February 10, 2015

Finest Hour 163

Page 52

By Andrew Roberts

30TH INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL CONFERENCE, WASHINGTON, DC, 1 NOVEMBER 2013

“If you are the recipient of a message which cheers your heart and fortifies your soul, which promises you reunion with those you have loved in a world of larger opportunities and wider sympathies, why should you worry about the shape or colour of the travel-stained envelope; whether it is duly stamped, whether the date on the postcard is right or wrong?…I adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.” —WSC

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I could hardly be called a pillar of the Church,” Winston Churchill once famously remarked, “I am more in the nature of a buttress, for I support it from the outside.”¹ The reasons why our greatest 20th century prime minister—indeed perhaps along with Elizabeth I our greatest ever national leader— was not a Christian are rather bizarre. They include a sectarian nursemaid, a long-forgotten Victorian explorer, and the officers’ mess of the 4th Hussars at Bangalore, India.

In My Early Life, published in 1930, Churchill wrote of how, at the Ascot prep school he loathed and where he was regularly beaten, “This form of correction was regularly reinforced by frequent religious services of a somewhat High Church character in the chapel.” His beloved nurse and confidante, Mrs. Everest, was Low Church, and had a profound dislike of the Pope, on the doubtful grounds that he was, “she said…behind the Fenians.”² Churchill thus conceived a strongly anti-Catholic view, an attitude which lasted well into his mid-twenties, telling his brother in 1898 that Oxford “has long been the home of bigotry and intolerance and has defended more damnable errors and wicked notions than any other institution, with the exception of the Catholic Church.”³

At Harrow Churchill attended three services every Sunday, besides morning and evening prayers throughout the week. He later remarked: “All this was very good. I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since. Weddings, christenings and funerals have brought in a steady annual income, and I have never made too close enquiries about the state of my account. It might well even be that I should find an overdraft.”⁴

Whether he was in credit or debit with the Almighty, by the time that he was stationed with the 4th Hussars at Bangalore in Southern India he had begun first to doubt and then utterly to reject Christianity. In between polo chukkas, Churchill became a voracious reader, and three authors in particular plunged him into the disbelief in Christ’s divinity that was to stay with him for the rest of his life.

Although William Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of Rationalism and his History of European Morals , as well as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, established in Churchill’s  mind what he later called “a predominantly secular view,” it was William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man that convinced Churchill that Jesus was an inspired prophet but not the Son of God.

Reade was a Victorian explorer, novelist and war correspondent whose two-volume book went into eight editions over the twelve years after its publication in 1872. It employed quasi-Darwinian terms to explain the rise and fall of empires such as those of the Persians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Macedonians and of course the Romans. Reade was particularly scathing about all forms of religion, which he dismissed as worthless superstition.⁵ Along with Churchill, the book influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who has Sherlock Holmes mention it in one story—as well as H.G. Wells and George Orwell. According to Reade:

The prophet of Nazareth did not differ in temperament and character from the noble prophets of the ancient period. He preached, as they did, the religion of the heart; he attacked, as they did, the ceremonial laws; he offered, as they did, consolation to the poor; he poured forth, as they did, invectives against the rulers and the rich.…The current fancies respecting the approaching destruction of the world, the conquest of the Evil Power, and the reign of God had fermented in [Christ’s] mind, and had made him the subject of a remarkable hallucination. He believed he was the promised Messiah or Son of Man.⁶

Although this was, of course, Reade rather than Churchill writing, Churchill was then stationed in India, a sub-continent full of holy men, seers, mystics and prophets—of people such as he was years later notoriously to describe Mahatma Gandhi, “a fakir of a type well known in the East.”⁷ Did Churchill see Jesus as another one of these, and did he—the young imperialist paladin—instinctively sympathize with the problems of the Romans in Judea rather than with its native population?

In the Morning Post Churchill wrote:

Year after year and stretching back to an indefinite horizon, we see the figures of odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms are continually turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetewayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna the Immortal and Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of Truth, Prempeh abasing himself in the dust, the mad Mullah on his white ass and, last of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane.⁸

Yet if this “long procession” were to stretch back over Churchill’s indefinite historical horizon, might it not also include the prophet of Nazareth, riding into Jerusalem on his donkey, threatening the imperium of the hard-working Roman administrator, Pontius Pilate?

