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

by Erik Larson

One of Churchill’s first acts was to appoint himself minister of defense, which prompted an outgoing official to write in his diary, “Heaven help us.”

He was about to take one of his daily baths, these prepared with precision—ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit and two-thirds full—by his valet-butler Frank Sawyers, present at all hours (“the inevitable, egregious Sawyers,” as Colville wrote). Churchill took two baths every day, his longtime habit, no matter where he was and regardless of the urgency of the events unfolding elsewhere, whether at the embassy in Paris during one of his meetings with French leaders or aboard his prime ministerial train, whose lavatory included a bathtub.

Churchill would wander the halls wearing a red dressing gown, a helmet, and slippers with pom-poms. He was also given to wearing his sky-blue “siren suit,” a one-piece outfit of his own design that could be pulled on at a moment’s notice. His staff called it his “rompers.”

Churchill was convinced that one of Hitler’s first goals would be to kill him, with the expectation that whatever government replaced his would be more willing to negotiate. He insisted on keeping a Bren light machine gun in the trunk of his car,

But he was also ready for worse. According to one of his typists, Mrs. Hill, he embedded a capsule containing cyanide in the cap of his fountain pen.

“Uh ay ma bain?”—his French version of the question “Where is my bath?” One witness reported that in his fury he looked like “an angry Japanese genie.”