The Splendid and the Vile

But then came Friday, May 10, and Hitler’s blitzkrieg assaults on the Low Countries. The news cast gloom throughout Whitehall, although for Chamberlain it also brought a flicker of renewed hope that he might retain his post. Surely the House would agree that with such momentous events in play, it was foolhardy to change governments. The rebels, however, made it clear that they would not serve under Chamberlain, and pushed for the appointment of Churchill.

Chamberlain realized he had no choice but to resign. He urged Lord Halifax to take the job. Halifax seemed more stable than Churchill, less likely to lead Britain into some new catastrophe. Within Whitehall, Churchill was acknowledged to be a brilliant orator, albeit deemed by many to lack good judgment. Halifax himself referred to him as a “rogue elephant.” But Halifax, who doubted his own ability to lead in a time of war, did not want the job. He made this duly clear when an emissary dispatched to attempt to change his mind found that he had gone to the dentist.

It remained for the king to decide. He first summoned Chamberlain. “I accepted his resignation,” the king wrote in his diary, “& told him how grossly unfairly I thought he had been treated, & that I was terribly sorry that all this controversy had happened.”

The two men talked about successors. “I, of course, suggested Halifax,” the king wrote. He considered Halifax “the obvious man.”

But now Chamberlain surprised him: He recommended Churchill.

The king wrote, “I sent for Winston & asked him to form a Government. This he accepted & told me he had not thought this was the reason for my having sent for him”—though Churchill, according to the king’s account, did happen to have handy the names of a few men he was considering for his own cabinet.

THE CARS CARRYING CHURCHILL and Inspector Thompson returned to Admiralty House, the seat of naval command in London and, for the time being, Churchill’s home. The two men left their cars. As always, Thompson kept one hand in his overcoat pocket for quick access to his pistol. Sentries holding rifles with fixed bayonets stood watch, as did other soldiers armed with Lewis light machine guns, sheltered by sandbags. On the adjacent green of St. James’s Park, the long barrels of anti-aircraft guns jutted upward at stalagmitic angles.

Churchill turned to Thompson. “You know why I’ve been to Buckingham Palace,” he said.

Thompson did, and congratulated him, but added that he wished the appointment had come sooner, and in better times, because of the immensity of the task that lay ahead.

“God alone knows how great it is,” Churchill said.

The two men shook hands, as solemn as mourners at a funeral. “All I hope is that it is not too late,” Churchill said. “I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have—whatever there may be left to us.”

These were sober words, although inwardly, Churchill was elated. He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.

In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears.

LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”

He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial … Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.”

Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it, too—his countrymen, his commanders, his cabinet ministers, and, most importantly, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.

What made this all the more daunting was that Churchill had to achieve these ends quickly, before Hitler focused his full attention on Britain and unleashed his air force, the Luftwaffe, which British intelligence believed to be vastly superior to the Royal Air Force.

IN THE MIDST OF THIS, Churchill had to cope with all manner of other challenges. An immense personal debt payment was due at the end of the month, one he did not have the money to pay. His only son, Randolph, likewise was awash in debt, persistently demonstrating a gift not just for spending money but also for losing it gambling, at which his ineptitude was legendary; he also drank too much and had a propensity, once drunk, for making scenes and thereby posing what his mother, Clementine, saw as a continual risk that one day he would cause irrevocable embarrassment to the family. Churchill also had to deal with blackout rules and strict rationing and the mounting intrusion of officials seeking to keep him safe from assassination—as well as, not least, the everlasting offense of the army of workmen dispatched to buttress Downing Street and the rest of Whitehall against aerial attack, with their endless hammering, which more than any other single irritant had the capacity to drive him to the point of fury.

Except maybe whistling.

His hatred of whistling, he once said, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler. It was more than merely an obsession. “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—immense, immediate, and irrational,” wrote Inspector Thompson. Once, while walking together to Downing Street, Thompson and the new prime minister encountered a newsboy, maybe thirteen years old, heading in their direction, “hands in pockets, newspapers under his arms, whistling loudly and cheerfully,” Thompson recalled.

As the boy came closer, Churchill’s anger soared. He hunched his shoulders and stalked over to the boy. “Stop that whistling,” he snarled.

The boy, utterly unruffled, replied, “Why should I?”

“Because I don’t like it and it’s a horrible noise.”

The boy moved on, then turned and shouted, “Well, you can shut your ears, can’t you?”

The boy kept walking.

Churchill was for the moment stunned. Anger flushed his face.

