On a Sunday in June of 1940, at Chequers, the country house of British prime ministers, Clementine Churchill sat down to write a letter to her husband. France had fallen. She tore the letter up. Days later, she gave it to him anyway.

One of the men in his entourage, she wrote—a devoted friend—had come to tell her there was a danger of Winston being generally disliked by his colleagues and subordinates because of his rough, sarcastic, and overbearing manner. She signed it, “Your loving, devoted, and watchful Clemy. ” No written reply has ever been found. The letter came from a woman who had been married to its reader for almost thirty-two years.

She knew his moods. She knew his hours. She knew better than anyone alive the difference between the voice the nation heard on the wireless and the voice that came through the door of his study at one in the morning. She began gently.

“My darling Winston,” she wrote, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner, and you are not so kind as you used to be. ” Then she set out the charge plainly. One of the men in his entourage, a devoted friend, had come to her. The warning was blunt: the people Winston depended on most—the colleagues around the table and the staff beneath them—were coming to dislike him, and the cause was his manner.

She did not name the friend. The sources that survive do not name him either. What followed was a lesson in power written by the one person who could deliver it. It is for you to give the orders, she wrote.

And if they are bungled, except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Speaker, you can sack anyone and everyone. A prime minister in wartime held that kind of power. She knew he held it. She wanted him to understand what it did to the people beneath him.

The three exceptions she named were chosen with care: the King reigned above him, the Archbishop headed the Church of England, the Speaker presided over the House of Commons. Nobody else in public life, she was telling him, could be sure of keeping a job if he decided otherwise. Therefore, she went on, with this terrific power, you must combine urbanity, kindness, and if possible, Olympic calm. She reminded him of a line he used to quote to her in French: one rules the souls of others only through calm.

It had been his own maxim once. She was handing it back to him. Then she turned to the meetings. Higher up, she wrote, if an idea is suggested, say at a conference, you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.

She had seen what that contempt did to a room. Men stopped offering. The silence that followed could pass for agreement. You won’t get the best results by irascibility and rudeness, she wrote.

They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality. At the bottom she added a postscript. I wrote this at Chequers last Sunday. Tore it up.

But here it is now. She signed herself his loving, devoted, and watchful Clemy. Each of those words was chosen. Loving came first.

Watchful came last. Writing was how this marriage said its hardest things. Over fifty-six years, about 1,700 letters passed between the two of them. They kept separate bedrooms and breakfasted apart.

For long stretches they were in different places altogether. The letters were full of pet names and private jokes. The letter of June 1940 has none of that. It is the letter of a woman who had decided that something had to be said, and that the safest place to say it was on paper, where he would have to read every line.

The International Churchill Society records that this is the only known letter between the couple from the whole of 1940. No written reply survives. Their daughter Mary believed the two of them probably talked it over in person, in the way of a marriage that had long since learned where its sore places lay. The original is kept today at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, among the papers of the man it was written to correct.

So what had she seen? To answer that, the story goes to the people who were in the room. There were the young women who took his dictation at midnight, at his bedside and in his bath. There were the private secretaries who sat outside his door and the valet who ran his baths and packed his cases.

There were the generals who carried out his orders and the generals he removed. There was his son, and there were the ministers and viceroys who kept diaries and wrote in them what they could not say to his face. Almost all of them loved him in some fashion. Many of them were frightened of him.

Several wrote down private sentences that his admirers have been trying to explain ever since. One of those sentences was written by a soldier in a diary late in the war: a single line about the prime minister. Years afterward, the man who wrote it confessed that reading it back made him feel ashamed. That line waits further along in this story.

Against these witnesses stand the defenders. Two institutions in particular—the International Churchill Society and the Churchill Project at Hillsdale College—have spent decades answering each charge laid against him. They correct misquotations. They check dates.

They point out, often rightly, when a famous line was never his. Their answers belong too, because honest uncertainty is part of the record. There is one more thing to say before the story begins. Churchill kept no private diary of his own.

His inner life reaches us almost entirely through other people: through their letters and memoirs, and through the letters he wrote to his wife. When he was angry, we know it because someone else wrote it down. When he said sorry, we know it the same way. That makes the letter from Chequers unusual.

It is one of the few times anyone told him the truth to his face, in writing, while the war was still being fought. It was written by the one person he could not dismiss. What she was warning against had been growing for a lifetime, and the story of it begins long before Downing Street, in the house where he was born. He was born on the 30th of November 1874 at Blenheim Palace, in the house of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough.

A duke is the highest title in the British peerage below the royal family itself. Yet the baby born there would never hold a title of his own. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a younger son. Titles passed to the eldest.

So Winston would grow up an aristocrat by blood and a commoner by law, free to sit in the House of Commons and forced to earn his own living. His father was a brilliant, erratic Conservative politician who rose fast and fell faster. His mother was Jennie Jerome, an American heiress from New York. Neither parent had much time for the boy.

Winston grew up hungry for the attention of a father who rarely gave it. The clearest record of that father is a letter. On the 9th of August 1893, after Winston had only just scraped into Sandhurst, Lord Randolph wrote to him: “Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing long letters to you after every folly and failure. ” If the boy could not stop leading an idle and unprofitable life, his father warned, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy, and futile existence.

Winston was eighteen. He wrote back meekly: thank you very much for writing to me. I am very sorry indeed that I have done so badly. His mother offered no comfort, and he told her so.

Never would I have believed that you would have been so unkind, he wrote to her. I can’t tell you how wretched you have made me feel. Decades later in his memoir My Early Life, he remembered that he was pained and startled by this communication and made haste to promise better results in the future. The man who would one day send his own son a crushing letter about gambling debts had learned early what it was to receive one.

That was the school in which his temper was formed. Lord Randolph died in January 1895. Winston had already gone through Sandhurst and into the cavalry. What he wanted was fame, and he went looking for it wherever there was fighting.

He served and wrote as a war correspondent in Cuba, in India, in the Sudan, and in South Africa. In 1899, during the Boer War, he was captured and then he escaped. The escape made his name across the empire. He used it at once.

In 1900 he was elected member of parliament as a Conservative. Four years later he crossed the floor of the House and joined the Liberals. His old party never forgave him. He did not much mind.

He was rising, and he knew it. In 1908 he married Clementine Hozier, on the 12th of September. He was thirty-three. She was a clever, reserved young woman whose own mother had gambled away money at the card tables of Deauville, and she would carry that memory into her marriage like a warning.

The historian David Lough, who spent years in Churchill’s bank records, found an order for drink placed in that same year, 1908. It shows how the young politician meant to live. There were nine dozen bottles and seven dozen half-bottles of Pol Roger champagne, six dozen bottles of claret, five dozen of port, seven dozen of sparkling Moselle, six dozen of whiskey, three dozen of twenty-year-old brandy, three dozen of vermouth, and four bottles of gin. It was the cellar of a duke, ordered by a man living on his salary and his pen.

That order is the first line in a long account. It runs through a doctor’s note written in a New York winter, a wager with a newspaper baron, and a champagne house that would one day put black borders on its labels. The ambition was already visible to everyone around him. So was the self-regard.

He was impatient with people who moved slowly, and generous to people who amused him. He talked more than he listened. He rarely noticed what his demands cost those who met them, and when he did notice, he was often charming about it. In February 1910, at thirty-five, he became Home Secretary.

The post made him the cabinet minister responsible for the police and for public order across England and Wales. He took up the office with the energy he brought to everything. Within a year he would be standing in a London street under fire, and a decision made at his desk would follow him for the rest of his life. On a January morning in 1911, the Home Secretary of Great Britain stood in an East London street in a top hat and a coat with a fur collar, watching a house burn.

The house was number 100 Sidney Street. The men inside it were wanted for murder. The story had begun a few weeks earlier. On the 16th of December 1910, three unarmed police officers had been murdered at Houndsditch in London.

The suspects were Latvian revolutionaries. On the 3rd of January 1911—one account gives the 4th—the police surrounded the house. As Home Secretary, Churchill authorized soldiers of the Scots Guards to come from the Tower of London. Then he went to see for himself.

He arrived in his top hat, and the newspaper photographers found him at once. A Maxim gun, a heavy machine gun, was brought up to the street. When the house caught fire, the fire brigade moved forward. Churchill stopped them from approaching the burning building while keeping them ready to protect the houses on either side.

Both gunmen died inside. A firefighter was later killed by falling debris. The siege was one of the first great news events ever caught on film, and in the footage, the figure the eye keeps finding is the minister in the hat. His political opponents noticed.

Arthur Balfour rose in the House of Commons with a pointed line: “We are concerned to observe photographs in the illustrated newspapers of the Home Secretary in the danger zone. ”

Years later, Churchill was candid about why he had gone. “I thought it my duty to see what was going on myself,” he wrote, but he added that his convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check. He admitted the criticism was not altogether unjust.

There was no need in law for the Home Secretary to stand in Sidney Street. The police had their own commanders and the Guards had their own officers. Yet the decision to hold back the fire brigade was made by him in the street, with the cameras turning. It was a small preview of a lifelong habit.

Wherever events were happening, he wanted to be at the center of them, directing them himself. In 1940, it would help to save a country. In 1911, it made him look like a man who had wandered onto a stage. There was another side to the Home Secretary in those months, and it was written in private.

In December 1910 he wrote a letter to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, about what he called the feeble-minded and insane classes. Their unnatural and increasingly rapid growth, he wrote, was a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. Then came the sentence his critics quote most often: I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed. The historian Sir Martin Gilbert traced what came next.

As Home Secretary, Churchill marked up a pamphlet by an American, Dr. H. C. Sharp, on the sterilization laws of the state of Indiana.

He asked his officials to look into similar measures for Britain. He described sterilization as a simple surgical operation. It did not happen. The Mental Deficiency Act that Parliament passed in 1913 allowed people judged mentally defective to be detained against their will, but it rejected sterilization.

His defenders point to the times: eugenic ideas were widely held across the parties before the First World War, in Britain and in America alike. Gilbert argued that when Churchill’s son left the letter out of the official biography, it was an oversight and no attempt to hide it. Critics answer that the letter is his own, in his own words, and that the words speak for themselves. The public man went to the street in a top hat.

