Churchill's Britain: From the Antrim Coast to the Isle of Wight

By Peter Clark

Clark takes us on a geographical journey through Churchill's life, following his footsteps through Britain and Ireland.

More than half a century after his death, Winston Churchill, the most significant British statesman of the twentieth century, continues to intrigue us. Peter Clark’s book, however, is not merely another Churchill biography. Churchill’s Britain takes us on a geographical journey through Churchill’s life, leading us in Churchill’s footsteps through locations in Britain and Ireland that are tied to key aspects of his biography. Some are familiar–Blenheim Palace, where he was born; Chartwell, his beloved house in the country; and the Cabinet War Rooms, where he planned the campaigns of World War II. But we also are taken to his schools, his parliamentary constituencies, locations of famous speeches, the place where he started to paint, the tobacco shop where he bought his cigars, and the graves of his family and close friends. 

Clark brings us close to the statesman Churchill by visiting sites that were important to the story of his long life, from the site where his father proposed to his American mother on the Isle of Wight to his grave in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire. Designed as a gazetteer with helpful regional maps, Churchill’s Britain can be dipped into, consulted by the traveler on a Churchill tour of Britain, or read straight through—and no matter how it’s read, it will deliver fresh insights into this extraordinary man. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781909961753

Peter Clark

Peter Clark has known Istanbul since the early 1960s and is a regular visitor. He is a writer, translator and consultant and worked for the British Council in the Middle East for thirty years.

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Index

INTRODUCTION

Winston Churchill needs no introduction. No British historical figure has been so abundantly documented. The authorised biography comes to eight volumes – over 8,000 pages of text – and sits alongside many more companion volumes of relevant papers. Churchill himself wrote six volumes of memoir/history about each of the two world wars. Many volumes of his journalism and speeches have also been published. It is reckoned that a thousand biographies have been penned. Many of his political and military colleagues, his domestic staff and his family have written about him. Every year a significant work of scholarship appears on some aspect of his life, personality or career.

So why add another volume? All my life, I have been interested in places associated with people and events. Specialists and scholars can analyse documents and old newspapers. Anyone can visit a location and allow their imagination to recreate what it was like in the past. Churchill was a great traveller and had fought wars in three continents before he was twenty-five. He was frequently on the move and left records, sometimes even paintings, of the places he visited. My aim in this book is to consider the places in Britain – including Ireland before its independence in 1921 – that have associations with Churchill. Some are well known, such as Blenheim Palace where he was born and Chartwell which he made his home over his last forty years. The Cabinet Rooms in Whitehall are full of the spirit of Churchill during the years of the Second World War: the only thing missing is the smell of his cigars. I have noted the homes he lived in, his places of study, the offices he occupied and locations where he delivered significant speeches. I have tried to examine the relationship he had with each of the four constituencies he represented in the House of Commons between 1900 and 1964. But there are also many lesser-known locations that tell stories that shed light on Churchill’s personality or politics.

The book is in the form of a gazetteer, divided into geographical regions. (I have retained the names of counties as they were in Churchill’s time.) Many of the locations are private homes or working institutions and not open to the public. Privacy must be respected.

The book is restricted to Britain. From childhood to old age, however, Churchill was a frequent visitor to France, which he loved. He travelled extensively, in war and in peace, to the United States and Canada. His travels never took him to China and the Far East, to South America or to Australia and New Zealand, but there are many sites abroad – from the North-West Frontier to Cuba, from South Africa to Carthage in Tunisia, from Yalta to Normandy, from Marrakesh to Tehran – that could provide material for other books.