But one of Churchill’s great strengths was perspective, which gave him the ability to place discrete events into boxes, so that bad humor could in a heartbeat turn to mirth. As Churchill and Thompson continued walking, Thompson saw Churchill begin to smile. Under his breath, Churchill repeated the boy’s rejoinder: “You can shut your ears, can’t you?”

And laughed out loud.

CHURCHILL BENT AT ONCE to his new summons, heartening many, but confirming for others their most dire concerns.

CHAPTER 2

A Night at the Savoy

MARY CHURCHILL, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD, AWOKE THAT MORNING, May 10, to the grim news from Europe. The details were terrifying in themselves, but it was the juxtaposition between how Mary had spent her night and what had happened across the English Channel that made it all the more shocking.

Mary was the youngest of Churchill’s four children; a fifth child, a daughter named Marigold, the family’s beloved “Duckadilly,” had died of septicemia in August 1921, at two years and nine months of age. Both parents were present at her death, a moment that drew from Clementine, as Churchill later told Mary, “a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.”

Mary’s eldest sister, Diana, thirty, was married to Duncan Sandys, who served as Churchill’s “special liaison” to Air Raid Precautions (ARP), the civil defense division of the Home Office. They had three children. The second sister, Sarah, twenty-five, so stubborn that as a child she was nicknamed “Mule,” was an actress who, to Churchill’s displeasure, had married an Austrian entertainer named Vic Oliver, sixteen years her senior and twice married before he met her. They had no children. The fourth child was Randolph, nearly twenty-nine, who a year earlier had married Pamela Digby, now twenty years old and pregnant with their first child.

Mary was pretty, buoyant, and spirited, described by one observer as “very effervescent.” She approached the world with the unabashed enthusiasm of a spring lamb, a guilelessness that a young American visitor, Kathy Harriman, found cloying. “She’s a very intelligent girl,” Harriman wrote, “but so naive that it hurts. She says such frank things; then people laugh at her, make fun of her, and being super-sensitive, she takes it all to heart.” At her birth, Mary’s mother, Clementine, had nicknamed her “Mary the mouse.”

While Hitler had been inflicting death and trauma on untold millions in the Low Countries, Mary had been out with friends having the time of her life. The evening began with a dinner party for her close friend Judy—Judith Venetia Montagu—a cousin, also seventeen, daughter of the late Edwin Samuel Montagu, former secretary of state for India, and his wife, Venetia Stanley. Theirs had been a marriage steeped in drama and speculation: Venetia married Montagu after carrying on a three-year affair with former prime minister H. H. Asquith, thirty-five years her senior. Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love. Over the three years of their affair he wrote at least 560 letters to Venetia, composing some during cabinet meetings, a penchant Churchill called “England’s greatest security risk.” Her surprise engagement to Montagu crushed Asquith. “No hell could be so bad,” he wrote.

A number of other young men and women also attended Judy Montagu’s dinner, all members of London’s bright set, the offspring of Britain’s gentry, who dined and danced and drank champagne at the city’s popular nightclubs. The war did not put an end to their revelry, though it injected a somber note. Many of the men had joined some branch of the military services, the RAF being perhaps the most romantic, or were ensconced in military schools like Sandhurst and Pirbright. Some had fought in Norway, and others were now abroad with the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the girls in Mary’s group joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped resettle evacuees, operated rest centers, and provided emergency food, but also did such varied tasks as spinning dogs’ hair into yarn for use in making clothing. Other young women were training to be nurses; some took shadowy posts within the Foreign Office, where, as Mary put it, they pursued “activities not to be defined.” But fun was fun, and despite the gathering darkness, Mary and her friends danced, Mary armed with the £5 allowance Churchill gave to her on the first of each month. “London social life was lively,” Mary wrote in a memoir. “Despite the blackout, theaters were full, there were plenty of nightclubs for late dancing after restaurants closed, and many people still gave dinner parties, often organized round a son on leave.”

A favorite location for Mary and her group of friends was the Players’ Theatre, near Covent Garden, where they sat at tables and watched an ensemble of actors, including Peter Ustinov, perform old music-hall songs. They stayed until the theater closed, at two A.M., then walked home through blacked-out streets. She adored the beauty and mystery conjured on nights when the moon was full: “Emerging from streets deep in shadow like dark valleys into the great expanse of Trafalgar Square flooded with moonlight, the classical symmetry of St Martin-in-the-Fields etched in the background and Nelson’s Column soaring away up into the night above his guardian lions so formidable and black—it was a sight I shall never forget.”