The private man wrote to the prime minister about sealing off the stream of madness. Both were the same person, and both were acting with the same complete certainty. It would be easy to separate the two—the brave showman and the cold theorist—and keep only the one that suits the story being told. The record does not allow it.

And two months before Sidney Street, a telegram sent from his office had already settled what a whole region of Wales would think of him for forty years. In the autumn of 1910, the miners of the Cambrian Combine had been on strike since September. The Rhondda was a long narrow valley in South Wales crowded with pit villages. The dispute was bitter, and in early November it turned violent.

On the 8th of November, in the town of Tonypandy, crowds clashed with the police. In Edwardian Britain there was no national riot police. When local forces were overwhelmed, troops were routinely called out to help them. That was what the local authorities wanted.

By the time the Home Secretary became involved, soldiers had already been authorized to go. What Churchill did next is the heart of a quarrel that has lasted more than a century. He stopped the troop train at Swindon. He allowed only the cavalry to travel on to Cardiff, with orders to stay there.

Instead of soldiers, he sent police from London. He told the chief constable that infantry should not be used till all other means have failed. And he sent a message to the miners: confiding in the good sense of the Cambrian workmen, we are holding back the soldiers for the present and sending police instead. The figures show how the day was handled.

Two hundred cavalry waited at Cardiff. Two hundred Metropolitan Police went west from London, with ten mounted constables beside them. More than 500 civilians and nearly eighty policemen were injured in the disturbances. One man died, a miner named Samuel Rees, of a head wound that the coroner’s jury said came from some blunt instrument.

No soldier fired a shot. Then, at about eight in the evening on the 8th of November, the situation changed. A critic of Churchill, the writer Bob Pitt, quotes the telegram sent at ten minutes past eight to General Nevil Macready: as the situation appears to have become more serious, you should, if the chief constable or local authority desires it, move all the cavalry into the disturbed district without delay. By the 9th of November, the 18th Hussars and the Lancashire Fusiliers were in the area, with Macready in command.

His defenders, among them the Welsh historian Dai Smith writing for the International Churchill Society, say he did everything he could to keep soldiers away from strikers, and that he succeeded. Pitt argues that the Home Secretary imposed central control over the use of police and army, and that placing Macready in command was an extraordinary constitutional innovation. In his reading, the order that sent the cavalry into the valley was Churchill’s own. Macready himself, writing his memoirs in 1924, said that the first reports of attacks on the miners had been exaggerated.

Even Dai Smith gave his article a telling title. He called the riots Winston Churchill’s nemesis. In the old Greek stories, nemesis was the power that punished pride and could never be escaped. In the valleys, a different story took hold.

It said that Churchill had sent troops to shoot the miners. That is a legend—no one was shot at Tonypandy. But the legend was believed for generations. The Labour member Ness Edwards declared that Mr.

Churchill did use the military against the miners at Tonypandy, and the miners will never forget it. Welsh cinema audiences reportedly booed his face when it appeared on the newsreels. Churchill never let it go. In February 1949 he wrote to the Lord Mayor of Cardiff that the action he took at Tonypandy was to stop the troops being sent to control the strikers, for fear of shooting.

Instead, I sent Metropolitan Police, he wrote, who charged with their rolled mackintoshes, and no one was hurt. The next year, at Ninian Park in Cardiff, he said he wanted to replace in Welsh villages the cruel lie with which they have been fed all these long years. His own defense went too far. Samuel Rees had died.

Hundreds had been hurt. Part of the confusion came later, and from somewhere else. In August 1911, during a national railway strike, troops at Llanelli, also in South Wales, did open fire on a crowd. Between two and four people were killed.

Llanelli and Tonypandy ran together in memory, and the dead of one were laid at the door of the other. He had held back the soldiers, and then he had sent them in. He had kept the shooting away from Tonypandy, and then he had claimed that no one was hurt at all. Both halves are true.

The Welsh remembered only one of them. He would soon hold an office where a single plan of his would cost lives on a scale no one in the Rhondda could have imagined. By 1915, Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister who ran the Royal Navy, and he believed the war could be shortened at the Dardanelles. He had held the office since October 1911.

The First Lord was a civilian, a politician set above the admirals who commanded the fleet. By the second winter of the Great War, he had a plan. The Dardanelles was the narrow strait leading toward Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally. Force the strait with warships, the argument ran, and the Ottomans might be knocked out of the war.

At his side was the most famous sailor in Britain. In October 1914, Churchill had brought Admiral Jackie Fisher back as First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Navy beneath the First Lord. Churchill called him a veritable volcano of knowledge and of inspiration. The two men were alike in energy and in ego, and they could not work together for long.

Fisher never fully believed in the Dardanelles. He went back and forth in his support, and he would have preferred an attack on Germany’s Baltic coast. At a meeting of the War Council on the 28th of January 1915, he went along with the naval attack only reluctantly. According to an American naval study written in 1953, Churchill left the impression that the whole Board of Admiralty backed the plan unanimously, which was untrue.

The naval attacks began in February 1915 and ran into March. The ships could not break through. On the 25th of April, soldiers were landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula instead. They stayed for more than eight months.

The last of them left on the 9th of January 1916. The National Army Museum counts over 220,000 Allied casualties out of a force of nearly half a million men. The Imperial War Museums give a narrower account: 115,000 Allied casualties and 186,000 on the Ottoman side. Neither is small.

Others had shared in the decision. Churchill had argued for it hardest, and he paid for it first. The end came through Fisher. By May, Churchill wanted to send still more ships to the Dardanelles, draining the fleet that watched Germany at home.

Fisher wrote to Admiral Jellicoe that Churchill was a bigger danger than the Germans. On the 15th of May 1915, Fisher resigned. His note to Churchill was short: I am unable to remain any longer your colleague. I am off to Scotland at once so as to avoid all questionings.

The prime minister, Asquith, first shrugged. “Fisher is always resigning,” he said. Then he ordered him back. Fisher answered with a list of six demands for sole authority over the fleet; one of them, according to one historian, was that Churchill must not be in the Cabinet.

Asquith privately called it the letter of a madman and accepted the resignation. Fisher’s going set off a political earthquake. Two days later, Lloyd George and Bonar Law went to see Asquith, and Asquith agreed to form a coalition with the Conservatives. Their price included Churchill: they would not keep him at the Admiralty.

On the 21st of May 1915 he was forced out. He was given a minor post, the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, which carried a seat in the government and almost nothing to do for a man who lived for action. It was a kind of burial. Clementine later described it in words he never used himself.

When he left the Admiralty, she said, he thought he was finished. I thought he would die of grief. She blamed Fisher. In fury she wrote to the old admiral: keep your hands off my man.

You have all but ruined him once. Don’t ruin him again. Winston was more forgiving. After Fisher’s death, he wrote, I am glad that we were friends at the end.

He did not wait to be forgotten. Later that year he resigned from the government. On the 18th of November he arrived in France, attached to the Grenadier Guards to learn the trenches. On the 1st of January 1916 he was made a lieutenant colonel.

Four days later he took command of the sixth battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers at a Belgian village the British soldiers called Plug Street. He left the front line on the 3rd of May 1916 and went back to politics. The question of blame was waiting for him. On the 18th of July 1916 the government announced a Dardanelles commission to investigate what had gone wrong.

Its first report came in 1917, its final one in 1919. The commission found that the expedition had been poorly planned and executed and that its difficulties had been underestimated. On Churchill, it found that he had advocated the attack by ships alone before the War Council, against a certain amount of half-hearted and hesitating expert opinion. He should, the commission felt, have made certain that his naval advisers’ doubts were put plainly to the council.

At forty-one he had risen almost to the top and fallen almost to the bottom. He had learned what it was to be written off by the newspapers, by his party, and by the men who had once sat beside him. He came back, and in the years after the war he held offices where his private memoranda would say far more than his speeches. On the 12th of May 1919, at the War Office, Churchill wrote a minute that his defenders have spent a century explaining.

The war was over. He was now the minister responsible for the army, and the question on his desk was whether British forces should keep the right to use gas. A minute was an internal note written for officials and never meant for the public. I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas, he wrote.

We have definitely adopted the position at the peace conference of arguing in favor of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. Then came the sentence that has followed him ever since: I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. He went on: the moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.

It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases. Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. The defenders read the minute closely. Richard Langworth, one of the leading voices of the Churchill societies, argues that he meant lachrymatory gas—the kind that makes the eyes stream, what a later age would call tear gas.

The critics read the same page and stop at the words poisoned gas. What happened in practice is also disputed. In North Russia in 1919, the British did drop a device charged with a chemical called Adamsite; Langworth stresses that it caused uncontrollable vomiting and temporary incapacity rather than mass death. In Iraq in 1920, the picture is less clear.

One historian, Charles Townshend, wrote that gas shells were used there. Later research by R. M. Douglas found that the conditions for their use were never all present, and an army statement of November 1921 recorded that gas shells have not been used hitherto against tribesmen.

Most historians now agree that gas was not used. Yet the argument has not closed, because the minute itself survives, and it says what it says. Set against the gas minute stands a speech his defenders treat as their strongest exhibit. In April 1919 at Amritsar in the Punjab, a British officer, General Reginald Dyer, had ordered his troops to fire on a crowd.

On the 8th of July 1920 the House of Commons debated what should be done about him. Churchill spoke for the government, and Hansard preserves his words. It is an extraordinary event, he said. A monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.

He called it an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. He gave the toll as 379 people killed and most certainly 1,200 or more wounded. What I mean by frightfulness, he said, is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd but the whole district or the whole country. We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or other, he told the House, that this is not the British way of doing business.

So the same minister, within fourteen months, argued for gas against tribes and condemned a massacre in the plainest language. Both documents are his. Both are genuine. In Ireland, in the same months, he came closer to it.

Between 1920 and 1921, as Secretary for War, Churchill approved the recruitment of two new forces to support the Royal Irish Constabulary. About 1,200 former officers formed the Auxiliaries. About 8,000 former soldiers became the Black and Tans. They became notorious for unauthorized reprisals against the Irish civilian population.

