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

by Erik Larson

He asked Colville, “Will they do us any damage when they explode?” “I shouldn’t think so, Sir,” Colville said. “Is that just your opinion, because if so it’s worth nothing,” Churchill said. “You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.” Which reinforced for Colville the folly of offering opinions in Churchill’s presence, “if one has nothing with which to back them.”

The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”

Early in Pamela’s marriage, during a difficult period, Clementine gave her some strategic advice for dealing with Randolph: “Leave and just go away for three or four days, don’t say where you are going. Just leave. Leave a little note that you are gone.” Clementine said she had done likewise with Churchill and added, “It was very effective.”

It was hard for Ismay to see Churchill so tired, but, as he recalled later, a positive outcome also occurred to him: Maybe, at last, just this one night, Churchill would go to bed early, thereby freeing Ismay to do likewise. Instead, Churchill suddenly jumped to his feet. “I believe that I can do it!” he said. In an instant, his tiredness seemed dispelled. Lights came on. Bells rang. Secretaries were summoned.

An alliance between England, America, and Russia would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.”

On Monday, while still at Chequers, he continued working on the speech, still intent on drafting the French version himself but finding the going harder than his ego had led him to expect.

Inside the BBC’s broadcast chamber, Churchill settled in to begin his speech. The room was cramped, with a single armchair, a desk, and a microphone. The translator, Saint-Denis, was to introduce him to listeners, but found he had no place to sit. “On my knees,” Churchill said. He leaned back and patted his thigh. Wrote Saint-Denis, “I inserted a leg between his and next moment had seated myself partly on the arm of the chair and partly on his knee.”

“Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.”

with the guardedness of a snubbed suitor, quietly raised the issue.

Churchill went to the Cabinet War Rooms to await the raid. He did many things well, but waiting was not one of them.

Industry aside, Coventry was best known for its medieval cathedral and for hosting, according to legend, the drafty eleventh-century ride of Lady Godiva (and, as a by-product, giving rise to the term “Peeping Tom,” after a man named Thomas was said to defy an edict ordering citizens not to peek at the passing countess).

At another hospital, a nurse in training found herself confronting an old terror. “During the course of my training I had always the fear of being left with the limb of a patient in my hand after amputation and had so far managed to be off-duty when amputations were taking place,” she wrote. The attack “changed all that for me. I didn’t have time to be squeamish.”

procession. Reverend R. T. Howard, provost of the cathedral, watched it burn from the police station porch, as an orange fist engulfed its ancient pipe organ, once played by Handel.

Dr. Ashworth reported seeing a dog running along a street “with a child’s arm in its mouth.”

Those bodies that were mostly intact received luggage tags, stating where the body had been found and, when possible, the likely identification, and were stacked in multiple tiers. Survivors were permitted to walk through and look for missing friends and kin, until a bomb struck an adjacent natural gas storage facility, causing an explosion that tore the roof off the morgue. Rain fell, distorting the luggage tags. The process of identification was so macabre, so fruitless, with sometimes three or four people identifying the same body, that visits were halted and identifications made by examining personal belongings collected from the dead.

LORD BEAVERBROOK HURRIED TO the city, unwilling to be perceived as missing another cataclysmic raid. His visit was not well received.

During a meeting with officials, he tried out a bit of Churchillian rhetoric. “The roots of the Air Force are planted in Coventry,” he said. “If Coventry’s output is destroyed the tree will languish. But if the city rises from the ashes then the tree will continue to burgeon, putting forth fresh leaves and branches.” He was said to have shed tears upon seeing the destruction, only to be brought up “sharply,” according to Lucy Moseley, the mayor’s daughter. Tears, she wrote, had no value. Beaverbrook had hectored the factories for maximum production, and now much of the city was in ruins. “He’d asked Coventry’s workers for an all-out effort,” Moseley wrote, “and what had they got for it?”