Among the men at Judy Montagu’s dinner was a young army major named Mark Howard, whom Mary judged to be handsome and debonair, and whom she “rather fancied.” Fated to die in action in four years’ time, Howard was a major with the Coldstream Guards, the oldest continuously serving regiment in Britain’s regular army. Though an active combat unit, its duties included helping guard Buckingham Palace.

After dinner, Mary, Mark, and their friends went to the famed Savoy Hotel to dance, then moved on to a nightclub favored by London’s well-off young men and women, the 400 Club, known as “the night-time headquarters of Society.” Situated in a cellar in Leicester Square, the club stayed open until dawn, as guests waltzed and fox-trotted to the music of an eighteen-piece orchestra. “Danced almost exclusively with Mark,” Mary wrote in her diary. “V. nice! Home and bed 4 A.M.”

That morning, Friday, May 10, she learned of Hitler’s lightning attacks in Europe. In her diary she wrote, “While Mark & I were dancing gaily & so unheedingly this morning—in the cold grey dawn Germany swooped on 2 more innocent countries—Holland & Belgium. The bestiality of the attack is inconceivable.”

She went to her school, Queen’s College, on Harley Street, where, as a part-time “day girl,” she studied French, English literature, and history. “A cloud of uncertainty & doubt hung over us all day,” she noted. “What would happen to the govt?”

She soon got the answer. In the afternoon, as she customarily did on Fridays, she traveled to the Churchill family estate, Chartwell, about twenty-five miles southeast of London. She had grown up here, raising a menagerie of animals, some of which she sought to sell through an enterprise she named “The Happy Zoo.” The house was closed for the war, save for Churchill’s study, but a cottage on the grounds remained open, and was now occupied by Mary’s beloved former nanny, Maryott Whyte, Clementine’s first cousin, known variously within the family as Moppet or Nana.

It was a warm, summery evening. Mary sat on the cottage steps in the blue dusk—“the gloaming,” she called it—and listened to a radio playing within. Around nine o’clock, just before the regular BBC news broadcast, Chamberlain came on and made a brief speech, in which he stated that he had resigned, and that Churchill was now prime minister.

Mary was thrilled. Many others were not.

FOR AT LEAST ONE member of Mary’s set who was also present that night at the Savoy and the 400 Club, the appointment was troubling, in terms of both how it would affect the nation and the war, and how it was likely to affect his own life.

Until Saturday morning, May 11, John “Jock” Colville had served as an assistant private secretary to Neville Chamberlain, but now he found himself assigned to Churchill. Given the demands of the job, he faced the prospect of practically living with the man at No. 10. Mary’s view of Jock was ambivalent, almost wary: “I suspected him—rightly, on both counts!—of being a ‘Chamberlainite’ and a ‘Municheer.’” He, in turn, was less than enthralled with her: “I thought the Churchill girl rather supercilious.”

The job of private secretary was a prestigious one. Colville joined four other newly assigned men who together composed Churchill’s “Private Office” and served almost as his deputies, while a cadre of other secretaries and typists managed his dictation and routine clerical tasks. Colville’s heritage seemed to predetermine his posting to No. 10. His father, George Charles Colville, was a barrister, and his mother, Lady Cynthia Crewe-Milnes, a courtier, woman of the bedchamber to Mary, the queen mother. She also served as a social worker ministering to the poor in East London and now and then brought Colville along so that he could see the other side of English life. At the age of twelve, Colville became a page of honor to King George V, a ceremonial post that obliged him to appear at Buckingham Palace three times a year, bedecked in knee breeches, lace cuffs, a royal blue cape, and a three-cornered hat with red feathers.

Though only twenty-five, Colville looked older, an effect attributable both to the funereal manner in which he was compelled to dress and to his dark eyebrows and impassive face. Together these conveyed a dour censoriousness, though in fact—as would become apparent in a covertly kept diary of his days at No. 10—he was a precise observer of human behavior who wrote with grace and had a deep appreciation for the ambient beauty in the world at large. He had two older brothers, the eldest, David, in the navy, the other, Philip, an army major serving in France with the British Expeditionary Force, for whom Jock felt great anxiety.

Colville had been schooled in all the right places; this was important among Britain’s upper echelons, for whom one’s school served as a kind of regimental flag. He went to Harrow and captained its fencing team, then moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Harrow in particular had an outsized influence on the fates of young men of Britain’s uppermost classes, as evident in the roster of “Old Harrovians,” which included seven prime ministers, among them Churchill, a lackluster student said by a staff member to have exhibited “phenomenal slovenliness.” Colville learned German and burnished his skills during two stays in Germany, first in 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and a second time in 1937, when Hitler was asserting full control. At first Colville found the enthusiasm of the German populace infectious, but over time he grew uneasy. He witnessed a book burning in Baden-Baden and later attended one of Hitler’s speeches. “I had never before, and have never since, seen an exhibition of mass-hysteria so universal in its scope,” he wrote. That same year he joined the Foreign Office in its diplomatic service division, which supplied No. 10 with its private secretaries. Two years later, he found himself working for Chamberlain, by then engulfed in conflict over his failed Munich Agreement. Churchill, one of Chamberlain’s foremost critics, called the agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat.”