Churchill went further. In late 1920 he proposed that reprisals should be made official, and in December the Cabinet accepted them. Where no witnesses would give evidence, or could give it only at the peril of their lives, he wrote, where no juries would convict, the ordinary processes of law were non-existent. His defenders add the ending.

In December 1921 Churchill was one of the most important British figures in the negotiations that produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the settlement that ended that war. In those same years, he found a house in Kent that would swallow every pound he could earn. Chartwell stood in the countryside of Kent, and in September 1922 Churchill bought it for £5,000. He had wanted it badly, had first offered £4,800, and had been turned down.

Then he hired an architect, Philip Tilden, to rebuild it. Tilden’s first estimate was £7,000. By the time the work was done, the cost had risen past £18,000. The family moved in during April 1924.

For a house bought at 5,000, he had spent well over three times the price again on bricks, plaster, and his own ideas. He could not really afford it. Churchill had come into an inheritance in 1921. According to David Lough, within a decade he had blown the whole of that inheritance on spending, on gambling, and on mismanaging Chartwell.

In 1925 he needed an emergency bank loan of £30,000. The irony was plain to anyone who knew. From 1924 to 1929, the man who could not balance his own accounts was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the finance minister of Great Britain, responsible for the nation’s budget. He earned where he could.

In 1923 the oil companies Shell and Burmah Oil paid him £5,000 to lobby on their behalf. It was legal. It was also exactly the kind of thing his enemies suspected him of. Every so often the household tried to economize.

In 1926, by most accounts, he drew up instructions for cutting expenses. “No more champagne is to be bought” unless special directions are given, one read; only white or red wine or whiskey and soda will be offered. Another: cigars must be reduced to four a day. In the same year he proposed cutting down to two clean white shirts a week.

A review in the London Review of Books records what became of these measures: they were largely ignored. David Lough later took that first instruction as the title of his book on Churchill’s finances, No More Champagne. The order was given, the champagne kept coming, and sooner or later, someone else paid. Clementine watched it all with a particular dread.

Her own mother had gambled. Now she was married to a man with a casino habit of his own. Money was at the root of some of their fiercest quarrels. One story passed down as family legend, repeated without a firm source, holds that during a row about money Clementine hurled a plate of spinach at him.

Whether or not the spinach flew, the anxiety was real. She kept the household. He spent it. Chartwell was his refuge and his stage.

He kept fish there and fussed over them. Grace Hamblin was sent to collect maggots to feed them from the post office at Westerham, the nearby town. The postmaster would telephone the house when a delivery came in. “Is that the secretary?

” he would ask. “Your maggots are here, miss. ”

He built there, too. For his youngest daughter Mary he put up a small cottage in the grounds, the Marycot, and he wrote proudly to Clementine that Mary had laid the foundation stone with great ceremony.

This was the father at his best: playful, absorbed, delighted with a child. The same man could vanish into his work and hardly notice who else was in the house. Grace Hamblin began working at Chartwell in 1932 and would still be there more than thirty years later when the house passed to the National Trust. Money meant something particular to him.

He was an aristocrat without an estate. He lived on the pay of a politician and the earnings of a writer. He spent like the grandson of a duke. The gap between what came in and what went out was never closed.

It made him dependent again and again on publishers, newspaper owners, bankers, and rich friends. He behaved as though the money would always come, because he was Winston Churchill and something would turn up. Often it did. Sometimes it came from a publisher’s advance.

Sometimes it came from a newspaper. Sometimes, as the next years would show, it came from a man he barely knew, writing a check to keep him from ruin. In the meantime, he went to America to lecture and to write. And there, on a December night, a car nearly ended all of it.

Just after ten on the night of the 13th of December 1931, Winston Churchill was struck by a car on Fifth Avenue in New York. He was crossing between 76th and 77th Streets. The driver was a man named Mario Contasino. Churchill was badly hurt: a wound to his head, a sprained shoulder, cracked ribs.

He later developed pleurisy. He was bleeding heavily from his head and both thighs when he was taken to Lennox Hill Hospital. He wrote about it afterward with the bravado of a man who turned everything into copy: I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry. He was in America to make money.

That year Esmond Harmsworth offered him £8,000 for articles about America for the Daily Mail. He was also on a lecture tour, and one member of his staff on that tour left a less flattering account than most. Phyllis Moir, an American, worked for him briefly as a secretary and later wrote a book about it, I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, published in 1941. The Churchill Project describes her as one of the few staffers not devoted to him, and records that she found him rude and oblivious of those around him.

Her testimony matters because it is so rare. Almost everyone else who worked for him and wrote about it did so years later, with affection, after the war had made him a hero. Moir saw him in 1931, when he was a controversial politician out of office, and she described what a newcomer saw at close range: a man so absorbed in himself and his work that the people around him barely registered. America in 1931 was under Prohibition.

Alcohol was illegal. For a man of Churchill’s habits, that was a serious problem, and it was solved in the most American way possible. A physician, Dr. Otto Pickhardt, wrote him a note.

This is to certify, it read, that the post-accident convalescence of the Honorable Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite, but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters. Popular retellings like to say it prescribed unlimited alcohol.

It did not say that. It named a minimum and called the quantity naturally indefinite, which served him just as well. The drinking itself deserves a careful account, because it is surrounded by legend. The most careful reconstruction comes from Michael McMenamin writing for the Churchill Project.

Around eleven in the morning, at tea time, and at bedtime, he took a whiskey and soda with less than an ounce of whiskey in each glass. At lunch he drank an imperial pint of champagne or wine, followed by a brandy. At dinner, the same again. The total came to about six glasses of champagne or wine a day and five or six ounces of whiskey or brandy, spread over twelve to fifteen hours.

The whiskey was so heavily watered that it became a family joke. His private secretary Jock Colville called it scotch-flavored mouthwash. His youngest daughter Mary called it the Papa Cocktail: a thimbleful of scotch topped up with water, which he nursed for hours. It was usually Johnnie Walker Red.

He never drank whiskey neat. When he saw someone else doing it, he warned them: you are not likely to live a long life if you drink it like that. When an appraiser went through the Chartwell cellar in the 1950s, he found most of it undistinguished. The exceptions were telling: cases of Pol Roger champagne, vintage Hine brandy, and Johnnie Walker Red.

Around the middle of the decade he made a bet. The press baron Lord Rothermere challenged him to go a year without spirits. The International Churchill Society puts the bet in 1936; the Churchill Project mentions both 1936 and about 1938. He won, but the terms covered only undiluted spirits, so his whiskey and water was allowed.

The diarist Bruce Lockhart recorded him drinking loads of beer and five large glasses of port while the bet was running. Lockhart, who moved in the same circles, left other entries across more than twenty years that are less kind. “Winston drunk but unconvinced,” he wrote after one debate. On another occasion he found Winston slightly the worse for drink.

He had firm views about drunkenness in others. My father, he said, taught me to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk. That was the paradox his staff lived with. He drank steadily from late morning to after midnight.

His defenders and his bodyguards insisted that he almost never lost control. He enjoyed letting people believe his capacity was bottomless, and he insisted that the real sin was to be seen drunk. Back in England, out of office and short of money, he spent the early 1930s fighting one cause harder than any other. He wanted to keep India.

In January 1931 Churchill walked out of the Conservative leadership over India, and a month later he said in public what he thought of Gandhi. India was then ruled by Britain through a viceroy. The government in London, including many Conservatives, had begun moving toward giving Indians a share in governing themselves. Churchill opposed it with everything he had.

He resigned from the Conservative shadow cabinet in protest. Gandhi had gone to talks with the viceroy, and on the 23rd of February 1931 Churchill gave a speech about it. It is alarming and also nauseating, he said, to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

A fakir was a wandering holy man. The Middle Temple was one of the London inns where barristers trained. Churchill was mocking him for both: the lawyer dressed as a saint. The phrase half-naked fakir became one of the most famous insults of the century.

It was not an isolated outburst. A year earlier, in 1930, he was reported as saying that Gandhism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed. For four years he fought the government’s plans. The result was the Government of India Act, which received royal assent on the 2nd of August 1935.

The act ran to 473 clauses and 16 schedules. The debates over it filled about 4,000 pages of Hansard, which records dozens of interventions by Churchill between February and July of that year alone—among them seven speeches on the 4th of June and eleven more on the 5th. When the final vote came, he and eighty-three other Conservatives voted against it. The campaign cost him more than a vote.

According to the Churchill Archives Centre, the India outbursts made him look like a Colonel Blimp, the cartoon figure of a red-faced reactionary colonel. And by the middle of the decade, his reputation could hardly have been lower. That mattered, because in the same years he was warning that Germany was rearming under Hitler. Many who might have listened to the warnings about Germany had stopped listening to him at all because of India.

His private opinion of the men who led his own party in those years was no gentler. Of Stanley Baldwin he is recorded as saying that he was a countryfied businessman who seemed to have reached the Cabinet by accident. In 1931 he described Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald together as two nurses fit to keep silence around a darkened room. One line about Baldwin, recorded by a listener rather than written down, has him saying that occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

When Baldwin left office in 1937, Churchill is said to have remarked, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip. ” Years later, when he was asked to send Baldwin a birthday greeting, he refused. According to Martin Gilbert, he said it would have been much better had he never lived. In March 1937 he gave evidence to another inquiry, the Peel Commission, which was considering the future of Palestine, then governed by Britain.

What he said there has been quoted against him ever since. I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, he said, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. The Churchill Project offers a defense: in his usage, the word race often meant a nation or a people, as it did for many of his generation, and the words came in a heated exchange within about twenty pages of testimony.

His critics answer that the words mean what they say. The historian Andrew Roberts, who later became one of his leading defenders, once put it more sharply. In 1994 Roberts wrote that Churchill was more profoundly racist than most, and that he thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time. By the late 1930s the man was isolated.

