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

by Erik Larson

Sensing that Beaverbrook might resist the idea, Churchill imbued his pitch with flattery and an uncharacteristic woe-is-me needfulness.

“I am not a committee man,” he wrote on January 3. “I am the cat that walks alone.”

His energy and rapacious ingenuity had driven aircraft production to levels that seemed nearly miraculous, and were crucial in helping the country to withstand Germany’s aerial onslaught and Churchill to maintain his own confidence in ultimate victory. Moreover, Churchill needed him personally: his knowledge of political undercurrents, his counsel, and just generally his presence, which enlivened the day.

BEAVERBROOK STOOD FAST. With a schoolboy’s petulance, he told Churchill on Monday, January 6, that he had never wanted to be a minister in the first place.

He thanked Churchill for his support and friendship and closed the letter with a metaphoric hanky in hand.

“On personal grounds,” he wrote, “I hope you will permit me to see you sometimes and to talk with you occasionally on the old terms.”

At midnight, Churchill again wrote to Beaverbrook, this time in longhand and summoning the judgment of history: “You must not forget in the face of petty vexations the vast scale of events and the brightly-lighted stage of history upon which we stand.” He closed by quoting a remark that Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution, made to himself just before being guillotined in 1794: “ ‘Danton no weakness.’ ”

This skirmish with Beaverbrook was mostly stage combat. Having been friends for so long, they knew well how to jolt each other’s composure, and when to stop. This was one reason Churchill liked having Beaverbrook in his government and found such value in his near-daily presence. Beaverbrook was never predictable. Exasperating, yes, but always a source of energy and cold-eyed clarity, with a mind like an electric storm. Both men took a certain delight in dictating letters to each other. To both it was like acting—Churchill strutting about in his gold-dragon nightclothes and jabbing the air with a dead cigar, savoring the sound and feel of words; Beaverbrook like a knife thrower at a carnival, hurling whatever cutlery came to hand. The physical character of the resulting letters revealed the men’s contrapuntal natures. Where Churchill’s paragraphs were long and precisely worded, full of complex grammatical structures and historical allusions (in one note to Beaverbrook he used the word “ichthyosaurus”), each of Beaverbrook’s paragraphs was a single, brief knife thrust serrated with short, crisp words, not so much savored as sputtered.

“The truth is that they both enjoyed it, and of course neither found the writing, or usually the dictating, of letters laborious,” wrote A.J.P. Taylor, Beaverbrook’s biographer. “Beaverbrook liked parading his troubles and liked still more winding up with a display of emotional attachme...

“His was a soul that flamed out of a frail and failing body,” Churchill wrote. “He was a crumbling lighthouse from which there shone the beams that led great fleets to harbor.”

John Colville noted in his diary that Churchill and Hopkins “were so impressed with each other that their tête-à-tête did not break up till nearly 4:00.”

It was a fitting punctuation point for a day of heartbreak for Colville. While Churchill had been having lunch with Hopkins, Colville had been dining with his beloved Gay Margesson, at the Carlton Grill, in London. By coincidence, this was the two-year anniversary of his first proposal to marry her. “I tried to be reasonably aloof and not too personal,” he wrote, but the conversation soon veered into philosophical approaches to leading one’s life and, thus, into more intimate realms. She looked lovely. Sophisticated. She wore a silver fox; her hair hung below her shoulders. She wore too much rouge, however, Colville noted with satisfaction—his accustomed means of easing the pain of her unattainability by noting her imperfections. “Certainly she was not the Gay of Jan. 10, 1939,” he wrote, “and I do not think the influence of Oxford has improved her.”

After lunch they went to the National Gallery, where they met Elizabeth Montagu—Betts—and Nicholas “Nicko” Henderson, the man rumored to have captured Gay’s heart. Colville sensed a strong connection between Nicko and Gay, and this raised in him a “queer nostalgia,” which he likened to jealousy. “I went back to No. 10 and tried to think how immaterial it all was in comparison with the great issues that I see daily there, but it was no good: love dies slowly with me, if at all, and I felt sick at heart.”