Historians and biographers of Churchill, who concur on little else about him, all agree that it was at the still impressionable age of his early-to-mid-twenties that Churchill rejected Christianity altogether. His own testimony in My Early Life is unequivocal, where he writes:

Of course if I had been at a University my difficulties might have been resolved by the eminent professors and divines who are gathered there. At any rate, they would have shown me equally convincing books showing the opposite point of view. As it was, I passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase which, had it lasted, might easily have made me a nuisance.⁹

What is certain, therefore, is that when Chaim Weizmann, the founder of the state of Israel, said that “Men like Balfour, Churchill, and Lloyd George, were deeply religious, and believed in the Bible,” he could not have been more wrong as far as Churchill was concerned.

During Churchill’s service in India he wrote to his former Harrow headmaster, the Reverend (later Bishop) James Welldon, attacking Christian missionary work there, and saying that “Had I lived in the days when the influence of Buddha— or Christ—or of Mahomet began to disturb these primitive forms of worship I should probably have opposed the great movement they initiated.” This was because although he readily acknowledged that all three religions “were in every case more worthy of God and Man than those they superseded,” nonetheless the deluge of blood over the hundreds of years necessary to establish the new religions would have “appreciably diminished” the “sum of human happiness and prosperity.”¹⁰

In his novel Savrola, written in 1898 while he was also in India, Churchill has the hero tell the heroine:

I have always admired the audacity of man in thinking that a Supreme Power should placard the skies with the details of his squalid future, and that his marriage, his misfortunes, and his crimes should be written in letters of suns on the background of limitless space. We are inconsequential atoms.…I realise my own insignificance, but I am a philosophic microbe, and it rather adds to my own amusement than otherwise.¹¹

As Churchill put it elsewhere, we are all worms, but he liked to think of himself as a glow-worm.

Churchill’s letter of March 1898 from Camp Peshawar to his mother, in which he states, “I expect annihilation at death. I am a materialist to the tips of my fingers”; and a similar one to her from the Sudan six months later, where he foresees the battle of Omdurman and says, “I can assure you I do not flinch—though I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief,” leave his religious views at this period impossible to mistake.¹²

Yet it would certainly not be true to say that Churchill had no moral value system. He did; it was just one based more than anything upon conversations amongst the officers of the 4th Hussars stationed in India. As he was to write in 1930:

In the regiment we sometimes used to argue questions like ‘Whether we should live again in another world after this was over?’ ‘Whether we have ever lived before?’ ‘Whether we remember and meet each other after Death, or merely start again like the Buddhists?’ ‘Whether some high intelligence is looking after the world or whether things are just drifting on anyhow?’ There was general agreement that if you tried your best to live an honourable life and did your duty and were faithful to friends and not unkind to the weak and poor, it did not matter much what you believed or disbelieved. All would come out right. This is what would nowadays I suppose be called ‘The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness.’¹³

Astonishing as it might seem, it was this rather adolescent and almost holistic “Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” that formed the basis for Churchill’s value system for the rest of his life. Divines can judge whether it is more in the character of a cult or a genuine religion, but it remained for him the closest he had to a code of ethics or a sense of spirituality. Whatever it was— and its underlying ethics did not seem to differ much from Christianity—it did not acknowledge Christ as Our Lord.

The historian Paul Addison has summed up Churchill’s beliefs as follows:

For orthodox religion, Churchill substituted a secular belief in historical progress, with a strong emphasis on the civilising mission of the British and the British Empire. This was accompanied by a mystical faith, alternating with cynicism and depression, in the workings of Providence.¹⁴

One of the primary duties of the Providential Being in whom Churchill did believe, but to whom he paid little overt obeisance, seems to have been to watch over the physical safety of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Few people in history could have brushed against the cloak of the Angel of Death as often as Churchill, yet he survived until his 91st year. “I did not hesitate to ask for special protection when about to come under the fire of the enemy,” he wrote, “nor to feel sincerely grateful when I came home safe to tea.”¹⁵

So often did he survive near-misses that he began to believe himself specially chosen for great things. “Over me beat invisible wings,” he later wrote. Once, during the Great War, when his dugout was destroyed by a German high-explosive shell moments after he had left it, decapitating his batman, he said that he had “the strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot.”¹⁶

After Churchill was run over by the driver of a car crossing Fifth Avenue in 1931 he said: “There was a moment…of a world aglare, of a man aghast.… I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.”¹⁷

The conclusion that he came to was that Fate had especially marked him out to save his country. In many other people this might be thought a prima facie case of incipient lunacy, but in the man whom A.J.P. Taylor described, in a famous footnote, as “the saviour of his country” it cannot be lightly dismissed. The sole time that the late Lord Hailsham could detect the direct hand of the Almighty in human affairs was when Churchill succeeded to the premiership on exactly the same day that Hitler unleashed Blitzkrieg in the West.