This was the paradox of the wilderness years. The same fierce certainty drove his campaign against Indian self-government and his warnings about Hitler. History has judged the two campaigns very differently. He fought both with identical conviction, and he expected to be believed on both for the same reason: because he was sure.

The press mocked him over India. His warnings about Hitler were dismissed as the alarms of a has-been. And at Chartwell, the money was running out. In 1938, the advertisement described five reception rooms, nineteen bed and dressing rooms, eight bathrooms, and eighty acres of Kent.

The house on offer was Chartwell. The asking price was £20,000. It had come to this because Churchill had gambled on the American stock market and lost. By 1938 he owed his stockbrokers, a firm called Vickers da Costa, £18,000.

He did not have it. The one asset that could raise it was the house he loved most in the world. A financier from South Africa, Sir Henry Strakosch, stepped in. He paid Vickers da Costa the whole debt: £18,162, one shilling and tenpence.

Strakosch also agreed to manage Churchill’s shares for three years. Chartwell was taken off the market. David Lough, working through the bank records many years later, found that one rescuer in that period wrote out two checks that together were worth, in today’s money, more than a million pounds. Files declassified in the 2000s show large financial gifts to Churchill in 1938 and again in 1940.

The pattern of his finances in the 1930s, as Lough reconstructed it, is almost reckless in its consistency. In the tax year that ended in April 1932, Churchill earned £15,000 and spent £30,000. For 1939 he projected an income of £22,000 against spending of £13,000; in fact he earned about £13,000 and spent £20,000 or more. Across the decade, in today’s money, he borrowed the equivalent of more than £2.

5 million, and he lost on average about £40,000 a year at the gaming tables on his holidays. The writer Daniel Yergin observed that Churchill gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a high. The wine merchants were owed too. Lough found that in 1936 Churchill owed his wine merchant the equivalent of about $75,000 in today’s money, much as he had in 1914.

Here the defenders correct the record, and the correction is fair. The historian Peter Clark pointed out that the wine bills from 1907 to 1914 totaled £1,166, about £150 a year. In 1935 the household spent £515 on drink. Large sums, not ruinous ones.

What ruined him, or nearly did, was everything together: the house, the staff, the cellar, the cigars, the casinos, and the stock market, all drawing on the same thin stream of income from books and articles. The Strakosch story has a darker afterlife. It has been seized on by antisemitic websites that present it as a sinister plot. There is no evidence of anything of the kind.

Roberts, who told the story first in print, presents it for what the record shows: a rich friend saving a man he admired from the consequences of his own habits. His judgment of people could fail as badly as his judgment of money—and nowhere more publicly than in the winter of 1936. On the 3rd of December that year he spoke at a great rally at the Albert Hall, part of his campaign to rearm against the danger from Germany. That same day, the news broke that King Edward VIII meant to marry Wallis Simpson.

The rally was forgotten at once. Churchill took the King’s side. On the 4th of December he went to see him at Fort Belvedere and wrote a memorandum afterwards. The King, he wrote, was most gay and debonair for the first quarter of an hour, and then it was obvious that the personal strain had exhausted him.

Churchill told him: Your Majesty need not have the slightest fear about time. If you require time, there is no force in this country which would or could deny it you. On the 7th of December he rose in the House of Commons to ask the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, for an assurance that no irrevocable step would be taken before the House had heard a full statement. Hansard captures the scene.

Members shouted no. They shouted speech. They shouted sit down. The Speaker told him to confine what he has to say to a simple question, and then rebuked him for going beyond one.

Baldwin said it was quite impossible for him to enter into hypothetical considerations. Churchill left the chamber, and by one account he muttered, I am finished. The diarist Harold Nicolson wrote that he had undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction work of two years. Leo Amery thought him completely staggered by the unanimous hostility of the House.

The historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft later called it the most disastrous parliamentary performance of his life, incoherent and seemingly the worst for drink. That seemingly carries the weight. Hansard shows two short questions, and no witness quoted in the record proves he had been drinking. On the 11th of December, with the abdication done, he lunched with the man who was now no longer king.

The former king later recalled that there were tears in Churchill’s eyes, and that he tapped out the rhythm of a poem with his cane as he recited lines of Andrew Marvell: He nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene. Within two years, the man who could not keep his own accounts in order would hold the fate of the country in his hands. He would have the power to hire and dismiss almost anyone in the land. And seven weeks into that power, his wife would write to tell him what it was doing to him.

Churchill became prime minister on the 10th of May 1940. Within seven weeks, the woman who knew him best had written that he was not so kind as he used to be. Those seven weeks were among the most frightening in British history. By their end, France had fallen.

Churchill was sixty-five, and he was working the hours of a much younger man. The Imperial War Museums record that he regularly worked eighteen-hour days. He drove his staff very hard, the museum notes, but he drove himself even harder. It was in that setting that someone close to him went to Clementine.

Not everyone in Whitehall had welcomed him. On the 10th of May, the day he took office, Jock Colville, then a private secretary who had served Neville Chamberlain, recorded in his diary what Rab Butler was saying. The good, clean tradition of English politics, Butler said, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. In the same outburst he dismissed the new prime minister as a half-breed American, a sneer at Jennie Jerome’s son.

Colville shared those doubts at first. Yet within three days his diary had shifted. Whatever its faults, he wrote on the 13th of May, the new government has drive. A month before, Colville had noted something else.

One of Hitler’s cleverest moves, he wrote, had been to make Winston public enemy number one, because this has, in fact, helped to make him public hero number one at home and in the USA. The adventurer had become the only possible leader. The same qualities that had made the establishment distrust him were the ones the moment required. And the people who now had to work for him were about to learn what those qualities felt like at close quarters.

Whoever the devoted friend was, he took a risk. To tell the prime minister’s wife that her husband was making himself hated was to gamble that she would act, and that the prime minister would never learn who had spoken. He trusted Clementine with both. The International Churchill Society, publishing the letter decades later, gave its article a dry title: “Advice from a Wife.

” It was also advice from inside the machine, carried to the one person who could deliver it. His warning was specific. It concerned the colleagues and subordinates who had to work with the prime minister every day, and what his manner was doing to them. The letter she wrote was dated the 27th of June 1940.

She had first written it at Chequers on the Sunday before, and torn it up. Then she decided he needed to read it after all. Read again, knowing what was happening that summer, the letter is extraordinary for its restraint. Her subject was his manner and the way it was turning the people around him against him.

She reminded him that he could dismiss anyone he liked, except the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Speaker. And she told him what that required: urbanity, kindness, and if possible, Olympic calm. She wrote about the conferences where an idea once offered met such contempt that soon no ideas at all came forward. She wrote about the result.

Irascibility and rudeness, she warned, will breed either dislike or a slave mentality. A slave mentality. In a government trying to fight Hitler, that was the most dangerous outcome of all. A prime minister surrounded by frightened men would hear only what he wanted to hear.

Her point was practical. Rudeness, she was telling him, had a military cost. Every adviser who stayed silent in a meeting was a warning that never reached him. And in the summer of 1940, a single unheard warning might decide the war.

There is no written reply. Their daughter Mary believed they talked about it. What he said, if he said anything, is not recorded. So did it change him?

The biographer Sonia Purnell, who wrote a life of Clementine, believes it did. “His behavior changed as a result of this,” she told an interviewer on American public radio. That is her judgment. It may be true in part.

The staff accounts suggest the change, if there was one, was far from complete. The secretaries whose memoirs and diaries cover 1941 to 1944 describe outbursts that match Clementine’s letter almost word for word. His chief of the Imperial General Staff recorded tempers, late-night rages, and rudeness right through to the end of the war. The letter was read.

The manner went on. It is possible that the letter did something smaller. The staff who served him through the war describe a pattern in which an outburst was followed, sometimes within hours, by a gesture of kindness. Perhaps the letter made him more aware of the damage.

Perhaps it made him quicker to make amends. The record cannot say. What the letter does prove is that the problem was seen from inside at the very start. It was seen by the person closest to him, and reported to her by a man loyal enough to take the risk.

Later, critics and disappointed rivals had no hand in it. The warning came from a devoted wife and a devoted friend in the summer of 1940, worried that the man who might save the country was making himself impossible to work for. The letter now lies in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. Anyone reading it today knows how the story ended.

Britain did not fall. The man with the rough, sarcastic manner became the most famous war leader in the world. But in June 1940 Clementine did not know that. She knew only what she saw at home and at the table, and in the faces of the people who worked for him.

The weight of that manner would fall on them. Over the next five years, it would fall hardest on the youngest and the most junior: the women at the typewriters and the men who ran his bath. The following spring, one of those young women was called into his room at ten at night. Elizabeth Layton was called in to take dictation at about ten at night in the late spring of 1941.

She would go on to spend four years at his side through the worst and the best of the war. In 1958 she published a memoir called Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. It is the book of a woman who remembered him with deep affection.

And its story begins with the night he threw her out. The prime minister was preparing a speech. He dictated straight onto the typewriter, expecting the words to appear on the page as fast as he spoke them. He wanted the text in double spacing.

She typed it in single. He exploded. By the accounts drawn from her memoir, he called her a fool, a mug, and an idiot, and ordered her out of the room. One retelling says he gave his anger free rein and demanded that she leave immediately and fetch a more competent colleague.

She was so shaken that she did not try to work for him again for several days. The dates, as so often, vary. One source places that night in late May. Another gives the 5th of May.

One more detail belongs here because it shows how legends grow. A line often attributed to him that night—a cry of “Good God, what a fool! ”—cannot be found in any of the pages that quote her book. Until someone checks the original, it belongs to the legend.

The sequel is better attested, and it is the other half of the man. One day, when she was in tears, he turned to her and said: “Good heavens, you mustn’t mind me. We’re all toads beneath the harrow, you know. ” The harrow was a heavy farm frame dragged across a field to break up the soil.

The toads beneath it had no say in where it went. In his literary way, he was apologizing and telling her at the same time that he too was being crushed by events. The occasion is disputed. The International Churchill Society places it on her first day.

Richard Langworth places it on a later day, when she had a bad cold. The words agree. The day does not. Other scenes from her years with him survive only in a weaker source, a translated summary of her memoir, and should be heard with that caution.

