Dinner with Churchill

Policy-Making at the Dinner Table

Cita Stelzer

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781453271612
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This engaging biography invites readers to dinner with Winston Churchill and his political guests in the years surrounding WWII. A friend once said of Winston Churchill: "He is a man of simple tastes; he is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything." But for Churchill, dinners were about more than good food, excellent champagnes, and Havana cigars. "Everything" included the opportunity to use the table both as a stage on which to display his brilliant conversational talents and as an intimate setting in which to glean gossip and diplomatic insights and to argue for the many policies he espoused over his long political career. In this riveting, informative, and entertaining account, Cita Stelzer draws on previously untapped material, diaries of guests, and a wide variety of other sources to tell of some of the key dinners at which Churchill presided before, during, and after World War II. An "acutely revealing" and eloquent look at one of Great Britain's most impactful prime ministers, Dinner with Churchill offers delicious new insights into the food, cocktails, and conversations that shaped history ( The Times Literary Supplement ).

SECTION 1

CHAPTER 1

The Importance of Dinners

“As Churchill’s life unfolds, it becomes an unending succession of meals with bigwigs.”¹

“Food in diplomacy can be a lubricant.”²

Dinner parties were an important means by which Churchill rewarded friends, won over rivals and gathered information on all subjects, from diplomatic secrets to social gossip. He also hugely enjoyed them. His meals had the advantage over most other more formally scheduled encounters of being easily extended, even into the early hours of the morning, the time of day when Churchill would gather strength while others were flagging. His daughter, Mary, reports that “mealtimes tended to prolong themselves far into the afternoon or evening”, with luncheons lasting until half past three or even four o’clock, and dinners going on “endlessly” after the ladies had withdrawn, to the increasing annoyance of her hostess-mother.³

After Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, these extended dinners were more than ever an important part of the day’s work. At Chequers, the country house used by British prime ministers, a typical Churchillian evening during the war would run:

From eight-thirty until nine we had drinks with Mrs. Churchill and perhaps one or two of the daughters were there. Then we went into dinner. Dinner was from nine until just after ten. Then the ladies left the room and the most amusing part of the evening started as Winston held forth in his own inimitable manner until about ten-thirty to ten forty-five. Then we would go up and join the ladies … and marched up to the library where he ran a cinema film. About half past midnight we’d come down for a nightcap with the ladies. Finally at about 12:45 or 1 a.m. we’d go up to the main room where we used to meet. We would sit down and he would say, “Now, down to business”. And then he worked there until two, or three or four in the morning.

Other guests were “Sometimes a chief of staff … sometimes a Cabinet minister, sometimes a visiting foreigner”.⁴

From his earliest days Churchill was able to captivate his dinner companions. Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of H.H. Asquith, later a Liberal Prime Minister, dined with the leading figures of the day. In 1906 the nineteen-year-old found herself seated next to the 31-year-old Churchill and was:

spellbound … I was transfixed, transported into a new element … There was nothing false, inflated, artificial in his eloquence. It was his natural idiom. His world was built and fashioned in heroic lines. He spoke its language.⁵

John Maynard Keynes, a man not easily impressed with the eloquence and intelligence of others, wrote to his mother in September 1940, contrasting Churchill with a First World War Prime Minister, David Lloyd George:

Last night I went to my Other Club and was put next to Winston, so I had some two or three hours’ conversation with him and listening to him. I found him in absolutely perfect condition, extremely well, serene, full of normal human feelings and completely uninflated. Perhaps this moment is the height of his power and glory, but I have never seen anyone less infected with dictatorial airs or hubris. There was not the faintest trace of the insolence which LL.G., for example, so quickly acquired.⁶

Harold Macmillan, many years later to be Prime Minister, recalled the dinner meetings with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and young Conservative backbenchers in the late 1920s:

All the rest of us would sit around, sometimes late into the night, smoking, drinking, and arguing and of course listening. The flow of Churchill’s rhetoric once it got under way was irresistible. Nevertheless, he quite happily allowed rival themes to be put forward.⁹

The Other Club, a dining club, was founded in 1911 by Winston Churchill and his very good friend, F.E. Smith, a member of the Conservative Party at a time when Churchill was a Liberal, to accommodate the men they deemed worthy of joining. The Pinafore Room at the Savoy was the location then as it is today. Churchill always sat in the middle of one of the longer sides of the table. Membership was limited to 50 but would include not fewer than 24, and its only purpose was “to dine” on alternate Thursdays, at 8:15 punctually, when Parliament was in session. Members’ names were secret (and are to this day), but the club rules are not. There were to be no speeches. The last rule reads: “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.”⁷

The architect Basil Ionides, a member of the famous Victorian art-collecting family, was commissioned to sculpt a black cat. The statue would be used to fill out the table in case the diners numbered the awkward 13. This lucky cat, named Kaspar, was to have a napkin tied around his neck, and be served as if he were a regular diner, with the usual champagnes and wines and appropriate silverware.