Churchill was obviously not entirely joking when he wrote to his mother after a skirmish on the North-West Frontier: “I am so conceited, I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”¹⁸

With a difficult birth, childhood pneumonia, a near-drowning, hunting falls, a cavalry charge, a prison escape, a plane crash, and service in the trenches, it was astonishing that Churchill reached the great age he did. Indeed the absence of an assassination attempt on him seems a curious omission in an otherwise busy life.

Of course Churchill the practicing politician was well aware of the problems it might cause him were his religious views to become well known, even notorious, in the Conservative Party that he had joined. In the days of Lord Salisbury at the turn of the century, when the Anglican Church was the Tory Party at prayer, it would not have done to have had atheistic or agnostic candidates standing for Parliament. As it was, in the Oldham by-election of July 1899, Churchill had promised not to vote for Salisbury’s pro-Anglican Clerical Tithes Bill, intended to help Church schools and clergy revenues, prompting Arthur Balfour’s scornful retort: “I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.”¹⁹

In his Religion and Public Doctrine in England, Professor Maurice Cowling shows how Churchill “played down his evolutionary materi- alism” while he was a member of a pro-Church party that was under the influence of the devout Anglican Lord Hugh Cecil. Yet, as Cowling notes, in his Liberal period Churchill “was a good deal more explicit than before about the desirability of secular education.” He even found positive things to say about the work of Nonconformist mission- aries. Yet as Cowling sums up: “Though he was a conforming Anglican, Churchill did little to suggest that Christianity was of special significance.” Indeed, when Churchill did refer to Christianity it was sometimes in an absurdly magniloquent way, such as when he marked the arrival of the millionth American soldier in Europe during the Great War with the words: “No event since the beginning of the Christian era is more likely to strengthen and restore Man’s faith in the moral governance of the universe.”²⁰

Churchill had a strong appreciation of the value of harnessing religion to politics. In January 1920, in a speech defending British intervention in the Russian Civil War, he said: “We defend freedom of conscience and religious equality. They seek to exterminate every form of religious belief that has given comfort and inspiration to the soul of man.”²¹ Similarly, in June 1934, he attacked the Nazi regime for the way in which “Religion must be read from the drill book.”²² Yet this was not hypocrisy; Churchill genuinely believed in the rights of freedom of religion and the duties of complete religious toleration. As he once told his last private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne: “Whether you believe or disbelieve, it is a wretched thing to take away Man’s hope,” which is what he earlier than anyone else in politics believed the Nazis were doing.

It was of course during the Second World War that Churchill drew deepest on religious vernacular and imagery, despite not being a believer himself. Dr. Margaret Mein of Westfield College, University of London, has argued that because Churchill’s wartime speeches used plenty of biblical and liturgical phrases, he was inspired  by Christianity—when, for example, he offered common citizenship to France in June 1940.²³

In fact, although it is quite true that Churchill regularly employed language suffused with powerful religious overtones—words like “salvation,” “sacrifice,” “faith” and “zeal” abound in his wartime speeches—in fact they were more often used in common parlance and in the political idiom of the day than they are today. And anyhow, Churchill’s offer to France was simply a desperate and doomed device to try to keep that country in the war. “Destiny,” “Providence” and “Fate” appear as often as “God” in Churchill’s wartime speeches.

The Almighty occasionally gets a mention in sub-phrases, such as in Churchill’s January 1940 speech at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, “There never was a war which seems so likely to carry its terrors at once into every home, and there never was a war to which the whole people entered with the same united conviction that, God helping, they could do no other.”²⁴

On Trinity Sunday 1940 he read the collect from the Book of Maccabees which ends, “As the will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.” But that was only really chosen for the splendidly martial opening line: “Arm yourselves and be ye men of valour.”²⁵ As Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor and friend, once put it: “King and country, in that order, that’s about the only religion Winston has.”²⁶

As one might have expected from a reactionary Tory and a lover of the English language, Winston Churchill was ultra-conservative over the liturgy. “As for the Revised Version of the Bible and the alterations in the Prayer Book and especially the marriage service,” he wrote, “they are grievous.”²⁷ Very few of Churchill’s friends were religious, except his best man, Lord Hugh Cecil. Otherwise cronies like Max Beaverbrook, F.E. Smith, and Brendan Bracken were about as far removed from men of the cloth as it was possible to get. One of his friends, Bob Boothby, complained of how with Churchill “‘Thou shalt have no other gods but me’ has always been the first, and the most significant, of the Commandments.”²⁸

Churchill’s wife Clementine had been religiously inclined and a regular churchgoer as a young girl, but her observances fell off during their marriage. After her husband’s death she began to attend services again, at Holy Trinity, Brompton, where she was taken by her children and grandchildren.²⁸ Although Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames has correctly written that he “had a strong underlying belief in a Providential God,” she has also pointed out that he “was not religious in a conventional sense-—and certainly no regular church-goer.”³⁰ He went for ceremonial occasions and for family christenings, weddings and funerals, but that was about it.

