The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

by Erik Larson

“It was so lovely—joie de vivre overcame vanity.”

It was also a night for putting things in context. One woman, Joan Wyndham, later to become a writer and memoirist, retreated to an air-raid shelter in London’s Kensington neighborhood, where, around midnight, she decided the time had come to cease being a virgin, and to employ her boyfriend, Rupert, in the venture.

The next afternoon she followed through on her decision, but the experience fell well short of what she had hoped for. “Rupert slipped off his clothes, and I suddenly realized he looked terribly funny in the nude and began laughing helplessly.”

“When I saw the dead Chinese, I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought well I must be dead, as they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought I cannot be alive, this is the end of the world.”

he recalled with displeasure how Göring, on the cliff at Cap Blanc-Nez, “let himself be carried away in a superfluous bombastic broadcast to the German people, an exhibition distasteful to me both as a man and as a soldier.”

Beaverbrook, too, sped back to the city. He persuaded his secretary, David Farrer, working on a book about the Ministry of Aircraft Production, to depict him as having been in the city throughout the raid.

Farrer resisted at first. He tried to make Beaverbrook relent by reminding him that many of his own staff had heard him announce his departure for his country home right after lunch on the Saturday of the raid. But Beaverbrook insisted. In a later memoir Farrer wrote, “It was, I think, inconceivable to him in retrospect that he, the Minister of Aircraft Production, should not have been witness to this cataclysmic moment in air warfare; so he was there—and that was all there was to it.”

“He looked invincible, which he is. Tough, bulldogged, piercing.”

Tough, yes, but at times weeping openly, overcome by the devastation and the resilience of the crowd. In one hand he held a large white handkerchief, with which he mopped his eyes; in his other he grasped the handle of his walking stick. “You see,” an elderly woman called out, “he really cares; he’s crying.”

“You see,” an elderly woman called out, “he really ca...

When he came to a group of dispirited people looking over what remained of their homes, one woman shouted, “When are we going to bomb Berlin, Winnie?” Churchill whirled, shook his fist and walking stick, and snarled, “You leave that to me!” At this, the mood of the crowd abruptly changed, as witnessed by a government employee named Samue...

It was the perfect rejoinder for the moment, he decided. “What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill”—his ability to transform “the desp...

BEAVERBROOK SAW GRAVE WARNING in the September 7 attack. Upon his return to London, he convened an emergency meeting of his top men, his council, and ordered a tectonic change in the structure of the nation’s aircraft industry. Henceforth, large centralized manufacturing centers would be broken up and dispersed to nodes spread throughout the country.

But to Beaverbrook the logic of dispersion was overpowering, no matter the degree of opposition. “It secured him premises for the duration,” Farrer wrote, “and enemies for life.”

“Buz! Take notice, there are higher, more fateful powers which I should point out to you—let us call them divine powers—which intervene, at least when it is time for great events.”

He called Hitler’s bombing of London an attempt “to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.” But the attempt, by “this wicked man,” had backfired, Churchill said. “What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.”

This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects.

“Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.”

“It’s not the bombs I’m scared of any more, it’s the weariness,” wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—“trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I’d die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.”

The attack, the king observed, made him and his wife feel a closer connection to the masses. The queen put it succinctly: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

Although I often behave in a completely idiotic & ‘haywire’ fashion—yet I feel I have grown up quite a lot in the last year. I am glad of it.”

Awed by the idea of so many young pilots dashing headlong into battle, Churchill, in the car, said aloud to himself, “There are times when it is equally good to live or to die.”

The raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone, somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: “Alive.”

Afterward, everyone hurried away, Panter-Downes wrote, “shouldering their gas masks and looking all the better for having been lifted for an hour to a plane where boredom and fear seem irrelevant.”

Diarist Phyllis Warner found that she and fellow Londoners were surprised by their own resilience. “Finding we can take it is a great relief to most of us,” she wrote on September 22. “I think that each one of us was secretly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to, that he would rush shrieking to shelter, that his nerve would give, that he would in some way collapse, so that this has been a pleasant surprise.”

“What I dread,” he wrote, “is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.”

The Chequers Trust, which paid the wages of Chequers’ staff and the routine costs of maintaining the estate, donated £15, or just under $1,000 in today’s dollars, for each weekend, about half of what Churchill actually spent—or, as he once put it, just about enough to cover the cost of feeding the chauffeurs of his guests. For the period from June through December 1940, his costs at Chequers exceeded the trust’s overall contributions by the equivalent of $20,288.

At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.

“Edward only takes three minutes before he is asleep but manages to yawn loudly and incessantly as a prelude to dropping off into this bottomless, childlike slumber, out of which nothing wakes him.”

