated, “Victorian” views, and his excessive drinking—hardly expressions of confidence or closeness. When Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King met in April 1940, they spent much of the time gossiping about Churchill’s alcohol consumption. FDR later groused about what he called “the Winston hours,” which called for drinking and talking until the “wee hours of the morning.” When Churchill became Prime Minister, Roosevelt commented ungenerously that he “supposed Churchill was the best man that England had, even if he was drunk half of his time.” Roosevelt’s colleagues were worse. “A drunken sot” was the phrase of one close FDR adviser.

Wendell Willkie, who ran for President against FDR in 1940 but supported Roosevelt in the war, later visited London, and was asked by Roosevelt if Churchill was a drunk. Willkie replied that he had as much to drink as Churchill did when they met, “and no one has ever called me a drunk”—which may tell us more about Willkie than it does about Churchill.

The sharpest accusation of Churchill as drunk came from Field Marshal Alanbroke, who wrote in his diary that Churchill tried to recover with drink after a tiring speech in the House of Commons: “As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood…”

Brooke later admitted that he too had lost his temper and that they had “one of the heaviest thunderstorms that we had.” But that is the only such entry found in his extensive and critical diaries.

To be fair, Churchill expressed concern—horror might be a better word—about Roosevelt’s drinking habits. In this case it was the President’s late afternoon ritual of concocting what he called martinis: gin mixed with both dry and sweet vermouth and stirred vigorously by FDR himself. Not even Churchill, who loathed mixed drinks, could turn down a martini constructed by the President’s own hand, but the Englishman apparently became adept at using the nearest bathroom or flower pot as a disposal. He had no such compunctions with others, reputedly once going so far as to spit out a mouthful of what FDR’s cousin, Polly Delano, labeled a Tom Collins.²

I have found only one reference to Churchill drinking a martini other than in FDR’s presence. It is in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, “Never Despair,” by Sir Martin Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1988, 1298), concerning Churchill’s 1958 cruise on the Onassis yacht Christina:

[They sailed through the] Dardanelles, past the Gallipoli peninsula to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul, where the Patriarch Athenagoras was invited on board to meet Churchill. The passage of the Dardanelles had been made after Churchill had gone to bed “because,” as Nonie Montague Browne later recalled, “they knew it would upset him.” For this part of the cruise, Churchill was joined by his daughter Diana. “He liked to sit on deck,” Nonie Montague Browne later recalled. “He would come on deck at about noon. He would have a dry martini and spoonfuls of caviar. We would be a long time over lunch—cigar, brandy, coffee. Then he would sit in the sun.”

The Montague Brownes (Anthony was his personal private secretary) were close to Sir Winston from 1952 to the end in 1965. Many habits changed in his old age but I do not think he enjoyed martinis, dry or otherwise, in earlier years.

It’s always possible that WSC finally changed his habits and drank martinis. But I doubt it—since he was devoted to those habits (sometimes to Clemmie’s despair). I wonder if Nonie Montague Browne mistook a glass of white wine for a martini? The long lunch with a caviar, a cigar, brandy, and coffee resonates.

The Prime Minister won a small victory for his preferred habits when he met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in 1945. Noting that the King’s religion required that he abstain from alcohol and tobacco, Churchill announced that “my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred rite smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them.” Churchill reported Ibn Saud’s “complete surrender,” although the King had his unwitting revenge when he gave the Englishman a drink that Churchill described as “a very nasty cocktail.” Turns out it was an aphrodisiac!³

The potentially darker side of Churchill’s use of alcohol has been presented, but only in caustic and irresponsible fashion. Neither those accusations, nor the argument that Churchill watered and nursed his drinks, are persuasive to this writer, but such is the fate of iconoclasm. All that said, there is little testimony of Churchill being drunk, in the falling-down, non-composmentis sense, while he was Prime Minister, whatever the occasional reports of slurred words. Perhaps, as C. P.Snow quipped, Churchill was no alcoholic, for “no alcoholic could drink that much. “⁴

“Alcohol-dependent” may be the appropriate phrase. Whatever Churchill’s prodigious consumption of alcohol, it was a lifetime habit, not a temporary response to the pressure and tension of wartime leadership. There is no evidence, factual or anecdotal, to indicate that Churchill’s drinking affected his policies during the war or, for that matter, his policies before the war.

President Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have responded to complaints about General U.S. Grant’s drinking by challenging the questioner to “find out what brand of whisky he drinks so I can send a case to my other generals”-—-generals who were notoriously cautious and indecisive. Britain’s King George had no need to send a case to Churchill.