Only after they moved on did the man on the curb realize it was the king. “I was so taken aback, flabbergasted, amazed, overwhelmed that I couldn’t even answer him.”

A team of Mass-Observation researchers, experienced in chronicling the effects of air raids, had arrived on Friday afternoon. In their subsequent report they wrote of having found “more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis” than they had seen over the prior two months of chronicling air-raid effects. “The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness.” (The italics were theirs.) The observers noted a widespread sense of dislocation and depression. “The dislocation is so total in the town that people feel that the town itself is killed.”

JOHN COLVILLE WAS ENTRANCED. BOMBS fell and cities burned, but there was his love life to attend to. As he endured the persistent aloofness of his yearned-for Gay Margesson, he found himself increasingly drawn to eighteen-year-old Audrey Paget.

He was torn. “Actually,” he wrote the next day, “if I were not in love with Gay, and if I thought Audrey would marry me (which she certainly would not just at present) I should not at all mind having a wife so beautiful, so vivacious and whom I genuinely like as well as admire. “But still Gay with all her faults is Gay, and it would be silly to get married—even if I could—at this moment of European History.”

She cautioned that it was vital for them to get control of their expenditures. “I simply can’t be happy, when I’m sick with worry all the time,” she wrote. She was by now deeply disappointed in her marriage, but not yet irrevocably. She softened her tone. “Oh! my darling Randy,” she wrote, “I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t love you so deeply & so desperately. Thank you for making me your wife, & for letting me have your son. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my life.”

Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day.

The next day, apparently in need of a little attention himself, Beaverbrook resigned again.

Once again he veered toward self-pity, citing how his reputation had diminished as the fighter crisis had begun to ease. “In fact, when the reservoir was empty, I was a genius,” he wrote. “Now that the reservoir has some water in it, I am an inspired brigand. If ever the water slops over, I will be a bloody anarchist.”

Most galling was that his own Air Ministry appeared to be unable to account for 3,500 airplanes out of 8,500 frontline and reserve aircraft believed ready, or nearly ready, for service. “Surely there is in the Air Ministry an account kept of what happens to every machine,” Churchill complained in a subsequent minute. “These are very expensive articles. We must know the date when each one was received by the RAF and when it was finally struck off, and for what reason.” After all, he noted, even automaker Rolls-Royce kept track of each car it sold. “A discrepancy of 3,500 in 8,500 is glaring.”

“But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program.”

“Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. That is something brand new in the thoughts of everybody in this room, I think—get rid of the silly, foolish, old dollar sign.

ploughing under every fourth American boy.”

According to Sherwood, the eloquent power of the prime minister’s letter to Roosevelt sparked in Hopkins “a desire to get to know Churchill and to find out how much of him was mere grandiloquence and how much of him was hard fact.”

His craftier instincts told him that Lothian’s death might in fact offer him an opportunity to strengthen his hold on his own government. Banishing men to far-flung posts was for Churchill a familiar and effective tactic for muting political dissent.

What Churchill clearly knew from their long friendship was that Beaverbrook had a knack for, and delighted in, making people do what he wanted them to do. Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts called Beaverbrook a “born schemer.” Beaverbrook’s own biographer, A.J.P. Taylor, wrote, “There was nothing Beaverbrook liked better in politics than moving men about from one office to another or in speculating how to do it.”

Beaverbrook made his way to the Foreign Office to meet with Halifax, who was immediately on his guard. He knew that Beaverbrook lived for intrigue and that he had been waging a war of whispers against him.

Halifax did not want to go, and told Beaverbrook as much, but Beaverbrook reported back to Churchill that Halifax had replied with an unhesitant “yes.” Wrote biographer Roberts, “He returned to Churchill with a completely fabricated story about Halifax’s reaction to the offer.”

Everyone who can do so is leaving the town.”

She told Churchill that she believed the problem with the worst shelters was that responsibility for them was apportioned among too many agencies with overlapping authority, and as a result, nothing was done.