In one, he was on the telephone to a commander when his cat got in the way. “Get off, you fool! ” he shouted. Then, in a different voice: “Poor little thing.

” In another, she had finished typing a report of 10,000 words at four in the morning. He told her to go and sleep for a few hours before making the fair copy. The same summary records her belief that even in a fit of temper he never failed to give an unspoken acknowledgement of respect. She always felt herself, it says, to be a colleague and never a servant.

Layton was far from the first secretary to be tested this way. Kathleen Hill had joined him in July 1937, in the wilderness years at Chartwell. On her first day he asked her to fetch him a cloop. She had no idea what a cloop was.

Anxious to please, she went off and came back with a German history in fourteen volumes. Cloop was his hole punch. “God almighty,” he said, according to the account in Celia Sandys’s book on his staff, Working with Winston. “Good try.

Very well done, but not what I wanted. ” Then he saw that he had hurt her, so he complimented her handwriting. Her hours give a sense of what working for him meant. She worked for Clementine in the mornings, rested in the afternoon, and then worked for Winston at night, sometimes until two or three in the morning.

She stayed with him for years, into the war. Marian Holmes joined the office during the war and kept a diary, which the International Churchill Society has published in extracts. On the 24th of March 1943 she recorded something he said to her. You must never be frightened of me when I snap.

I’m not snapping at you, but thinking of the work. It is one of the most revealing things he ever said about himself. He knew he snapped. He knew people were frightened.

He did not promise to stop. He asked them to understand that the anger was aimed past them, at the work, at the war, at the world. Holmes also recorded the other side. On first meeting her, according to Sandys, he said: “Oh dear, she’s very young.

I mustn’t frighten her. ” He had fires lit for secretaries who were cold. When they were ill, he sent them hot whiskey toddies. She found him, on the whole, generally solicitous and sweet-tempered.

On one night in August 1944 he dictated 3,500 words and then told her there was no hurry. “You need not type it tonight,” he said, as I won’t open my eyes until Big Ben strikes ten. She typed until seven in the morning anyway, because she knew what he would expect when he did open his eyes. On another evening at eleven at night, when she thought the day was done, he stopped her leaving.

“Damn it, don’t go,” he said. “I’ve only just started. ” In June 1944, when German flying bombs were falling on London, she wrote in her diary: How can one feel frightened in his company? Put the accounts side by side and a character appears.

He was frightening in the first minute and kind in the tenth. He shouted at the cat and then petted it. He threw out a secretary and then quoted poetry to her about toads. He asked the young women to stay until three in the morning, and he sent them whiskey when they were ill.

The pattern was the same from one woman to the next: first the fury, then, without an apology in so many words, a compliment. The handwriting was lovely. The typing was beautiful. He would never frighten her.

The fury and the kindness both came out of the same daily routine. And that routine ran from a bed and a bath. His working day began in bed, in a red dressing gown, with a cigar, a cat named Nelson, and a secretary at the foot of the covers. That picture comes from the diary of Jock Colville.

He was lying in bed in a red dressing gown, Colville wrote, smoking a cigar and dictating to Mrs. Hill. Nelson the cat lay on the bed beside him. “Cat, darling,” the prime minister would say to it between sentences meant for generals and presidents.

The routine can be counted by the clock. He woke late and stayed in bed until lunch, working through the red dispatch boxes of government papers. He dressed and worked until five in the afternoon. Then he slept for an hour or so, which let him start again in the evening and carry on until two or three in the morning.

The secretaries worked in relays to keep up. Days of eighteen hours were ordinary for him. In a single evening in August 1944 he dictated 3,500 words, and Marian Holmes sat at her machine until seven the next morning to type them. His bath was run at 98 and two-thirds degrees Fahrenheit.

The cigar was a ritual of its own. In the mornings he insisted that it be relit from a candle, which sent Elizabeth Layton, on at least one occasion, into a fit of giggles. The bath was not a place of rest. Patrick Kinna, a male shorthand writer, recalled taking dictation there, sitting on top of the lavatory seat with the typewriter on his knee.

Kinna had his own summary of the man: Churchill was basically very kind, he said, but in full flight nothing else mattered, and politeness didn’t come into it. The rule for secretaries was simple. You never asked him to repeat himself. Behind the secretaries came the valet.

Frank Sawyers was his valet through most of the war and went with him everywhere, as far as Yalta. Elizabeth Layton described him working with almost never a day off, and she remembered poor Sawyers, who had no time for lunch, looking half dead. At Yalta, according to Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, the prime minister was heard shouting, “Sawyers, where is everyone? ” Colville first called him the inevitable, egregious Sawyers, and later changed his mind and called him a considerate character.

Brooke once overheard the valet giving orders of his own, telling the prime minister to turn down the brim of his hat. Sawyers left in 1946. Churchill’s reference for him was warm. Sawyers came everywhere with me in these six and a half tempestuous years, he wrote.

He stood up to bombardment well. He is leaving me at his own wish, and I am sorry to lose him. Colville told a story in a speech in 1983 about one particularly bad day. The prime minister had been furious and extremely ill-tempered and very unpleasant all day, Colville said.

Then at about two in the morning he called Colville in to take dictation, looked at his notes, and said: “What beautiful handwriting you’ve got. Much better than any private secretary I’ve ever had. ” It wasn’t true, Colville admitted. It was, he said, typically Churchillian.

Colville also left the loveliest line any of them wrote about watching him work. To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation, he wrote, is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child. Colville’s verdict on the man was balanced to the ounce. He was impatient yet understanding, obstinate yet open to conviction, fierce but never vindictive.

He never let the sun go down without making amends. He was often petulant and certainly self-centered and could be most unbelievably inconsiderate. Yet he had, Colville said, a deep and genuine humanity that won the affection of all who ever served with or under him. A reviewer for the Washington Post, reading Colville’s published diaries in 1985, drew a harsher picture from the same pages.

The Churchill of the diaries, the reviewer wrote, was inconsiderate of his staff, a user of men who discarded them without a thought, incapable of apologizing, though charming those he had hurt: ruthless, even cruel. The two readings can be reconciled. He almost never said sorry in words. He made up with praise instead.

The pattern continued after the war, into his years at the London house in Hyde Park Gate. When his butler brought out his best cigars for guests, Churchill barked, “Not these, you damn fool. ” Later he went out of his way to compliment the butler’s elegant manner. A bodyguard of those years, Ronald Golding, remembered that he drove his staff hard, but that when they reached breaking point he became sympathetic and solicitous.

One of the wartime secretaries, Cecily Gemmell, known as Chippy, put the loyalty in the plainest words of all. I would have thrown myself under the bus practically, she said, for the old man. The American historian William Manchester described the mechanism well, and Langworth quotes him with approval. Churchill’s first reactions, Manchester wrote, were often emotional and even unworthy of him.

They were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. It is a generous reading, and it is also an accurate one as far as it goes. What it leaves out is the minute or the hour before the generosity arrived: the young woman crying at her desk, the valet with no time for lunch, the secretary who had given up her evening and was told that he had only just started. Some would call it charm.

Others would call it a kind of management. The people on the receiving end mostly called it forgiveness, and most of them forgave him. The secretaries and the valets could be forgiven at two in the morning. The generals he removed could not be restored so easily.

Sir John Dill, the head of the British army when Churchill took power, had a nickname in Downing Street: Dilly-Dally. Dill was Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the professional head of the British Army and the government’s senior military adviser. He held the post from May 1940 to December 1941. Dill was cautious.

Churchill wanted action. Dill left one account of the prime minister’s temper that has been quoted ever since, though its date and setting are not established. The prime minister lost his temper with me, Dill is quoted as saying. I could see the blood come up in his great neck and his eyes began to flash.

In practice Dill was eased out at the start of December 1941 and posted to Washington. For a professional soldier, removal of that kind was a verdict delivered in front of the whole army. The prime minister who gave him that nickname would soon find that the man who replaced him was no less cautious, only far more stubborn. His place was taken by Sir Alan Brooke.

The commanders in the field fared no better. In June 1941, after an offensive in the Western Desert called Operation Battleaxe failed, Churchill removed General Wavell from command in the Middle East. Wavell was sent to India. His job went to General Claude Auchinleck.

In his war memoirs Churchill explained that at home we had the feeling that Wavell was a tired man. Auchinleck lasted a little over a year. Through the summer of 1942 the telegrams from London pressed him again and again to attack; one account sums up London’s message in a single phrase: now, if not sooner. In February of that year Brooke recorded one of the prime minister’s outbursts about the generals in the desert.

“Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles? ” Churchill demanded. “Have none of them any ideas? Must we continually lose battles in this way?

”

In early August 1942 Churchill and Brooke flew to Cairo to see for themselves. The prime minister decided Auchinleck had to go. He wrote a letter offering him a smaller command over Iraq and Persia, and gave it to a staff officer, Colonel Ian Jacob, to deliver. Jacob left a single sentence about how that errand felt: I felt as if I were going to murder an unsuspecting friend.

Auchinleck refused the smaller command. He gave up his post on the 15th of August 1942. The manner of it mattered as much as the decision. Auchinleck learned his fate from a letter carried by a colonel, in the middle of a campaign, from a prime minister who had flown out to judge him.

Between the prime minister and the generals stood Hastings Ismay, the soldier who worked closest to him on the business of the war. Ismay often begged him to be reasonable, and he did not always succeed. Yet Churchill himself admitted that he owed more to Ismay than to anybody else. The historians have tried to weigh it all.

Max Hastings, who wrote at length about Churchill as a war leader, put it in one line: displays of supreme wisdom were interspersed with outbursts of childish petulance. Hastings also noticed a difference between the groups around him. The ministers and commanders, he observed, were less sympathetic to the prime minister than his personal staff. That makes sense.

The secretaries received the storm and then the compliment. The generals received the storm and then sometimes the letter of dismissal. There was no handwriting to praise at the end. Another historian, Tom Ricks, has argued the opposite case with some force: the generals were often right in their complaints about Churchill’s interference, and yet Churchill was on the larger questions of the war the better strategist.