“embarrassed officials would often encounter Winston, robed like a Roman emperor in his bath towel, proceeding dripping from his bathroom across the main highway to his bedroom.”

She danced with a Frenchman, Jean Pierre Montaigne. “I felt incredibly gay—I waltzed with Jean Pierre incovertly, wildly & very fast—great fun. I missed only a few dances.”

She got to bed at four-thirty A.M., “footsore & weary but very happy.”

That Churchill saw poison gas as a grave and real threat was evident in his insistence that Hopkins be issued a gas mask and a helmet, his “tin hat.” Hopkins wore neither. From a sartorial perspective, this was prudent: He and his immense overcoat already resembled something an American farmer might stick in a field to scare away birds.

“Lord and Lady Halifax, he so tall and she so small,

Now General Lee weighed in, and described how the original presidential mansion had been burned by the British in the War of 1812. “Lord Halifax looked shocked and puzzled,” Lee wrote later, “and I got the distinct idea that he did not know the War of 1812 had ever happened.”

“No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” Churchill said.

Colville set out by car for Oxford and lunch with Gay Margesson, camouflaging his romantic interest with the minor deception that it was prime ministerial business that was bringing him to town.

“I found her charming and not so changed as I had feared,” he wrote, “but I did not make very much headway. We always talk so fluently, but I can never succeed in being anything but ‘the same old Jock’ and until I become—or appear to become—different, I shall have no chance of making a new impression on Gay.”

Soon it was time to depart. Snow fell. Gay said goodbye and invited Colville to come visit her again, and there in the snow, as he wrote with evident sorrow, “Gay looked as beautiful as she ever has, her long hair half hidden by a handkerchief and her cheeks flushed by the cold.”

Upon his return, he decided enough was enough. He composed a letter to Gay confirming “that I was still in love with her and saying that the only solution from my point of view was to cut the Gordian Knot and see her no more. I should leave no serious gap in her life, though I believed she was fond of me, but I could not hang around her as a rejected suitor, haunted by memories of what had been and dreams of what might have been.”

He knew, however, that really this was just a gambit, one deployed by doomed lovers in every age, and that he did not truly intend that the knot remain severed forever. “So perhaps weakly,” he wrote in his diary, after setting the letter aside, “I postponed the project and decided to ‘hang around’ for some time yet. History is full of lessons about the redemption of Lost Causes.”

“Oh yes,” Hopkins told one valet. “I’ve got to remember I’m in London now—I’ve got to look dignified.”

Churchill paced; a secretary typed. Hopkins watched, enthralled.

Hopkins left Churchill a thank-you note. “My dear Prime Minister,” he wrote, “I shall never forget these days with you—your supreme confidence and will to victory—Britain I have ever liked—I like it the more.

This was Churchill at his most deft—candid yet encouraging, grave but uplifting, seeking to bolster his own people while reassuring, albeit somewhat disingenuously, the great mass of Americans that all he wanted from the United States was material aid. Goebbels, listening too, called it “insolent.”

“Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us,” Churchill said. “Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” — THAT WEEKEND KING GEORGE came to a new realization. In his diary he wrote, “I could not have a better Prime Minister.”

exhilaration….That

Colville was delighted. Whether he was aware of it or not, the life expectancy of a new member of a bomber crew was about two weeks.

The goal, the directive said, “must be to induce Japan to take action in the Far East as soon as possible. This will tie down strong English forces and will divert the main effort of the United States of America to the Pacific.” Beyond this Germany had no particular interest in the Far East. “The common aim of strategy,” the directive stated, “must be represented as the swift conquest of England in order to keep America out of the war.”