NOTES

1. This is hardly a new topic, nor is this new information to those interested in the matter. I am indebted to the editor for adding some “wet” anecdotes to my draft. I have focused on the Second World War years. Finest Hour has, in various issues, addressed stories about Churchill’s drinking, with material now also posted on the Churchill Centre website, including an essay questioning the notion that Churchill was an “Alcohol Abuser.” That piece that includes the delightful story of his presumably persuading a doctor attending him after he was hit by a car New York in early December 1931 (during Prohibition in the USA), to prescribe “the use of alcoholic spirits especially at mealtimes,” with 250cc per day as the minimum. The original note is in the Churchill Papers, CHAR 1/400A/46, 26 January 1932 (Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge). Perhaps the doctors order had good medical reasons. As Lady Soames observed of the traffic accident, her father “suffered severe shock and bruising, and developed pleurisy; but for the fact that he had been wearing a heavy fur-lined overcoat, he might well have been killed.” Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills, Mary Soames, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 357.

2. Churchill’s Victorianism is discussed in Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 66-67, and “‘A Victorian Tory’: Churchill, the Americans, and Self-Determination,” in More Adventures with Britannia, William Roger Louis, ed. (New York and London: University of Texas/I.B. Tauris, 1998), 221-39. Churchill’s Victorian background is seen as an asset by David Jablonsky in Churchill, The Great Game and Total War (London: Frank Cass, 1991).

On Roosevelt’s fears of Churchill’s drinking habits, see Michael Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (New York: Norton, 1980), 200. Dean Acheson’s recollection of Churchill’s visible disappointment with Cherwell’s calculations is quoted in Alan Dobson, “Informally Special? The Churchill-Truman Talks of January 1952 and the State of Anglo-American Relations,” Review of International Studies 23 (1997): 44. See also Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit (revised edition; Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 53.54, wherein he uses the “lusty Elizabethan” phrase, and 261, n. 85, which mentions “Pa” Watson’s curiousness about Churchill’s drinking habits.

For the gossip between FDR and King, see J. L. Granatstein, Canada’s War (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), 117. The “Winston hours” are from a letter, FDR (at Casablanca) to Margaret Suckley, 20 Jan’ 43, quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward (ed.), Closest Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 199. Roosevelt’s comment when Churchill became Prime Minister is from David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart {New York: Random House, 1988), 136, quoting the diary of Harold Ickes. Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston (New York: Random House, 2003), 51, quotes Sumner Welles calling Churchill a “drunken sot,” an ironic label from someone who later became an alcoholic.

Willkie’s quip is from Kimball, The Juggler, 225-26, n.6. The Roosevelt martini is described with distaste by Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (NewYork: Norton, 1973), 143. See Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (rev. edition; New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), 115, 685, 688, for the Sultan of Morocco story and descriptions of some other “vile” concoctions. See Ward, ed., Closest Companion, 163, for a story of Churchill spitting out a mouthful of Polly Delano’s Tom Collins.

The most plausible description of Churchill’s steady drinking is Ian Jacob in Action This Day, John Wheeler-Bennett, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1968), 182-83. The other stories are in Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 262 n.; Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 336, n.l; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 241-42; David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (New York: Putnam, 1972), 707; Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries, 1939-1945, Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 370, 544 (“especially drink well”), 566-67 (“drunken mood”). An observer of the angry confrontation between Churchill and Brooke noted that “there is no doubt that the PM was in no state to discuss anything. Very tired and too much alcohol.” Ibid., 566-67.

3. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory (Boston: Houghton Mififlin, 1986), 1225-27.

4. The C. P. Snow remark is from Raymond O’Connor to W F. Kimball, 21Dec87 (personal correspondence). All the references to Churchill’s drinking in Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (New York: John Wiley &: Sons, 1994) take the “weak mouthwash” position. At the 2006 Churchill Conference in Chicago, Danny Mander, a bodyguard at the Teheran Conference in 1943, announced that he had helped a dead-drunk Churchill and Eden home after a long dinner with the Russians. This was, said Churchill health authority Dr. John Mather, the first primary source testimony to Churchill ever being the worse for drink that he ever heard.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is, of course, a selective list of comments on Churchill’s drinking. An exhaustive list would make a good start toward filling the empty portion of that railroad car Cherwell described. For some additional stories see Meacham, Franklin and Winston; Kimball, The Juggler; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 685, 688; Hopkins to Churchill, 22 Jan ’46, quoted in George Mcjimsey, Harry Hopkins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 397; Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957), 464. Eden’s report is from Anthony Eden, The Reckoning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 494. See also David Carlton, Anthony Eden (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 328; Thomas Campbell and George Herring, eds., The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 44. David Irving, Churchill’s War: The Struggle for Power (Australia: Veritas Publishing Co. Pty., 1987), makes unverified (though perhaps unverifiable) accusations on pp. 225-28, 506. Finally there is the dubious tale told by Paula Fox, The Coldest Winter (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), a “memoir” about the winter of 1945-46 in war-torn Europe. In England Fox wrote, she caught a glimpse of “a clump of men.. .carrying and pushing a drunken Winston Churchill. Not only was he weeping but mascara was puddling under his eyes before it ran down his plump cheeks.” All that from a glimpse? The plump cheeks are correct, the weeping plausible; but the mascara is just plain silly.