March 18, 2015

Finest Hour 160, Autumn 2013

Page 41

By Peter Pooley


Nineteen sixty-four was Churchill’s last year as a Member of Parliament. He attended infrequently, but he usually was there when his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, was scheduled to speak. I was then a junior member of Soames’s private office in the Ministry of Agriculture. One of my charges was to prepare Parliamentary work. I prepared the dossier for Parliamentary Questions, and after rehearsing my minister would sit in the official box while the drama of Question Time unfolded. On these occasions the grand old man would toddle in, supported physically by a couple of younger Members, and take his privileged seat on the front bench below the gangway. Formally there are no reserved seats, but traditionally this seat is the preserve of former Prime Ministers, and no one else would dare to sit there.

For a giant of history, I remember being surprised at how small he was. Of course he had shrunk with age, but at the time I judged him to be below average height, perhaps five feet six. He was still a colossus as a statesman and I noticed how, as he stood at the bar of the House and made his bow, the buzz of conversation was stilled, and all eyes were turned on Sir Winston. The experience was dazzling and memorable for a 27-year-old civil servant.

Later I met him, although I can’t be sure that he met me….

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Christopher Soames, as a fairly junior minister at the time, had been allocated a rather mean and cramped office, rather inconveniently placed. His father-in-law, by contrast, had a commodious room very close to the Chamber. Sir Winston rarely had need for it, and with his permission, Mr. Soames often used the office.

One day Mr. Soames had an important statement to make to the House. It was my job to cobble together a draft on the basis of contributions from the civil servants most closely concerned.  We met in the Churchill office an hour or two beforehand. No sooner had Mr. Soames begun to read through the draft than the door opened, and there was Sir Winston. We made as if to leave, but he waved the gesture aside and headed for an armchair. He sat down with a little help from an aide, who handed him a copy of The Times, behind which the great man quickly disappeared. I was not introduced.

Returning to work, my Minister strongly criticised the draft statement I had prepared. Christopher Soames was a kindly man who wanted to encourage young people, when he remembered to do so, which was not always. He said it was a draft prepared by civil servants for civil servants, quite unsuitable for a politician addressing hostile opponents.

“It’s so balanced,” he said. “It puts both sides of the argument. There’s all this “on the one hand and on the other hand.” I need just one side of the case—my side—and I need it put forcefully. We’ll have to start again. The first thing I’m going to do is strike out every sentence that begins with the word ‘however.’”

You may wonder how I can remember every word of that conversation half a century ago. Well, it was a memorable lesson learned during my early professional development. More important is the vivid memory of the words that followed—from behind the newspaper.

In his unmistakable tones Sir Winston Churchill quipped: “Why don’t you cut off one of his hands?”

I felt utterly humiliated, but with the passage of years I began to look back on the encounter with some pride. “Think of it, children, your grandfather was once the butt of one of Sir Winston’s little jokes.”

I learned later, from those who had lived close to him, that he had made this joke many times before, his favourite target being two-handed economists who said “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” Still, there cannot be many of us left: civil servants condemned to manusection by the hero of our age.

My remaining sadness is that I cannot remember, should a grandchild ask, whether the great man was carrying a cigar. I should like to think he was, but whether it was lit or unlit I simply cannot remember!


Mr. Pooley ([email protected]) is a retired civil servant.

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