Peter Clark

Frome, Somerset, 2020

1

LONDON

SW1

L ondon was like some huge prehistoric animal, capable of enduring terrible injuries, mangled and bleeding from many wounds, and yet preserving its life and movement. ¹

In 1954, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, were returning from a Commonwealth tour on the Royal Yacht Britannia. Winston Churchill, in his eightieth year, was prime minister and joined the yacht when it was in British territorial waters and together they sailed to London. The queen saw the Thames as a dirty commercial river, but, as she said, Churchill was describing it as the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain.²

Churchill had more to do with London than with any other city. He went to secondary school on the outskirts of the capital but, from the beginning of the century, he always had a home in London. Over a third of the locations celebrated in this book are found in London, so I have divided the city into two. First we have the postal area of SW1, which covers the City of Westminster – the centre of Britain’s political life – and the socially elite area to the north.

1. Arlington Street, p.6

2. 4 Carlton Gardens, p.6

3. German Embassy, p.7

4. Caxton Hall, p.8

5. Stornoway House, p.9

6. Downing Street

10 Downing Street, p.12

11 Downing Street, p.17

7. 33 Eccleston Square, p.20

8. Cabinet War Rooms, p.21

9. 71–72 Jermyn Street, p.28

10. King Charles Street, p.28

11. Empire Theatre, p.29

12. The Mall, p.30

13. Buckingham Palace, p.31

14. Morpeth Mansions, p.32

15. Northumberland Avenue, p.35

16. Parliament Square, p.40

17. St Margaret’s Church, p.41

18. Westminster Abbey, p.44

19. Methodist Central Hall, P.45

20. Big Ben, p.45

21. House of Commons, p.45

22. Westminster Hall, p.55

23. St James’s Place and St

James’s Street

29 St James’s Place, p.56

6 St James’s Street, p.57

9 St James’s Street, p.57

19 St James’s Street, p.57

24. The Carlton Club, p.59

25. Westminster Gardens, p.59

26. Admiralty House, p.59

27. Foreign Office, p.64

28. Home Office, p.65

29. The Treasury, p.66

30. The Old War Office, p.67

Arlington Street

21 Arlington Street

USEFUL ARISTOCRATIC CONNECTIONS

Arlington Street was part of the early development of the fashionable St James’s quarter of London. It was originally built in the late seventeenth century.

Although there is no plaque, the street featured the London home of the third Marquess of Salisbury, prime minister when Winston Churchill first became a Member of Parliament in 1900. Lord Salisbury was an intellectual, a dabbler in amateur chemistry and, in his earlier days, an essayist dealing with political history. He had just about pushed Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, out of the cabinet in 1886, and there was a brittle relationship between the older man and the young Churchill. But Salisbury was generous and took a paternal interest in him. Salisbury’s son, Lord Hugh Cecil, became a close friend of his, and was best man at his wedding in 1908. While Churchill was still a Conservative – until 1904, that is – he used to spend time with Lord Hugh Cecil and others who formed an awkward squad known as ‘the Hughligans’.

Not far away is Number 21, a house with a forecourt. Formerly known as Wimborne House, it was the principal London home of the family of Viscount Wimborne, Churchill’s cousin (Wimborne’s mother was a sister of Lord Randolph Churchill). Wimborne’s son, Ivor Guest – successively a Conservative and Liberal MP – made Wimborne House available to Churchill and his family after he ceased to be First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915.

Carlton Gardens

4 Carlton Gardens

CHURCHILL AND DE GAULLE

Carlton Gardens and Carlton House Terrace were built in the 1820s, designed by John Nash to replace Carlton House, the residence of the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Both streets became the homes of the ‘new rich’ – the ‘old rich’ already had their houses to the northwest, in Mayfair and Belgravia.

Next to the gardens is a statue of General Charles de Gaulle, uniformed and with one hand outstretched. A junior minister when France capitulated in June 1940, de Gaulle slipped out and came to Britain. Here, he became the leader of the Free French, directing a consistent resistance to Nazi-occupied France. This address, as a plaque indicates, was the headquarters of France Libre.

Winston Churchill welcomed de Gaulle and gave him resources and moral support. But over the years they had a prickly relationship. Both men saw themselves as personifying the ideals and the history of their countries.