He saw further than they did, even when he saw less clearly. Put the removals together and a hard fact remains. Dill went. Wavell went.

Auchinleck went. Each was judged in the end by a prime minister who wanted victories faster than they could be delivered. Churchill’s impatience in the desert was the same impatience he had shown at the Dardanelles a quarter of a century earlier. This time he had the power to act on it without anyone above him to say no.

A line attributed to Brooke, though its date is uncertain, puts the dilemma in a sentence: God knows where we should be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him. Sir Alan Brooke kept a diary through the war and filled it with the prime minister. Brooke became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December 1941 and held the post for the rest of the war. He was the man who absorbed Churchill’s nights.

The meetings ran late. The arguments were endless. After them, on the 30th of August 1943, Brooke summed up his master in a single entry. He is a genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision, Brooke wrote.

He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck. In June 1944 he wrote of a long and painful evening listening to Winston’s strategic ravings. On the 6th of July he recorded a meeting that began at ten at night and lasted until two in the morning. It was quite the worst we have had with him.

There was drink in some of those nights, and Brooke recorded that too. After one speech in the Commons he described the prime minister in a mellow, bad-tempered, drunken mood. He was not alone in noticing. In 1940, according to the diary of the American politician Harold Ickes, President Roosevelt said he supposed he was the best man England had, even if he was drunk half of his time.

Roosevelt’s complaints did not stop there. In January 1943, in a letter to Margaret Suckley, he grumbled about Churchill’s late-night drinking and talk. Before their meeting at Argentia Bay in August 1941, Roosevelt reportedly worried about Churchill’s excessive drinking. The American diplomat Sumner Welles reportedly called him a drunken sot.

Wendell Willkie had a different answer. When he met Churchill, he said, he drank as much as Churchill did, and no one has ever called me a drunk. Churchill’s bodyguards had their own defense. At the Tehran conference, one of them, Danny Mander, recalled that Churchill and Anthony Eden were not falling-down drunk, just singing songs and feeling good.

The Churchill Project’s verdict, using modern clinical criteria, is that Churchill was not an alcoholic. The historian Warren Kimball, writing for the International Churchill Society, calls him alcohol dependent and finds little testimony of his being drunk in any incapacitating way while he was prime minister. Then there was the black dog. His doctor, Lord Moran, published a diary in 1966 that described Churchill suffering fits of depression that might last for months, which Churchill himself called the black dog.

Moran quoted him saying: I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing. That diary has been badly damaged as a source. The historian Sir Martin Gilbert found published entries for days on which the manuscript had no entry at all. Churchill’s inner circle called the book an inexcusable breach of confidence.

Two medical authors writing in 2018 concluded that he did not suffer from major depression. The International Churchill Society points out that black dog was an old nursery phrase for a bad mood. His daughter Mary, who knew him far longer than Moran, gave a careful answer when psychiatrists later tried to diagnose him from a distance. He himself talks of his black dog, she said, and he did have times of great depression.

Some of the things he went through would depress anybody. But, she added, I never saw him disarmed by depression. Brooke can be trusted, at least, to have written what he felt at the time. On the 10th of September 1944 he wrote the passage that would become the most quoted words about Churchill by anyone who worked for him.

And the wonderful thing is that three-quarters of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the strategists of history, a second Marlborough, and the other quarter have no idea what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war. It is far better that the world should never know and never suspect the feet of clay of this otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty. With him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again.

Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being. It is the verdict of the man who knew his military mind best: admired and despised, a superhuman being with feet of clay. It is also, in its way, a love letter written by an exhausted man at the end of another impossible day.

Years later Brooke read his diaries again and added notes. On reading these diaries, he wrote, I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him, especially during the latter years. He also wrote: I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying ones in my life. The Imperial War Museums quote another of his lines: It is worth all these difficulties to have the privilege to work with such a man.

There is a scene from the war, recorded in accounts of Brooke’s life, that catches the relationship. Churchill told Ismay that he thought Brooke hated him. When Ismay passed this on, Brooke answered: “Hate him? I don’t hate him.

I love him. ” When Churchill heard that, he said simply: “Dear Brookie. ”

In the months that Brooke raged in private, the War Cabinet was making decisions about a place thousands of miles away. One of them concerned how much food to send to Bengal.

In 1943, the province of Bengal in the east of British India began to starve. It is the heaviest charge laid against Churchill, and the one argued over most fiercely today. Start with the dead, because no one agrees on how many there were. The official inquiry, the Famine Inquiry Commission, known by the name of its chairman, Woodhead, reported in 1945 that a million and a half of the poor of Bengal fell victim to circumstances for which they themselves were not responsible.

The economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda puts the number at over two million, and about 2. 1 million has become the most common scholarly estimate. Some estimates run as high as 3. 8 million.

Against those millions stand the shipments. From December 1942, according to the standard account, requests from India for food imports were either rejected or reduced to a fraction of what was asked by Churchill’s War Cabinet. On the 4th of August 1943 the Cabinet offered what it called a token shipment. On the 24th of September it committed 200,000 tons by the end of the year.

Churchill turned down a Canadian offer of 100,000 tons on the grounds that the ships would have a long voyage, and pressed Australia to send wheat instead. By the end of 1944, according to the writer Zareer Masani, over a million tons of grain had reached Bengal. The causes were many, and the defenders stress them. Burma, which had supplied rice to Bengal, had been lost to Japan in 1942.

A cyclone had struck the region that same year. The local administration made grave mistakes. Woodhead’s commission itself concluded that the Bengal government’s decision in March 1943 to end price controls on grain was a mistake. Shipping was desperately short everywhere, and the War Cabinet controlled it.

In February 1944, according to Masani, the answer from London was: we have given a great deal of thought to your difficulties, but we simply cannot find the shipping. The critics point to other evidence. The most damaging comes from the diary of Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, a member of the government who sat in the meetings. With the caution that it is Amery’s record, his paraphrase of Churchill, and sometimes his anger at Churchill, here is what Amery wrote.

On one occasion, dated by one account to the 10th of November 1943, he recorded that Winston, after a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day for doing nothing, turned to the matter of shipping. On another day Amery wrote that on the subject of India, he was not quite sure whether Winston was really quite sane. Amery also recorded Churchill calling the Hindus a beastly people with a beastly religion. And in one exasperated entry he wrote that he did not see much difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.

One entry from 1943 is quieter and perhaps more chilling. Winston may be right, Amery wrote, in saying that the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, at any rate from the war point of view. Wavell, whom Churchill had made Viceroy of India, kept a journal too. In it he described the government’s attitude to India as negligent, hostile, and contemptuous, and he called the famine one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule.

One quotation should be removed from the charge sheet. It is often said that Churchill asked during the famine why Gandhi hadn’t died yet. The line comes from Wavell’s journal in July 1944, where Wavell wrote: Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet. According to Langworth, the telegram actually said: “Surely Mr.

Gandhi has made a most remarkable recovery as he is already able to take an active part in politics. ” That was Churchill’s sarcasm. The famous version is Wavell’s sarcasm about it. It concerned Gandhi’s health, and it had nothing to do with the famine.

The historians divide. Madhusree Mukerjee, in her book Churchill’s Secret War, published in 2010, argued that food exports from India continued, that shipping was moved away from the Indian Ocean on the advice of Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, and that British policies of seizing rice and boats made things worse. Max Hastings wrote that the broad thrust of Mukerjee’s book is as sound as it is shocking. Joseph Lelyveld, reviewing it in the New York Review of Books under the title “Did Churchill Let Them Starve?

,” thought she overstated Churchill’s intentions but called the book a serious attempt to deal with a neglected catastrophe. Zareer Masani, in an essay he titled “Churchill and the genocide myth,” called it sensationalist and largely conspiracist. The economic historian Tirthankar Roy finds little evidence of Churchill’s views influencing War Cabinet policy, and names four causes: nature, the Bengal administration, London, and the markets. Arthur Herman, one of Churchill’s defenders, argues that without Churchill the Bengal famine would have been worse, because it was Churchill who sent Wavell, and Wavell who used the army to move food.

A study of rainfall published in 2019 found that the region had above-normal rain in the summer of 1943; its lead author, Vimal Mishra, ruled out drought and blamed a complete policy failure during the British era. Cormac Ó Gráda offers a middle judgment that many find persuasive. The problem in Bengal in 1943, he wrote, was the failure of the imperial power to make good a harvest shortfall that would have been manageable in peacetime. And he noted Churchill’s lack of empathy for India.

Even Langworth, his most devoted defender, concedes the private record. In those fraught weeks, he writes, Churchill said things off the record that were unworthy of him. The famine was far away, argued over in minutes and cables. At home, meanwhile, the war was costing him something closer and more personal.

It was costing him his son. Randolph Churchill was drinking at his father’s dinner table as a boy, and by nineteen he was ordering double brandies. He was born in 1911, the only son among four daughters. His father had been starved of attention by his own father, Lord Randolph, and seems to have resolved to do the opposite.

The International Churchill Society describes Winston lavishing affection on the boy. He spoiled and indulged him to the dismay of Clementine, who felt that the boy manifestly needed a father’s hand. Randolph sat up late at his father’s table with the politicians and the wits. F.

E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, taught him to drink heavily. At fifteen, five of his schoolmasters reported him for either being idle or being a bore with his chatter. He grew up brilliant, charming, rude, and loud.

Fitzroy Maclean, writing in 1943, called him irrepressible, arrogant, rude, argumentative, and one of the most charming men I have ever known. The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge saw him in 1950 as immensely bloated, laying down the law to a little circle of fellow drinkers. Above all, Randolph wanted his father’s career. His record at the ballot box tells the story.

In 1935 he stood at a by-election in Wavertree as an independent Conservative, split the vote, and handed the seat to Labour. In 1936 he lost at Ross and Cromarty. In 1940 he was returned unopposed for Preston, because in wartime the parties did not contest each other’s seats. In 1945 he lost Preston.