Harriman took particular note of this lunch because of Roosevelt’s cold. He wrote, “It struck me as the most unhealthy diet under the circumstances, particularly as we discussed the British food situation and their increasing needs for vitamins, proteins and calcium!!” Roosevelt wanted Harriman to make England’s food supply a priority, and spent a long while—too long, from Harriman’s perspective—talking about the specific foods the British would need to survive. Harriman found this ironic. “As the President was obviously tired and mentally stale, in the British interest it struck me that fortification of the President’s diet should be first priority.”

Harriman initially reserved a room for himself at Claridge’s hotel, then canceled and booked the Dorchester. Notoriously frugal (he rarely carried cash and never picked up a dinner check; his wife, Marie, called him a “cheap old bastard”), he telegraphed Claridge’s on Saturday, March 8: “Cancel my reservation but reserve cheapest room my Secretary.”

Conant replied that as president of Harvard, “he would rather risk his life than his reputation.”

General Brooke observed: “Luckily PM decided to go to bed early and by midnight I was comfortably tucked away in an Elizabethan four poster bed dated 1550. I could not help wondering, as I went to sleep, what wonderful stories the bed could tell of its various occupants during the last 400 years!”

“Randolph lost £850 in two evenings.” In a letter to his own wife, Waugh remarked, “Poor Pamela will have to go to work.”

Pamela, certain now that she was indeed again pregnant, was stunned and frightened. This was “the breaking point,” she said. At £10 a month, she would have needed a dozen years just to resolve the debt to Fitzwilliam. The amount was unfathomable, so much so that it brought into focus how fundamentally defective her marriage was. “I mean, that was the first realization in my life that I was totally on my own and that the future of my son was dependent entirely on me and my future was dependent on me, that I couldn’t rely ever again on Randolph,” she said.

Almost immediately, Beaverbrook came to mind. “I liked him enormously, admired him tremendously,” she said. She considered him a close friend and, along with baby Winston, had spent a number of weekends at his country home, Cherkley. He felt the same way, although those who knew Beaverbrook understood that he saw a value in their connection that went beyond mere friendship. She was a conduit of gossip from within the loftiest circle in the land.

Of course he assented: Secrets were his favorite possessions.

“Max had to have control of the people around him, whether it was Brendan Bracken or even Winston Churchill,” she said. “I mean, he had to be in the driver’s seat and he just smelled [of] danger for me.”

What she did have was a gift for making the most of a situation. “She combined a canny eye for chances with a genuinely warm heart,” Clarissa wrote.

She found herself compelled to “hustle” for these dinner invitations, but this proved to be an art at which she excelled.

She had no inkling, of course, that in a very short while she would fall in love with a handsome older man living a few stories below, on one of the safest floors in the safest hotel in London.

Ever striving for efficiency, Harriman decided to take advantage of the delay by having the hotel clean his traveling clothes,

He presented the tangerines he had bought for Clementine in Lisbon. “I was surprised to see how grateful Mrs. Churchill was,” he wrote, later. “Her unfeigned delight brought home to me the restrictions of the dreary British wartime diet.”

He moved from Claridge’s to an apartment that seemed likely to withstand attack. In a letter to a colleague back in the States, he described his satisfaction with the place. He occupied a four-room flat on the eighth floor of a modern building made of steel and brick, with a protective shield of two more floors above. “I even have a view,” he wrote. “Opinion differs as to whether it is safer to go in a cellar and have the building fall on you in a raid or live upstairs and fall on the building. At least if you are upstairs you can see what hits you—if there’s any comfort in that.”

HARRIMAN ACTED QUICKLY TO establish his office. Although news accounts portrayed him as a lone paladin striding through chaos, in fact, the “Harriman Mission,” as it became known, soon became a minor empire, with Harriman, Meiklejohn, seven more senior men, and a battalion of staff that included fourteen stenographers, ten messengers, six file clerks, two telephone operators, four “charwomen,” and one chauffeur.

“Too meticulous: he searches too long for the exact phrase which will convey his meaning. This is rather dull.”