Carlton House Terrace

German Embassy

APPROACHED BY HITLER’S MAN IN LONDON

The German Embassy lies alongside the Waterloo Steps, which descend to the Mall, the long, majestic road leading from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. In 1937, Winston Churchill was invited to a meeting with the ambassador there, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop was a familiar personality in London’s upper-class social circles, and Churchill had met him several times before. Churchill was received in a large room on an upper floor, and their conversation lasted for over two hours. Ribbentrop argued that Germany sought only friendship with Britain and its empire, but that it must have Lebensraum – living space – to the east for its expanding population. Churchill, who was not a government representative at the time, argued that Britain could not give Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe, even though Britain detested Soviet Communism as much as Hitler did.

Ribbentrop later became German foreign minister and negotiated the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 with his Soviet counterpart, Molotov. After the war, he was found guilty at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to death.

Caxton Street

10 Caxton Street, Caxton Hall

A CELEBRITY BY-ELECTION

Found at the heart of Westminster, the red-brick Caxton Hall has witnessed many important political events. In March 1924, the results of a by-election were declared here: Winston Churchill lost.

Before the reform of the parliamentary electoral system in 1832, the Westminster parliamentary constituency was the most democratic of English constituencies: almost all of its adult male constituents had the vote. What is more, because of its central metropolitan location, it always attracted attention. In 1780, Westminster had 12,000 voters who, after a riotous election, returned Charles James Fox as Member of Parliament. The following century, the philosopher and early advocate of women’s rights John Stuart Mill was MP for Westminster.

In 1924, Winston Churchill was edging away from the Liberal Party and towards his first allegiance, the Conservative Party. He stood in the by-election as an independent, anti-socialist Constitutionalist. He had been a Liberal MP (and minister) until 1922, and he had fought and lost an election at Leicester in 1923. He had campaigned ferociously against the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and saw no great difference between Soviet Communism and the gentle English socialism of the Labour Party which, in January 1924, had formed the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. In this by-election, Churchill was not endorsed by the Conservative Party, who put up their own candidate, but he was supported by individual Conservatives. In effect, he was splitting the right-wing vote. This displeased the ‘Conservative machine’ and contributed to the deep distrust that many Conservatives had for Churchill over the next twenty years.

The Westminster constituency was called the Abbey division, and it included Westminster Abbey, Victoria station, Pall Mall, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It was reckoned that, in 1924, over one hundred Members of Parliament lived within the constituency, as well as dukes, jockeys, prize-fighters, courtiers, actors and businessmen.³ Among these distinguished constituents was the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who got on well personally with Churchill. Shaw thought Churchill had been right about the disastrous Gallipoli campaign but, as a socialist, he voted for the Independent Labour Party candidate, Fenner Brockway. Another constituent was the former prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, Arthur Balfour, who issued a letter backing Churchill. But Westminster was not home to wealth alone: there was a working-class element around Horseferry Road. As well as Otho Nicholson, the official Conservative candidate, a Liberal stood.

The by-election became an entertainment. Churchill had the enthusiastic and resourceful support of a new friend, a twenty-three-year-old red-headed Irishman with a flair for promoting himself and Churchill. His name was Brendan Bracken. He organised a coach and four horses to take his candidate around the constituency. Chorus girls came to address envelopes for circulars for constituents and deliver election addresses.

The glamour did not win against the machine. Nicholson was returned with a majority of forty-three over Churchill. Brockway came a reasonable third, and the Liberal at the bottom of the poll. At the count, Brockway recalled, the first indications were that Churchill had won. But when his defeat was confirmed, his spirits slumped. His hopes of returning to the House of Commons were dashed. He shared his disappointment with the Labour candidate: You know, Brockway, you and I have no chance. We represent ideas – Nicholson represents the machine.⁴

Later that year, Churchill managed to get a constituency and the backing of the Conservative Party: Epping, a constituency he held for the rest of his parliamentary life.