In 1950 and again in 1951 he fought Plymouth Devonport and lost to Michael Foot both times. He never won a contested election in his life. On the ship to Egypt in 1941 he gambled away more than he could possibly pay back. Later he wrote asking his young wife to cover a gambling debt, given in one account as $12,000, and she paid it, keeping it secret from his parents.

That wife was Pamela Digby, whom he married on the 4th of October 1939. Their son, another Winston, was born in 1940. In February 1941 Randolph was posted to Cairo. By the spring, Pamela was sleeping with Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s envoy, a married man nearly thirty years older than she was.

The affair, according to Langworth, was an open secret. Neither Winston nor Clementine ever spoke of it. They were anxious, Langworth writes, for good relations with the Americans. When Randolph found out, he was incandescent, in the word of his biographer Josh Ireland.

He believed his parents had known and said nothing, and he called it taking realpolitik too far. Langworth thinks Randolph unfairly blamed his parents for abetting the affair. Ireland is more sympathetic to the son. Pamela filed for divorce in December 1945.

The rows between father and son were ferocious. According to Ireland, they grew so violent that Clementine feared Winston would have a heart attack. Randolph threw chairs, stormed out, and got drunk. After one of them Winston wrote to Clementine: one’s children are like a lot of live bombs.

The pattern, one account says, was explosive arguments followed by touching reconciliations. Winston sent his son a letter about his gambling debts so crushing that Langworth compares it to the savage letters Lord Randolph had once written to Winston himself. Clementine, for her part, called Randolph’s move to a parachute unit in 1942 selfish and unjust to you both. There were moments of grace.

In 1944 Randolph was serving in Yugoslavia alongside the forces of Tito. When Tito met Winston, he said to him: “But you have sent us your son. ” Tears of emotion, Langworth records, rolled down Winston’s cheeks. It is one of the few recorded moments when the father’s pride in his son broke through in public.

Ireland quotes Winston saying simply: I love him very much. Randolph himself put it best, and most sadly. I do so very much love that man, he said of his father. But something always goes wrong between us.

The children of Winston and Clementine paid in different coins for being born to them. The first to pay had paid when Randolph was only ten years old. In August 1921, at Broadstairs on the Kent coast, the youngest Churchill child fell ill while her parents were away. Her name was Marigold.

She was about two years and nine months old. The children had been sent to the seaside for a holiday in the care of a French governess. When Marigold became unwell, the governess was nervous of reporting it to the parents, and she delayed sending a telegram. Clementine was away visiting the Duke and Duchess of Westminster when the news reached her.

The cause, according to the International Churchill Society, was septicemia, an infection of the blood. Marigold died on the 23rd of August 1921. The American historian William Manchester wrote that Clementine shrieked in agony like an animal in mortal pain. That is his telling, drawn from family memory.

She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London on the 27th of August. In the years that followed, according to Sonia Purnell, she was rarely mentioned again by her parents. The next year, in 1922, a last child was born, Mary. She would describe herself later as the child of consolation.

She was brought up largely by her nanny. When questions came up, she remembered, the answer was always: I must ask Nana. The other children grew up in a household built around one man’s career, and each of them paid for it differently. Diana, the eldest, born in 1909, never found her footing.

She married John Milner Bailey in 1932 and divorced him in 1935. She married Duncan Sandys in 1935, and that marriage ended in divorce in 1960. She suffered several nervous breakdowns. In 1962 she began volunteering with the Samaritans, the charity that answers calls from the desperate.

On the 20th of October 1963 she died of an overdose of barbiturates. The coroner found that she had taken her own life. Her father was eighty-eight. Sarah, born in 1914, became an actress.

On Christmas Eve 1936 she married the entertainer Vic Oliver in New York. Winston’s opinion of him survives in a letter of February that year: I agree with your diagnosis—not a bad man, but common as dirt. Sarah’s second husband, the photographer Anthony Beauchamp, died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1957. After the war she drank heavily.

She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in 1959 and again in 1960, once in Santa Monica, and she spent a short spell on remand in Holloway prison. Rachel Trethewey, who wrote about the three daughters, describes her as clearly an alcoholic. She died of cirrhosis in 1982. Mary, the child of consolation, was the exception.

She married Christopher Soames, lived a long life, and in Trethewey’s words had a life devoid of spectacular crashes. It was Mary who would later edit her parents’ letters. What part did the parents play here? The sources divide sharply.

Sonia Purnell argued that Clementine appears to have detested her son and that she was constitutionally unable to deal with her children. Trethewey calls her a difficult mother, especially to Diana. The children themselves left few accusations. Randolph left one, to his mother’s face.

Speaking of a woman in his life, he told her: “I don’t care. I need her. She’s maternal and you’re not. ”

The strain on Clementine was real, and much of it came from living with Winston.

Mary believed her mother’s own unhappy childhood had left her with a lifelong anxiety and lack of confidence. She had at least one breakdown. She checked into nursing homes to recover from nervous exhaustion. She took frequent holidays on her own.

Mary later wrote of the intense strains that life with Winston imposed on her mother’s highly strung nature. Clementine herself called sustaining his career her life’s work. In December 1934 she left England on Lord Moyne’s yacht, the Rosaura, for a voyage of about six months, without her husband. On board was an art dealer, Terence Philip, a bachelor of forty-two.

The International Churchill Society says she fell romantically in love with him. Mary believed it was platonic. On New Year’s Day 1935 Clementine wrote to Winston from the voyage: I have loved you very much, but I wish I had been a more amusing wife to you. He wrote back: Is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together?

Winston faced a rumor of his own. In 1985, on tape, Jock Colville said that Churchill certainly had a brief affair in the 1930s with Doris, Lady Castlerosse, in the south of France. The claim was aired in a television documentary in 2018. Andrew Roberts rejects it.

Colville only joined Churchill in May 1940, Roberts points out, so his account was secondhand. There are no love letters. It would have been an insane risk. The claim remains disputed.

The 1,700 letters between husband and wife tell two stories at once. Their pet names ran through them: Pug, and later Pig, for him, and Cat for her. The National Trust says their disagreements never lasted. The London Review of Books, reading the same letters, saw something else: so much writing, between two people who kept separate bedrooms and were so often apart, might be the sign of a profound division as much as a devotion.

Both can be true. In July 1945, with the war in Europe won, the British electorate voted Churchill out of office. The man who had led the country through the war found himself at seventy with no war to run and no office to command. Lord Moran’s diary records him saying in August: I get fits of depression.

I can’t school myself to do nothing for the rest of my life. He did not do nothing. He wrote, and he drank, and he talked about drinking in lines that were quoted around the world. I could not live long without champagne, he is reported to have said in 1946.

In victory, I deserve it. In defeat, I need it. Another line comes from his own history of the war, describing a meeting from its final months. On the 17th of February 1945, at an oasis in Egypt, he met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Before the meeting he was told that the king’s religion forbade smoking and alcohol in his presence. Churchill’s reply, as he told it himself, was magnificent and unrepentant. His rule of life, he said, prescribed as an absolutely sacred right the smoking of cigars and the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals. He wrote those words himself, in a history of the war meant for the whole world to read.

Many of the drinking legends that followed him began with his own pen. In March 1946 he traveled by train with President Harry Truman to Fulton. On the train, according to Truman’s aide Clark Clifford, he tasted American bourbon and pronounced his verdict: “My dear Harry, this is very good, but it’s not whiskey, it’s bourbon. ” The train is said to have made an unscheduled stop so that someone could buy scotch.

The speech he gave at Fulton is remembered now as the Iron Curtain speech. It was typed for him by Jo Sturdee, the secretary who had joined him in 1941 and who now ran his private office. She had been with him at Quebec and at Yalta. Her letters home describing life in his entourage now sit in the Churchill Archives Centre.

That same year the valet Frank Sawyers left him, after six and a half tempestuous years. And there was one more champagne friendship to come. On the 12th of November 1945, at a lunch in Paris given by Duff Cooper, Churchill met Odette Pol Roger, whose family made the champagne he had been ordering since before his marriage. From then on she sent him a case every birthday.

He named a racehorse after the house, and in 1953 the horse Pol Roger won at Kemp Park. When he died, the house put black borders on its labels in mourning. The most famous line of all is harder to pin down: I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. The International Churchill Society traces it to a collection of recollections by his contemporaries and gives it no date or occasion.

Money, meanwhile, was solved at last, and it was solved by other people. In 1946 a group of friends led by the newspaper owner Lord Camrose raised £55,000 to secure Chartwell. The National Trust bought the house for £43,800, and Churchill was allowed to live there for the rest of his life at a rent of £350 a year. In 1943 and 1944 he had sold the film rights to two of his books for £50,000 each.

The man who had nearly lost Chartwell for £18,000 in 1938 now had it held for him by the National Trust. His staff after the war saw the same man as before. In 1946, after a long debate, he had an encounter with the Labour member Bessie Braddock. By the version Golding remembered, Churchill said to her: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly.

But tomorrow I shall be sober, and you will still be disgustingly ugly. ” Golding insisted that Churchill was not drunk, only tired and wobbly. The joke itself was borrowed from a film made in 1934 by the American comedian W. C.

Fields. Langworth calls it Churchill editing W. C. Fields.

The cruelty of it was his own choice. He came back to power in October 1951, a month short of his seventy-seventh birthday. Churchill became prime minister for the second time in October 1951, and within a year a state of emergency was declared in Kenya. Kenya was a British colony in East Africa, and the emergency was declared against a rising known as Mau Mau.

What followed during and after his premiership is documented by the Imperial War Museums without softening. More than a million Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru people were moved into supervised villages. In the detention camps, torture and forced labor were regular occurrences. The number of dead is fiercely disputed.

The official figure is about 11,000. The historian David Anderson puts it at twenty to twenty-five thousand. Caroline Elkins suggests tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. 1,090 people were hanged.

In 1954 Operation Anvil swept through Nairobi. In 2013 the British government compensated survivors and expressed its regret. What was Churchill’s own role here? The record is thinner than the charge.

The Imperial War Museums’ account does not name him. Langworth, searching the Cabinet records, found only two comments from Churchill on Kenya, both from 1953. One of them reads: care should be taken to avoid the simultaneous execution of any large number of persons. The killings at the Hola camp, the most notorious of the emergency, came in 1959, after he had left office.

