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

by Erik Larson

“For g. sake tell your father next time I have to cover his conference to wear a gas mask so’s I can concentrate on what he’s saying.”

As Churchill said later, “If we can’t be safe, let us at least be comfortable.”

she quoted Hilaire Belloc’s very short 1910 poem, “The False Heart”: I said to Heart, “How goes it?” Heart replied: “Right as a Ribstone, Pippin!” But it lied. Mary added: “No comment.”

Late in the party, the lights failed and the dance floor went dark—“not an altogether unwelcome event to many I think.” It was all great fun, she wrote, “but distinctly an orgy and rather bizarre.”

Over dinner, Harriman sat opposite Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. In describing the moment later, she wrote: “I saw the best-looking man I had ever seen.”

He was much older than she, she acknowledged. But from early on she had recognized in herself an affinity for older men. “I wasn’t amused or interested in people my own age,” she said. “What attracted me was much older men and I felt very at ease with them.” She had never felt wholly comfortable with members of her own generation. “Luckily for me, the war came, so then it sort of didn’t matter, and I immediately spent time with people much older than myself and found myself quite happily entertaining whoever it might be.”

That Harriman was married struck her as irrelevant. It struc...

Pamela’s own marriage was in lightning decline, and as it devolved her sense of freedom grew. A more exciting life seemed certain to lie ahead. She was young and beautiful, and at the center of Churchill’s circle. She wrote, “It was a terrible war, but if you were the right age, [at] the right time and in the right place, it was spectacular.”

Given Harriman’s ubiquity within Churchill’s circle, it was clear that Pamela and he would encounter each other again, and often—much to the glee of Max Beaverbrook, minister of aircraft production and collector of secrets, known to some as “the Minister of Midnight.”

TWO MEETINGS, TWO COUNTRY homes, one lovely weekend in March, with victory suddenly seeming a bit more near: Of such moments are great family upheavals sown.

The promise of spring had given way to a reprise of winter, as noted in her diary: “Snow—sleet—cold—not funny.”

Two days later, Thursday, April 3, she received a letter from Eric. “A very sweet letter at that,” she wrote. She counseled herself: “Now—Mary—take a hold on yourself—my little plum.”

“He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” Mary wrote in her diary. “Oh dear—have I fallen, or have I?”

“I wish I knew whether I am in love with Eric rather—or whether I simply have a crush.”

He also raised the specter of invasion. “That is an ordeal from which we shall not shrink,” he told the House, but added that Germany clearly had designs on Russia, in particular the Ukraine and oil fields in the Caucasus.

Churchill requested a bath. “Yes, sir!” the desk manager said brightly, as if this posed no challenge whatsoever—when, in fact, prior raids had left the hotel with no hot water. “But somehow, somewhere, in but a few minutes,” Thompson said, “an amused procession of guests, clerks, cooks, maids, soldiers, and walking wounded materialized out of some mystery in the back part of the building, and went up the stairs with hot water in all types of containers, including a garden sprinkler, and filled the tub in the Prime Minister’s room.”

Mary rode in the same car as Harriman. She liked him. “He has the root of the matter in him,” she wrote.

Harriman noticed that as Churchill moved among the crowds, he used “his trick” of making direct eye contact with individuals. At one point, believing Churchill to be out of earshot, Harriman told Pug Ismay, “The Prime Minister seems popular with the middle-aged women.” Churchill heard the remark. He whirled to face Harriman. “What did you say? Not only with the middle-aged women; with the young ones too.”

Churchill conferred degrees upon Ambassador Winant and Australian prime minister Menzies, and, in absentia, on Harvard president James Conant, who had returned to America. Before the ceremony, he’d quipped to Harriman, “I’d like to give you a degree, but you’re not interested in that sort of thing.”

She was struck by this strange power of her father to bring forth courage and strength in the most trying of circumstances. “Oh please dear God,” she wrote, “preserve him unto us—& lead us to victory & peace.”

SO MOVED WAS HARRIMAN by his experience at Bristol that he overcame his pinchpenny nature and made an anonymous donation to the city, in the amount of £100, about $6,400 in twenty-first-century dollars.

“Thrilled,” he telegraphed immediately. “When are you coming—Bring all possible nylon stockings for your friends here also dozen packs Stimudent for another friend.” Here he was referring to Stim-U-Dent, a toothpick-like product used to clean between teeth and stimulate blood flow in the gums, once so popular that the Smithsonian eventually acquired a specimen for its permanent collection. In another cable Harriman urged, “Don’t forget stimudents.” He told Kathy to bring whatever lipstick she favored, but also to include a few tubes of “green top” lipstick by Guerlain.

Nearby at Claridge’s hotel, General Lee, the American military attaché, now back in London, went down to the first-floor room of a member of the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic staff, Herschel Johnson. As bombs fell and fires burned, they discussed literature, mainly the works of Thomas Wolfe and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. The conversation shifted to Chinese art; Herschel brought out a collection of fine porcelain objects. “All this time,” Lee wrote, “I had the sickening feeling that hundreds of people were being murdered in a most savage way almost within a stone’s throw, and there was nothing to do about it.”