One day Kaspar disappeared. He had been stolen in a prank but was later found to be resting comfortably somewhere in Lincolnshire. Other sources say he was found in Hong Kong. No matter. Although all conversations are secret at The Other Club, it is known that the Prime Minister was glad to have his Kaspar cat back at the table.⁸

The Pinafore Room: home of the Other Club

One guest, at a family lunch, reported that the Prime Minister “gave a short lecture on the various invaders of Russia, especially Charles XII”.¹⁰ Churchill undoubtedly inherited and absorbed from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, his skills as a brilliant conversationalist and dinner party organiser. His mother organised a dinner party so that Winston could meet Ivor Novello whose song “Keep the Home Fires Burning” Churchill admired.¹¹ She, like her son, planned dinners to include both good conversation and beautiful surroundings.

Churchill also displayed his talent for the theatrical, using the dinner table and its settings as props. James Lees-Milne, the noted diarist, dined at Chartwell in 1928 and remembered that:

One evening we remained at that round table till after midnight. The table cloth had long ago been removed. Mr. Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought. It was a thrilling experience. He got worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.¹²

Churchill’s interest in recreating battlefield tactics extended to the American Civil War. One biographer noted that Churchill “using salt shakers, cutlery, and brandy goblets … can re-enact any battle in that war, from Bull Run to Five Forks”.¹³

The greatest tribute to Churchill’s ability to enthrall in company comes from as renowned a conversationalist as Franklin Roosevelt, the man whom the historian Andrew Roberts describes as being, like Churchill, “stratospherically self-confident”.¹⁴ On the occasion of a dinner for Churchill, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and others during Churchill’s December 1941 visit to the White House, the President “willingly turned the show over to Star Boarder Winston Churchill, leaned back and listened to the leader of another fighting people carry the conversational ball”.¹⁵

But Churchill was interested in more than merely the exercise of his rhetoric and the airing of his ideas at the dinner table: he was perpetually in search of information, and used lunches and dinners to pick the brains not only of political allies and opponents, but also of specialists and academics, including many not necessarily in tune with his own views.

During the First World War, when Churchill was Minister of Munitions, his office on the Western Front was at Chateau Verchocq in north-west France. In August 1918 he was there with his brother Jack, Sir Maurice Bonham Carter and several political and military figures. Churchill’s pilot, Lieutenant Gilbert Hall, reports:

In the evening we all assembled in the dining room for a meal … At that first meal Mr. Churchill sat at the head of the table and acted as host. Food was not too plentiful in the fourth year of the war and the first course was a plain and wholesome Shepherd’s pie. Mr. Churchill, with characteristic brio, referred to it as “minced meat under a glorious cloud of mashed potatoes”, and it tasted all the better for that.¹⁶

Churchill energetically quizzed the group on a wide range of topics, including how to get tanks, “the new surprise weapon”, across rivers, and attitudes on the home front towards the progress of the war.¹⁷ More than ten years later, Churchill played host to Harold Laski, called by his biographers “everyone’s favourite socialist … the enduring conscience of the British left”,¹⁸ among a company that included an admiral, several other naval officers and a young civil servant. Churchill had an opportunity to note how well (or poorly) the naval men handled a debate Laski initiated on “the meaning of maritime rights”; and to learn from the civil servant something about Radclyffe Hall, the author of the just published lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.¹⁹ R. A. Butler (“Rab”), President of the Board of Education during the war years, contended that dinner parties were a good source of information which he could not get sitting in his office. “Wives talk …”.²⁰

Joseph E. Davies, when serving as American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, dined with the Churchills in their London apartment in May 1937 and recorded in his diary:

He plied me with questions … He … wants to know the facts … He asked about the strength of the Soviet industry and the army … He impressed me as a great man.²¹

At these lunches and dinners, Churchill acquired and improved relationships that would stand him in good stead at some later point in his career. Even the dinner he organised at Claridge’s in 1932 to celebrate his son Randolph’s “coming of age” included what one guest described in his note of thanks as “Men who have made history and others who will no doubt figure equally prominently in the future”.²² Another commented: “It will be a very long time — if ever — before I find myself in a gathering of people such as these …” ²³ The bill from Claridge’s came to £135 16 shillings and 8 pence*. The dinner was on 16 June, the hotel billed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• SECTION 1
• SECTION 2
• Epilogue
• Diners
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright Page