His critics answer that he was prime minister, and that the camps ran on his watch. At home, a sentence from those years has followed him too. On the 20th of January 1955, after a cabinet meeting, Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary: “The PM thinks ‘Keep England white’ a good campaign slogan. ” The context was immigration from the Caribbean.

The words are Macmillan’s record, and they do not appear in the cabinet minutes. The greatest secret of his second government was his own health. On the 23rd of June 1953 he gave a dinner at Downing Street for the Italian prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi. There were thirty-eight guests.

After dinner he sat down abruptly and found he could not move easily. The left side of his body was weak. His face drooped. His speech was slurred.

He had suffered a stroke. The next morning he chaired the cabinet. According to one account, nobody noticed his incapacity. Then he grew worse.

Those around him feared he might not live through the weekend. What followed was a cover-up at the highest level. His doctors, Lord Moran and Sir Russell Brain, drafted a bulletin that mentioned a disturbance of the cerebral circulation which has resulted in attacks of giddiness. Two senior ministers, Rab Butler and Lord Salisbury, changed it.

The version issued to the public said only that the prime minister has had no respite for a long time from his very arduous duties and is in need of a complete rest. Jock Colville then spoke to three of the most powerful newspaper owners in the country: Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, and Lord Camrose. Not one of their papers printed the truth. Colville himself called the silence all but incredible.

On the 29th of June Butler told the House of Commons that the prime minister had been advised to take a complete rest and that he would not be able to resume his full duties for at least a month. The word stroke was never spoken. For weeks Butler in effect ran the government. The heir apparent Anthony Eden was himself away, recovering from surgery that had gone badly wrong.

Had Eden been fit, one account suggests, Churchill’s premiership would most likely have ended there. It did not end. He recovered at Chartwell. By September he was chairing cabinet again.

Moran put some of his unsteadiness down to probably a combination of fatigue and alcohol. His doctors prescribed an amphetamine, which, he said, cleared my head and gave me great confidence. On the 10th of October he spoke for fifty minutes at the Conservative conference at Margate, and Colville recorded that it went with complete success. The public learned of the stroke only in 1966, when Moran published his memoir.

Sir Russell Brain, one of the two doctors who had drafted the honest bulletin, wrote afterwards that the stroke had not been made public, and that he did not think anyone who did not know could have guessed what his condition had been four months before. A prime minister had been struck down. The country had been told he was tired. And he had walked back onto the stage before anyone could find out.

Then he stayed, and stayed. Eden, according to the scholar Anthony King, chafed bitterly at Churchill’s refusal to depart, or even to say definitely when he would depart. In 1942 Churchill had written to King George VI that Eden was his natural, indeed his inevitable successor. Now, according to Colville, he said with vehemence: “I don’t believe Anthony can do it.

”

He resigned at last on the 5th of April 1955, at eighty. Before the memoirs, there was a painting and a fire. In 1954, for his eightieth birthday, both houses of Parliament commissioned his portrait from the painter Graham Sutherland for a fee of 1,000 guineas. Churchill had hoped to be painted in his garter robes.

On the 30th of November 1954, his birthday, the portrait was unveiled in Westminster Hall. In public Churchill called it a remarkable example of modern art. In private he called it filthy and malignant. He told Sutherland it was not suitable as a presentation from the Houses of Parliament.

According to one account, he believed it was part of a conspiracy to bring him down. Clementine had at first thought it really quite alarmingly like him. She came to feel betrayed. She had the painting hidden in the cellar at Chartwell.

Then she told Grace Hamblin, the secretary who had served the family since 1932, to get rid of it. Hamblin’s brother took it away and burned it in his garden at night. Hamblin was famously discreet, and her part stayed hidden for sixty years. The world learned the painting had been destroyed only in 1978, after Clementine’s death.

Sutherland called it an act of vandalism. Her own part was finally revealed in 2015. It is the purest image of how the private Churchill was guarded. An unflattering picture was made, and a loyal household made it disappear.

Winston Churchill died on the 24th of January 1965, at the age of ninety. He was given a state funeral on the 30th of January and buried at Bladon, near Blenheim, beside his parents. Chartwell passed to the National Trust, and Grace Hamblin became its first administrator. Then the witnesses began to speak.

The first great breach came from his doctor. In 1966, only a year after the funeral, Lord Moran published his diaries under the title Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival. They revealed the 1953 stroke, the black dog, the fears, the frailty. The family called it an inexcusable breach of confidence.

Later Martin Gilbert found entries in the published book for days on which Moran’s manuscript contained nothing at all. The most intimate witness proved the least reliable. Brooke’s diaries had a stranger history. Before Churchill’s death, the historian Arthur Bryant published two volumes drawn from them, in 1957 and 1959, heavily censored.

Even those cut versions hurt Churchill deeply. The full diaries appeared only in 2001, with the admired-and-despised passage intact. By then Brooke had added his notes of shame and his conclusion that the difficulties were worth it, for the privilege. Set side by side, the witnesses form a curious pattern.

The doctor, who published first and fastest, proved the least reliable. The general, who wrote the harshest words, was the one most ashamed of them. The secretaries who suffered most directly from his temper were the slowest to speak, and the kindest when they did. Colville’s diaries followed in 1985 under the title The Fringes of Power: candid and affectionate, full of the storms and the amends.

Even Colville kept one silence. His diaries, as the historian Paul Addison noticed, say nothing about the crucial weeks after the stroke of 1953—the weeks when Colville himself had asked the press barons to keep the secret. What is striking is how little the secretaries told. Celia Sandys, who wrote about his staff, found that none of the women who worked for him profited from or leaked what they knew.

Phyllis Moir, who wrote about the lecture tour of 1931, was the exception. The others waited. When they did write, like Elizabeth Layton, they wrote with love. When she left his service to marry and move to South Africa, Winston and Clementine sent her off with a piece of advice.

You must have four children, they told her. One for mother, one for father, one for accidents, and one for increase. Randolph, meanwhile, had been given the task of his life. In 1960 he was commissioned to write the official biography of his father.

He finished two volumes. In 1964 surgeons removed a growth from his lung that proved not to be cancer. Randolph died on the 6th of June 1968, at fifty-seven. He had outlived his father by three years.

Much later, in 2019 and 2020, Marigold was moved from Kensal Green and reinterred at Bladon beside her parents. The child who had been rarely mentioned was brought home. Sixty years after his death, the argument over what he was has become a war of its own, fought largely with quotations. And not all of the quotations are his.

Some of the most quoted words against Winston Churchill were never his words at all. The question of why Gandhi hadn’t died yet belongs to the viceroy, a sarcastic summary of a telegram about Gandhi’s recovery. The line about Indians breeding like rabbits is Leo Amery’s paraphrase in a private diary of something said in a meeting. The words keep England white were written by Harold Macmillan, recording what he believed the prime minister thought.

The legend that he sent soldiers to shoot the miners of Tonypandy is false. The 42,000 bottles of champagne are a trivia writer’s sum. His defenders have been right to say so, and they have said it often. But the defenders have their own overreach.

Sending police to Tonypandy was only the first half of his story there. That same evening he sent word for the cavalry to move in if the chief constable wished it, and years later he claimed that no one was hurt when a miner had died. The drinking verdicts come largely from institutions founded in his honor. The best stories of his kindness come from people who loved him.

When the false quotations are cleared away, a great deal remains, and it is all in his own hand or in the official record. There is the letter of 1910 about the feeble-minded and the stream of madness that should be cut off and sealed up. There is the minute of 1919, strongly in favor of poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. There is the speech about the half-naked fakir and the evidence to the Peel Commission about a higher grade race.

There are the War Cabinet decisions on Bengal, whatever weight one gives them. There is the secret of a stroke hidden from Parliament. And there are the people who worked for him: the secretary called a fool on her first night, the generals sent away, the general who admired and despised him in the same breath, the son who loved him and could not stand beside him, the wife who tore up her letter at Chequers and then gave it to him anyway. He was certain, always certain.

He was contemptuous of hesitation in others and in himself. He saw the people around him as instruments of a purpose larger than any of them. He drove them to exhaustion, and he drove himself further. He lost his temper, and then he praised their handwriting.

That certainty was the same thing that made him unbearable to work for and unbreakable in 1940. The man who pressed the Dardanelles plan over hesitating expert opinion was the man who stood against Hitler when colleagues had dismissed his warnings. Brooke, who knew both sides of him, said it in his diary. England would have been lost without him, and with him it had come close to disaster again and again.

Nearly every harsh word about him from inside his circle was written in private, by people who went on serving him. Brooke raged in his diary and stayed at his post. Colville doubted him in May 1940 and came to love him. The secretaries were called fools and stayed for years.

Clementine tore up her letter, delivered it anyway, and stayed at his side for another quarter of a century. Whatever else he was, he was a man his own household kept choosing again and again to stand beside. Fear alone does not keep a secretary at her machine until seven in the morning, or send a general home ashamed of his own diary. His wife saw it first and put it best.

With this terrific power, she wrote, you must combine urbanity, kindness, and if possible, Olympic calm. The staff accounts suggest he found it in flashes, at two in the morning, when the storm had passed and the compliment arrived. It never became his nature. It was a gift he gave, an apology, and then took back the next time the work went wrong.

Elizabeth Layton, the young woman he had called a fool on her first night, spent four years in his service. Her verdict was a list, and she let the contradictions stand. Impatient, kind, irritable, crushing, generous, inspiring, difficult, alarming, amusing, unpredictable, considerate, seemingly impossible to please, charming, demanding, inconsiderate, quick to anger, and quick to forgive. And then she summed it up.

Difficult to work for, yes. Mostly lovable, always amusing without fail. It is the letter from Chequers that holds the truth of him best. A wife who knew his faults better than anyone wrote them down, tore the page up, and then gave it to him anyway.

She did it because she believed he could be better, and because she knew no one else would dare. She signed herself his loving, devoted, and watchful Clemy. For fifty-six years, she was all three.