Cleveland Row

Stornoway House

MAX BEAVERBROOK, HIS OLDEST FRIEND

Tucked away to the west of St James’s Street is an eighteenth-century mansion, Stornoway House. On one side, it overlooks Green Park, giving it an almost rural air; on the other, it overlooks St James’s Palace. The house was built in the 1790s for the first Lord Grenville, a future prime minister. Today, it accommodates the offices of a financial house.

From the early 1920s, Stornoway House was the London home of Lord Beaverbrook, a friend of Winston Churchill from before the First World War until the 1960s, and Churchill was an occasional guest here before the Second World War. Beaverbrook and Churchill were both allies of King Edward VIII at the time of his abdication, and Churchill dined here on 2 December 1936, during the abdication crisis, to discuss the king’s situation.

The political and personal lives of Churchill and Beaverbrook interacted over the decades. Beaverbrook, born Max Aitken in 1879, was a Canadian, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He came to London before he was thirty years old, by which time he was already a multi-millionaire, riding on the crest of Canadian development and his native country’s early-twentieth-century prosperity. He made his money in steel and cement, in the development of the West Indies, and in finance. After he arrived in London, Aitken had an extraordinary career. He became an ally of the Unionist (Conservative) Member of Parliament Andrew Bonar Law – also born in Canada – who became the leader of the Conservative Party in 1911. Promotion and honours were showered on him: Aitken effortlessly became the Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire, was knighted, made a baronet and then became a peer, taking his name from a stream in New Brunswick – Beaver Brook. He became at the centre of British public affairs, an ally of senior politicians and instrumental in the accession of prime ministers Lloyd George in 1916 and Bonar Law in 1922. Lloyd George made Beaverbrook minister of information in 1917, and so he became a privy counsellor before he was even forty years old. At the end of the First World War, he bought the Daily Express newspaper, and it is as a newspaper proprietor – though he preferred to see himself as principal share-holder – that he is best known. He founded the Sunday Express and was a regular contributor to his own newspapers; indeed, he described himself on his passport as a journalist.

Beaverbrook and Churchill held each other in mutual regard. Churchill’s closest friends were mavericks and, like Beaverbrook, not from the same upper-class background – Brendan Bracken and Professor Lindemann were similar outsiders. Beaverbrook and Churchill both had a sense of fun, even mischief. Both enjoyed their alcohol, and both had strong interests outside politics. Both had close friendships across the political spectrum. Both were serious historians. Beaverbrook always had access to Churchill. As Franklin D. Roosevelt’s confidant, Harry Hopkins, said, Beaverbrook was a man who saw Churchill after midnight.⁵ Clementine Churchill was, however, no fan of Beaverbrook, whom she referred to as Bottle Imp.

They did not always see eye to eye. Beaverbrook was critical of Churchill’s desire to snuff out the Bolshevik Revolution after 1917 and of his role as chancellor of the exchequer between 1924 and 1929; nor did he join in Churchill’s campaign for rearmament in the 1930s. But with the outbreak of the Second World War, the old friendship bloomed. Churchill wanted Neville Chamberlain to make Beaverbrook minister of food and, when Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, he looked to Beaverbrook for comfort and support. They lunched together – just the two of them – on 11 May and again the next day. And, on the evening he finally moved from Admiralty House to 10 Downing Street in June 1940, he even spent the night at Stornoway House. He brought Beaverbrook in as minister of aircraft production. But Churchill also seemed to depend on Beaverbrook for emotional support. When he made his fourth visit to France in the five weeks after he became prime minister – a visit that saw the collapse of morale of the French leaders – he took Beaverbrook with him.

Beaverbrook was an unorthodox minister in 1940. Stornoway House became the first offices of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and Beaverbrook recruited businessmen and staff from his newspapers, who were unpaid. Beaverbrook’s drive and dynamism built up the country’s arsenal of shells and guns as well as fighter aircraft, which were a key factor in the Battle of Britain later in 1940. At this time, the two men were very close. One evening during the Blitz in 1940, Churchill and Beaverbrook gazed out of Stornoway House’s large windows overlooking Green Park. They watched flashes of guns and the glare of an exploding bomb. Even Churchill thought they were taking needless risks, and they moved across central London to the ICI building on the South Bank, from which there was also a good view.