Colville liked and respected Chamberlain, and feared what might happen now that Churchill was in power. He saw only chaos ahead. Like many others in Whitehall, he considered Churchill to be capricious and meddlesome, inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once. But the public adored him. Colville, in his diary, blamed Hitler for this surge in popularity, writing, “One of Hitler’s cleverest moves has been to make Winston Public Enemy Number One, because this fact has helped to make him Public Hero Number One at home and in the U.S.A.”

To Colville, it seemed as though a miasma of dismay settled over Whitehall as the potential consequences of Churchill’s appointment began to register. “He may, of course, be the man of drive and energy the country believes him to be and he may be able to speed up our creaking military and industrial machinery,” Colville wrote. “But it is a terrible risk, it involves the danger of rash and spectacular exploits, and I cannot help fearing that this country may be manoeuvred into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.”

Colville harbored a quiet wish that Churchill’s tenure would be short. “There seems to be some inclination to believe that N.C.”—Neville Chamberlain—“will be back before long,” he confided in his diary.

One thing seemed certain, however: Colville’s posting with Churchill would provide ample material for the diary, which he had begun keeping eight months earlier, just after the war began. Only later did it occur to him that doing so was very likely a grave violation of laws governing national security. As a fellow private secretary put it later: “I am filled with amazement at the risks Jock was running in the matter of security, for which he should have been sacked on the spot if he had been caught.”

COLVILLE’S DAY-AFTER SKEPTICISM WAS echoed throughout Whitehall. King George VI told his own diary, “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.” The king encountered Lord Halifax on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, through which Halifax had royal permission to walk in his commute from his home in Euston Square to the Foreign Office. “I met Halifax in the garden,” the king wrote, “& I told him I was sorry not to have him as P.M.”

Halifax, though newly reappointed as foreign secretary, was skeptical of Churchill and the wild energy he seemed likely to bring to No. 10. On Saturday, May 11, the day after Churchill’s appointment, Halifax wrote to his own son, “I hope Winston won’t lead us into anything rash.”

Halifax—whose nickname for Churchill was “Pooh,” after the A. A. Milne character Winnie-the-Pooh—grumbled that Churchill’s new cabinet appointees lacked intellectual heft. Halifax likened them all to “gangsters,” the chief gangster, in his view, being Churchill. “I have seldom met anybody with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks,” Halifax wrote in his diary that Saturday. “Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion? On this much depends.”

Churchill’s appointment enraged the wife of one member of Parliament, who likened him to Hermann Göring, the obese, brutal chief of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. “W.C. is really the counterpart of Göring in England,” she wrote, “full of the desire for blood, ‘Blitzkrieg,’ and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.”

But a civilian diarist named Nella Last had a different view, one she reported to Mass-Observation, an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with the goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. The diarists were encouraged to hone their observational skills by describing everything on their own fireplace mantels and on the mantels of friends. Many volunteers, like Last, kept their diaries throughout the war. “If I had to spend my whole life with a man,” she wrote, “I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”

The public and Churchill’s allies greeted his appointment with applause. Letters and telegrams of congratulations arrived at Admiralty House in a torrent. Two of these surely tickled Churchill, both from women with whom he had been friends for a long time, and who at varying points may have harbored romantic aspirations. Clementine certainly wondered, and was said to be wary of both women.

“My wish is realized,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of H. H. Asquith, the former prime minister, who’d died in 1928. “I can now face all that is to come with faith & confidence.” She knew Churchill well and had no doubt that his energy and pugnacity would transfigure the office. “I know, as you do, that the wind has been sown, & that, we must all reap the whirlwind,” she wrote. “But you will ride it—instead of being driven before it—Thank Heaven that you are there, & at the helm of our destiny—& may the nation’s spirit be kindled by your own.”

The second letter was from Venetia Stanley, the woman who had carried on the epistolary affair with Asquith. “Darling,” Venetia wrote now to Churchill, “I want to add my voice to the great paean of joy which has gone up all over the civilized world when you became PM. Thank God at last.” She rejoiced, she told him, in the fact that “you have been given the chance of saving us all.”