At Claridge’s and the Ritz, when sirens sounded, guests brought their mattresses and pillows down to the lobby. This made for moments of egalitarian comedy, as journalist Virginia Cowles discovered upon finding herself raid-bound in the Ritz lobby. “They wandered about,” she observed, “in all forms of odd attire: beach pajamas, slacks, siren suits, and some just in ordinary wrappers with their night-dresses trailing on the floor.” While crossing the lobby, Cowles encountered a member of the royal family of Albania: “I tripped over King Zog’s sister, who was sleeping peacefully outside the door of the Ritz restaurant.”

Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear.

WHAT THE ATTACKS ON London seemed clearly to unleash was a new sexuality, as Joan Wyndham’s lover, Rupert, had already found. As bombs fell, libidos soared. “No one wanted to be alone,” wrote Virginia Cowles. “You heard respectable young ladies saying to their escorts: ‘I’m not going home unless you promise to spend the night.’ ” One young American woman newly arrived in London marveled at the vibrance of her social life, despite bombs and fire. “Every night next week is booked up already and the weekend hasn’t started,” she wrote, in a letter home. “The only thing people seem scared about here is being lonely, so they date up way ahead of time to ensure against an evening alone.”

Frank Harris’s memoir My Life and Loves,

Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at its sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give.”

Affairs involving married women and men became commonplace. “The normal barriers to having an affair with somebody were thrown to the winds,” wrote William S. Paley, founder of the Columbia Broadcasting System, who spent much of the war in London.

it looked pretty good, you felt good, well what in Hell was the difference.” Sex became a refuge, but that did not guarantee that the sex would be fulfilling. Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, in the midst of an affair with a married man, noted in passing that during a weeklong bout of lo...

There may have been a lot of sex, but lingerie wasn’t selling. Maybe it seemed too much of a luxury for wartime, or maybe in that supercharged sexual milieu the added oomph of sexy lingerie was perceived as unnecessary; whatever the cause, demand dwindled. “I have never in all my life experienced or thought of experiencing such a terrible season,” said th...

At a party at Blenheim Palace, during a discussion of sex, a woman so notorious for her sexual appetite that she was nicknamed “the Bedbug” turned to the Prof and said, “Now come on, Prof, tell us when you last slept with a woman.”

Göring came out to greet him, looking like a character from a Brothers Grimm fable. He wore a silk shirt with butterfly sleeves, a green suede hunting jacket, and high boots. Tucked into his belt was a large hunting knife that resembled a medieval sword.

Galland left, hauling the hugely antlered stag’s head along with him. For part of the journey, he and the head traveled aboard a train, where, Galland said, “the stag caused more sensation than the oak leaves to my Knight’s Cross.”

In another entry, Shirer noted that a joke had begun making its way around the more cynical quarters of Berlin: “An airplane carrying Hitler, Göring and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved?” Answer: “The German People.”

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

Churchill’s great friend Violet Bonham Carter told him that she had urged Clementine to restrain him from venturing into dangerous zones. “It may be fun for you—but it is terrifying for the rest for us. Please realize that for most of us this war is a One-Man Show (unlike the last) & treat your life like a guarded flame. It does not belong to you alone but to all of us.”

Churchill himself was fully prepared to fight it out among the Cromwellian artifacts, should German invaders enter the house, and expected his family to do likewise. At one gathering he said, “If the Germans come, each one of you can take a dead German with you.” “I don’t know how to fire a gun,” protested daughter-in-law Pamela.

Nicotine itself, MI5’s chief tester, Lord Rothschild, pointed out, was a dangerous poison, though he noted, after testing one group of gift cigars, “I should say that it would be safer to smoke the rest than to cross a London street.”

At one point Churchill threw caution to the winds. He received an entire chest full of Havana cigars as a gift from the president of Cuba. He showed this to his ministers one night after dinner, before the resumption of a particularly fraught cabinet meeting. “Gentlemen,” he said, “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. “It may well be that these each contain some deadly poison.”

He did not believe for a moment that such measures would indeed protect a factory, according to secretary Farrer: “It was the appearance, not the reality of safety that he was after.” His interest was not in saving workers but in keeping them at their posts, wrote Farrer, adding, “He was fully prepared to risk lives in order to produce more aircraft.”

That Beaverbrook actually cared about American perceptions is doubtful. He wanted production, at all costs.

By way of encouraging others to ignore air-raid alerts, Beaverbrook resolved to remain at his desk when the sirens rang out. He was, however, terrified. “Beaverbrook is a man of nervous temperament,” wrote secretary Farrer. “He was thoroughly scared by the noise of a falling bomb. But his sense of urgency prevailed over his fears.”

In her diary, Mary rose to her father’s defense: “I don’t see how in the course of having to make endless decisions one can avoid some mistakes.”