In time, the ministry moved to more conventional quarters, before Stornoway House suffered bomb damage in 1941. Beaverbrook was minister for twenty-one months, but he was regularly consulted by Churchill during the rest of the war. He was sent as a personal envoy to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to Moscow to break the ice and initiate talks with Stalin. Beaverbrook was loyal to Churchill, even though the former argued strongly against Churchill in favour of a ‘Second Front’ to distract German forces from their concentration on Soviet Russia.

Beaverbrook tried to remain detached from party politics. He supported many journalists in their careers, regardless of their politics, and was very close to left-wing politicians such as Michael Foot (whom Beaverbrook appointed as editor of the Evening Standard at the age of twenty-nine). More conventional Conservatives were wary of Beaverbrook, who was a reluctant adviser of the party during the General Election of 1945.

In their later years, both Churchill and Beaverbrook were absorbed in their own writing of twentieth-century history: Churchill with his war memoirs and Beaverbrook with a series of volumes – he called them chronicles – of the years between 1914 and 1924. As Churchill became frailer in his last decade, Beaverbrook did what he could. His villa in the south of France was made available to him, and he would call on Churchill in the last months of his friend’s life – though Churchill hardly knew who he was.

Beaverbrook’s body also became frailer, but his mind was as sharp as ever. Though four and a half years younger, Beaverbrook died in June 1964, seven months before Churchill.

In his final year, he gave an interview and spoke of Churchill as a man without rancour.⁶ Churchill, he said, could get emotional and be strongly critical of someone, but he then had the habit of touching you, of putting his hand on your hand – like that – as if to say that his real feelings for you were not changed.⁷

Downing Street

10 Downing Street

THE BEATING HEART OF BRITISH POLITICAL POWER

Since the 1980s, access to Downing Street has become restricted. There is a heavy police presence, and one has only a distant view of buildings 10 and 11. Number 10 of this rather ordinary terrace has been the official residence of the prime minister since the time of Sir Robert Walpole in 1735. It was Churchill’s official home between May 1940 and July 1945, and again between October 1951 and April 1955. During the war years, although he used Number 10 as an office, he had a flat at the Annexe in Storey’s Gate, two hundred yards away, and he used the Cabinet War Rooms close by as his operational headquarters.

At the beginning of 1938, the then prime minister Neville Chamberlain hosted a farewell luncheon for Joachim von Ribbentrop, the outgoing German ambassador. Clementine and Winston Churchill were among about fourteen guests. During the meal, a foreign office messenger brought a letter for the prime minister announcing that Hitler had invaded Austria and that German troops were heading for Vienna. The prime minister and Mrs Chamberlain were restless, anxious for the guests to go; Ribbentrop seemed totally unconcerned, even unaware. Churchill was conscious that something was up. He turned to Frau von Ribbentrop.

I hope England and Germany will preserve their friendship, he said.

Be careful you don’t spoil it, she answered.⁸

Churchill never saw Ribbentrop again. He was hanged at Nuremberg after the war.

On Thursday 9 May 1940, the prime minister Neville Chamberlain summoned Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to 10 Downing Street. The previous day, there had been a debate in the House of Commons on the disastrous campaign to prevent a German takeover of Norway. The government had won a vote, but some Conservatives had voted against the government or abstained. It had been a moral defeat for Chamberlain. His time was up. Chamberlain was ready to consider a coalition government with the Labour Party.

Churchill arrived to find the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Kingsley Wood, and the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, with Chamberlain. They were joined by Clement Attlee, the leader of the opposition and leader of the Labour Party, and Arthur Greenwood, his deputy. Chamberlain said there was a need for a national government to include the Labour Party. Attlee was non-committal; the Labour Party was at that moment in conference at Bournemouth and must be consulted. The meeting was adjourned.