“Division of authority is what is preventing improvement.”

I have never liked Americans, except odd ones.

Colville and his fellow private secretaries, having worked a succession of two A.M. nights, hoped to have a week off for the holiday. Principal secretary Eric Seal crafted a delicately phrased minute asking permission. The request “incensed” Churchill, according to Colville. Scrooge-like, Churchill scrawled “No” on the document itself. He told Seal that his own plan for the holiday, which fell on a Wednesday, was to spend it either at Chequers or in London, working “continuously.” He hoped, he wrote, “that the recess may be used not only for overtaking arrears, but for tackling new problems in greater detail.”

Churchill left for Chequers, calling out as he made his exit, “A busy Christmas and a frantic New Year!”

IT WAS OF COURSE on Christmas Eve, with snow falling and the night skies quiet, that Colville first heard a rumor that his beloved Gay Margesson had become engaged to Nicholas “Nicko” Henderson, who, decades later, would become Britain’s ambassador to America. Colville pretended not to care. “But it gave me a pang and worries me, even though I am fairly confident Gay will take no sudden leap—she is much too indecisive.”

He could not understand why he persisted in loving Gay, with so little likelihood that she would ever return his affections. “So often I despise her for her weakness of character, unobservancy, selfishness and inclination to moral and mental defeatism. Then I tell myself it is all selfishness on my part, that I find faults in her as a cover for her lack of interest in me, that instead of trying to help her—as I should, if I really loved her—I seek relief for my feelings in bitterness or contempt.” He added, “I wish I understood the true state of my feelings.” There was something about Gay that made her different from every other woman he knew. “I sometimes think I should like to marry; but how can I even think of it when the possibility of my marrying Gay, however distant, remains in being? Only time can solve this problem, and patience!”

THAT NIGHT, LATE, LORD Beaverbrook discovered that one of his most valued men was still in his office. The man had been working six or seven days a week, arriving in the morning before sunup, leaving well after nightfall, remaining at his desk even after sirens warned of imminent attack. And here it was Christmas Eve. At length, the man got up and left his office to go to the washroom before departing for the night. When the man returned, there was a small package on his desk. He opened it, and found a necklace. There was also a note from Beaverbrook: “I know what your wife must be feeling. Please give her this with my regards. It belonged to my wife.” He’d signed it “B.”

Lloyd George sent apples picked from the orchards at his estate, Bron-y-de, in Surrey, where in addition to growing Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins he cultivated his long-standing love affair with his personal secretary, Frances Stevenson.

“This was one of the happiest Christmases I can remember,” Mary wrote in her diary late that night, in the Prison Room. “Despite all the terrible events going on around us. It was not happy in a flamboyant way. But I’ve never before seen the family look so happy—so united—so sweet. We were complete, Randolph and Vic having arrived this morning. I have never felt the ‘Christmas feeling’ so strongly. Everyone was kind—lovely—gay.

“Poor old London is beginning to look very drab,” he wrote. “Paris is so young and gay that she could stand a little battering. But London is a char-woman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed.”

“No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” Roosevelt said. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.” If Britain were to be defeated, the “unholy alliance” of Germany, Italy, and Japan—the Axis—would prevail, and “all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun”— “a Nazi gun,” he specified later in the speech.

Thank God—for all their cunning and industry and efficiency—the Germans are fools.”

BEAVERBROOK RESIGNED AGAIN, ONE of a number of vexations that inaugurated the New Year for Churchill. This resignation came after he asked Beaverbrook to take on an additional job that he deemed crucial to Britain’s survival.

His hope was that here, too, Beaverbrook would serve as a catalytic force, to prod them into producing a greater flow of goods and materials. The post would give Beaverbrook greater power, which he had long claimed to want, but it would also put him in the position of being, essentially, a committee chairman, and Beaverbrook, as Churchill well knew, loathed committees.