Churchill wrote much about death, considering it to be “black velvet—eternal sleep,” and as he wrote in Thoughts and Adventures in 1932, it held no terrors for him. “Let us accept the natural order in which we move,” he wrote.

Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making—once.³¹ This dovetails remarkably closely with his “Religion of Healthy-Mindedness.”

Asked whether he believed in life after death, he replied that there might very well be two worlds, but he preferred to take them one at a time. He made plenty of references to God in his speeches, but very often in a rather jocular way, as in the House of Commons in December 1942, when he stated that “The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to make Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen.”³²

Not everyone approved; the devout Jan Christian Smuts, his dear friend from South Africa, was irritated by Churchill’s flippancy, and once complained to him that he never appealed to “religious motives.” Churchill waved the criticism aside, answering somewhat irrelevantly: “I have made more bishops than anyone since St Augustine.”³³ While that is not quite statistically true—Gladstone and Salisbury created more bishops in their much longer times in office— Churchill did appoint two Archbishops of Canterbury during the Second World War, William Temple and Geoffrey Fisher.

The death of William Temple in 1944, according to Churchill’s private secretary and Boswell, Jock Colville, “caused the PM no sorrow. In fact he was quite ribald about it.” Indeed Colville recalled how “as far as clerics were concerned, [Churchill] had a touch of Henry II about him.”³⁴ Churchill’s ribaldry derived from the fact that although the ascetic Temple, who had only been Archbishop of Canterbury for two years after the retirement of Cosmo Gordon Lang, had died at sixty-three—yet for all his drinking of alcohol, smoking of cigars and overeating of fattening foods, Churchill was feeling fine at seventy.

Churchill tended to leave all but the most important ecclesiastical appointments up to Tony Bevir, the Appointments Secretary at Number Ten. “He’s covered in snuff,” Montague Browne was told on joining the staff and trying to locate Bevir, “and looks as if he had slept in his wastepaper basket.” Bevir’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the clergy had won him the nickname “Heaven’s talent scout.” Churchill trusted Bevir’s recommendations and appreciated his tact. He once advanced on him at a party with a glass in one hand and a bottle of Pol Roger in the other, saying: “Treat these like bishops, Bevir—bloody carefully.”³⁵

ike the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, the almost complete absence of Jesus Christ from Churchill’s recorded writings, provides a strong clue to his beliefs. Yet he held a high regard for Jesus. As his friend Sir Desmond Morton said, while Churchill “did not believe that Christ was God, he recognised him as the finest character who ever lived.”³⁶

This is supported by some remarks Churchill made at Chequers to Field Marshal Montgomery on 28 May 1952, as they walked along the monument hill above the house, making their way amongst the picnickers. How did the prime minister define a great man, asked the Field Marshal (probably fishing for a compliment): “Was Hitler great?” “No,” answered Churchill, “he made too many mistakes.” They went on to discuss whether great religious leaders were the truly great men. According to Colville: “The PM said their greatness was indisputable but it was of a different kind. Christ’s story was unequalled and his death to save sinners unsurpassed; moreover the Sermon on the Mount was the last word in ethics.”³⁷

The way a man held himself at the moment of his death always mattered greatly to Churchill. He even commended Adolf Hitler for fighting to the last in Berlin, until he found out that the Führer had not in fact died like that at all. Christ’s courage at the Crucifixion commended itself to him as a noble death.

Before we leave the Sermon on the Mount it is perhaps worth noting that it was surely from the beatitudes that Churchill took the inspiration for his famous moral for his memoirs of the Second World War: “In War; Resolution. In Defeat; Defiance. In Victory; Magnanimity. In Peace; Goodwill.”

To Sir Anthony Montague Browne were vouchsafed a number of Churchill’s thoughts regarding religion, including the view that “The Benedictions are of God-given eloquence and beauty.” On many occasions he told Sir Anthony, “I believe that man is an immortal spirit,” which is as close to a reference to the Soul as we get from Churchill, who Sir Anthony considered “an optimistic agnostic.” At one Cabinet meeting in the 1950s Churchill referred to “the Old Man,”³⁸ who his colleagues took to mean God, and from that and much else we can assume that he was a Deist as opposed to an atheist.