As she walked down a corridor toward the dinner party, she reflected on her new sense of freedom and her new confidence. Later she recalled thinking, “You know, I am really on my own and my life is going to change totally now.”

Flares lit the city outside so brightly that Harriman, in a later letter to his wife, Marie, described it as looking “like Broadway and 42nd Street.”

Bombs fell; clothes were shed. As a friend later told Pamela’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “A big bombing raid is a very good way to get into bed with somebody.”

He noted as well that he “found Pamela Churchill and Averell Harriman also examining the devastation.” He made no further comment.

HARRIMAN WROTE TO HIS WIFE about the raid. “Needless to say, my sleep was intermittent. Guns were going all the time and airplanes overhead.”

She was quite taken with her date. In her diary she wrote, “Oh tais-toi mon coeur.” (“Be quiet, my heart.”)

But staying at 10 Downing Street no longer seemed appropriate. The more he thought about joining the RAF, the more dissatisfied he felt, and the more he needed to get away. He pursued it now the way he pursued Gay Margesson, with a futile mix of longing and despair. “For the first time since war broke out I feel discontented and unsettled, bored by most people I meet and destitute of ideas,” he told his diary. “I certainly need a change and think an active, practical life in the RAF is the real solution. I am not anxious to immolate myself on the altar of Mars, but have reached the stage of thinking that nothing matters.”

His diary crackled with enthusiasm for the war, and for life. “What a glorious spring day outside!” he wrote. “How beautiful the world can be! And we have no chance to enjoy it. Human beings are so stupid. Life is so short, and they then go and make it so hard for themselves.”

“The peoples of the British Empire and of the United States number nearly two hundred million in their homelands and in the British Dominions alone. They have more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel, than the whole of the rest of the world put together.” He urged his audience not to lose its “sense of proportion and thus become discouraged or alarmed.”

“No whisper of such plans is to be allowed,” he wrote. “No surrenders by officers and men will be considered tolerable unless at least 50 percent casualties are sustained by the Unit or force in question.” Any general or staff officer who found himself facing imminent capture by the enemy was to shoot it out with his pistol. “The honor of a wounded man is safe,” he wrote. “Anyone who can kill a Hun or even an Italian has rendered good service.”

ordering Hess to stand in for him at a ceremony the next day, May 1—Labor Day—at

ALSO THAT WEDNESDAY, LORD BEAVERBROOK submitted yet another resignation to Churchill. “I have taken the decision to retire from the Government,” he wrote. “The only explanation I will offer is ill health.” He tempered this with an acknowledgment of their long-standing friendship. “It is with devotion and with affection that I bring my official association to a close.” He added: “Leave me still the personal relations.” Churchill at last assented. As minister of aircraft production, Beaverbrook had succeeded beyond all expectations, while also poisoning beyond salvation the relationship between MAP and the Air Ministry. The time had indeed come for Beaverbrook to leave the post, but Churchill was not yet willing to let his friend make a complete exit, and Beaverbrook, as so often before, was not yet willing, either.

“I’m ready to be minister of church as well,” he quipped.

people “anxious to see the war won as quickly as possible, are hoping that the newly resurrected title of Minister of State carries with it a roving commission to kick inefficiency and departmental dawdling hard wherever it is encountered. The appointment was received with cheers.”

One result of Churchill’s long courtship of Roosevelt, however, was that now at least the prime minister felt able to express his concerns and wishes with more candor, directly, without fear of driving America away altogether.

If Hitler were to attain control over Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat, “not all the staunchness ‘of our Plymouth brethren’ will shorten the ordeal.”

Harriman’s secretary, Meiklejohn, took to filling the bathtub in his flat with hot water so that the steam would drift into his sitting room. “It has a good psychological effect,” he remarked, “if nothing else.”

IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day.

“I think all this is a flutter, which pleases Eric’s theatrical feelings and stirs Mary’s youthful emotions, but will have no serious consequence.”

“This evening Eric proposed to me,” Mary wrote in her diary. “I’m in a daze—I think I’ve said ‘yes’—but O dear God I’m in a muddle.”

McGovern professed to have no confidence in the war or the government, adding, “And, while I have a tremendous admiration for the oratorical powers of the Prime Minister, who can almost make you believe that black is white, I have no faith in his achieving anything of lasting benefit to humanity.”

He was thick-skinned, but only to a point. Even Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathy recognized this, after spending a later weekend at Chequers. “He hates criticism,” she wrote. “It hurts him as it would a child being unjustly spanked by a mother.”

Churchill, Channon wrote, “was obviously shaken, for he shook, twitched, and his hands were never still.”

“I ask you to witness, Mr. Speaker, that I have never promised anything or offered anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat, to which I will now add our fair share of mistakes, shortcomings and disappointments and also that this may go on for a very long time, at the end of which I firmly believe—though it is not a promise or a guarantee, only a profession of faith—that there will be complete, absolute and final victory.”

“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”

“Those in charge of tanks tell me it is rather ironic that Beaverbrook is now to help them as he has been the worst offender in stealing things they have needed”—meaning materials and tools. “Beaverbrook is not personally liked but people know he is the only man who can really cut the red tape and he is welcomed as an ally.”

gather from conversations with both the Prime Minister and Beaverbrook that he will end by being the number one trouble shooter.”