The following day, Wood came to see Churchill at the Admiralty and brought a further summons from Chamberlain to come to a meeting. Wood, Halifax and the Conservative chief whip, David Margesson, were present. The Labour Party had agreed to a national government – but not under Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain himself recognised that he had to step down. Whom should he advise King George VI to invite to form a government in his place? There was a long silence. Even Churchill, normally verbose, kept mum. Halifax, whom Chamberlain preferred, said his membership of the House of Lords would debar him from being an effective prime minister. Churchill was the only choice. Chamberlain resigned, and Churchill was called to Buckingham Palace later that day and agreed to form the new government.

After being appointed prime minister in May 1940, Churchill was slow to move into Number 10 and instead continued to use Admiralty House, his official residence as First Lord of the Admiralty. He loved this building; it was grander than 10 Downing Street. He finally moved in on 14 June 1940, but he used it as his regular base for just three months. In September he was advised, for security reasons, to move to what became known as the Annexe, a specially prepared flat above the Cabinet War Rooms in nearby Horse Guards Road. 10 Downing Street was used as a place of work during the day.

King George VI visited 10 Downing Street regularly during the Second World War, fourteen times in all. On two occasions he was there during an air raid; Churchill had to escort him to the air-raid shelter.

Churchill was present at Downing Street during one raid in February 1944 when a bomb fell yards away on Horse Guards Parade, breaking windows in Downing Street. Churchill, whose physical courage might well be seen as recklessness, would make only a gesture of self-protection by donning a heavy overcoat and wearing a tin hat.

On 14 October 1940, Churchill was dining in the garden room with three colleagues when there was an air raid. He had an instinct to tell the kitchen staff, who were preparing the meal, to go down to the underground shelter. They all did so, and minutes later a bomb fell on the Treasury building fifty yards away. The blast shattered the Number 10 kitchen’s large plate-glass window, creating havoc in the room. Had they not withdrawn, the staff would have been killed or seriously injured. The underground Treasury shelter suffered a direct hit, killing three civil servants working late.

A permanent resident at Number 10 during the first part of the war was a black cat called Nelson. Like all cats, he was terrified of the air raids. Churchill, a great cat lover, chided him for not living up to his name. Try to remember, he said to the cat, what those boys in the RAF are doing.⁹ In consideration for Nelson’s nerves, the cat was taken forty miles away to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence in Buckinghamshire.

One of Number 10’s visitors in January 1941 was President Roosevelt’s special representative, Harry Hopkins. Physically frail but determined, Hopkins was an intimate of Roosevelt. He arrived at 10 Downing Street after an air raid that had broken the windows. He and Churchill immediately hit it off. Churchill had a strong faith in the virtues of the English-speaking peoples. His four-volume history, which uses those words in the title, was a joint history of the two countries of his parents. Churchill was desperate for United States involvement in the war, but Roosevelt had just won his third election as president and was extremely cautious about becoming embroiled in a European conflict. He and Churchill corresponded regularly, and Roosevelt expressed great sympathy for the cause; in late 1940 and 1941, he even provided material support. During 1941, Britain and the United States shared an interest in protecting Atlantic traffic – but Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of the year spurred the United States to join the Allies officially the following day. Hitler also declared war on the United States and, to Churchill’s relief, the United States became a full belligerent.

The alliance was close at many levels. Hopkins was followed by another envoy from the president, Averell Harriman, who later married Pamela Digby after her divorce from Churchill’s son, Randolph.

In the spring of 1942, Number 10 hosted the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was breaking his journey from the United States to Moscow. Churchill described this old Bolshevik as being of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness.¹⁰ There was a rare moment of intimacy between the statesmen when Churchill grabbed Molotov’s arm and they looked each other in the eye. Silently we wrung each other’s hands.¹¹ Human feelings and a shared sense of danger seemed to erase all Churchill’s earlier rhetoric against the Soviet Union. On 8 May 1945, after announcing to the nation from here at 3 p.m. that the war was over, Churchill got in his car to go to the House of Commons. He was pushed by cheering crowds all the