On the question of suicide, which Churchill is thought briefly to have considered for himself in 1915 after his resignation over the Gallipoli debacle, he believed that it was only acceptable in the three cases: intolerable, incurable pain, the aversion of a great evil to others, and under certain circumstances in war, whereupon he quoted the lines from Kipling about being “lying out wounded on Afghan plains” as “the women come out to cut up what remains.” In an article rather morbidly entitled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” in 1924, Churchill argues that we should not. The sole—in the light of subsequent events discouraging—reason that he gave then was the existence of the League of Nations.

n 1949, when celebrating his 75th birthday, Churchill said “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”³⁹ When they did finally meet in January 1965, Churchill characteristically chose fighting hymns for his State funeral, namely The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Fight the Good Fight and O God Our Help in Ages Past. Heaven, he feared, might be an egalitarian place rather like the Welfare State, “and therefore no place for me,” although he relished the opportunity of meeting the great men of the past such as Julius Cæsar and Napoleon.⁴⁰

It is a little-known fact that Churchill is today worshipped as a saint by the Cao Dai religion in Tay Ninh, a town about sixty miles north of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Founded in the 1920s, it also worships Moses and Victor Hugo. Churchill would have liked that, except perhaps having to share the worship with Victor Hugo. Or Moses, come to that.

I will end with Churchill’s admonition from My Early Life not to take things too literally:

I have always been surprised to see some of our bishops and clergy making such heavy weather about reconciling the Bible story with modern scientific and historical knowledge. Why do they want to reconcile them? If you are the recipient of a message which cheers your heart and fortifies your soul, which promises you reunion with those you have loved in a world of larger opportunities and wider sympathies, why should you worry about the shape or colour of the travel-stained envelope; whether it is duly stamped, whether the date on the postcard is right or wrong?….I adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.⁴¹

This is a message as wise as it is tolerant, and totally consistent with his “Religion of Healthy-Mindedness.” Churchill might have not believed that he had an immortal soul, but if he did, it was undoubtedly a great one.

Mr. Roberts is a British historian and journalist, the author of numerous books on Churchill’s life and times, including Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (2008).

Endnotes:

1. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (London: Plume, 2002), 49 n.

2. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 26.

3. Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 18.

4. Churchill, My Early Life, 27-28.

5. Norman Rose, Churchill: An Unruly Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 37-38.

6.  William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Watts, 1945) 176-77.

7. Winston S. Churchill, 23 February 1931, in India (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 94.

8. Frederick Woods, ed., Winston Churchill War Correspondent 1895-1900 (London: Brasseys, 1992), 157.

9. Churchill, My Early Life, 129.

10.  Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy, 18.

11. Winston S. Churchill, Savrola (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 20.

12. Randolph S. Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume 1, Part 2 (London: Heinemann, 1967), 969, 907.

13. Churchill, My Early Life, 128.

14. Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 10.

15. Churchill, My Early Life, 129-30.

16. Winston S. Churchill, “Plugstreet,” Thoughts and Adventures (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 75.

17. Winston S. Churchill, “My New York Misadventure,” in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV 90. FINEST HOUR 163 / 59 The Last Farewell Sarah Churchill, Collected Poems, 1974

18. Randolph Churchill, Companion 1, Part 2, 839.

19. Churchill, My Early Life, 240.

20. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press 19802001), II 229.

21. Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy, 77.

22. Ibid., 93.

23.  Margaret Mein, Winston Churchill and Christian Fellowship (London: Stockwell, 1992), passim.

24. Winston S. Churchill, 27 January 1940, in Blood Sweat and Tears (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1941), 257.

25. Churchill broadcast, 19 May 1940, ibid., 334.

26. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 207.

27. Churchill, My Early Life, 38.

28. Rose, Unruly Life, 198.

29.  Joan Hardwick, Clementine Churchill (London: John Murray, 1997), 339.

30. Mary Soames, Winston Churchill: The Greatest Human Being, Ninth Crosby Kemper Lecture (Fulton: Westminster College, 1991), 7.

31. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, 10.

32. Churchill, 10 December 1942, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill in His Own Words (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 160-61.

33. Churchill to Smuts, 7 August 1942, ibid., 461.

34. John Colville, Fringes of Power (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), 203.

35. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset (London: Cassell, 1995), 110-11.

36. R.W. Thompson, Churchill and Morton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1976), 190.

37. Colville, Fringes of Power, 648.

38. Churchill, 28 June 1950 in Nigel Nicolson, ed., Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1966-68), III 191.

39. Langworth, Churchill in His Own Words, 463.

40. Rose, Unruly Life, 200.

41. Churchill, My Early Life, 130-31.