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Jill Rose…

…begins this fine World War II narrative with a friendly warning. Don’t wait till your parents are gone before preserving their memories. The parents of “baby boomers,” Rose writes, lived through the most momentous times of the 20th century. Truly we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. I have dug around to find out as much as I can about my family…but sadly there is so much more that I will never know.”

Mrs. Rose knows and shares much about her parents, Doris and Roger Miles—he a surgeon-lieutenant, Royal Navy; she a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, London. The book is built around Doris’ letters to the absent Roger. She knew only that he was aboard HMS Tartar, a famous ship which earned twelve battle honors during close encounters with the enemy.

Their correspondence began at their moment of separation, and continued until Roger was “de-mobbed” in 1946. It offers insight to the many ordinary Britons who served faithfully in the great battle. As Churchill said, quoting Tennyson, “Every morn brought forth a noble chance. And every chance brought forth a noble knight.”

Doris nursed throughout the war, but her noble chance came in February 1943. That was when, on orders of Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson, she was summoned to Whitehall. The PM was back in London, still unwell after a grim battle with pneumonia following the Casablanca Conference.

A significant patient

Doris was advised by Sir Charles (later Lord Moran): “I must warn you, the Prime Minister doesn’t wear pyjamas.” Sure enough, Doris found, there was only a silk vest, and a velvet jacket with diamond V on the lapel. But nurses are professionals. “I had to give him a tepid sponge as he had a high fever…. WC took great interest in this and I knew that if his temperature didn’t go down I would have very little authority. Luckily it did.”

Churchill had a loyal staff. If any kept records of crucial conversations, they did so privately. (Grace Hamblin, a devoted secretary, told this writer the boss would often say hopefully, “You’re not going to write, are you?”) But Doris was free to share the lighter moments, and with Churchill there were plenty. The patient, she wrote, “is all he is cracked up to be.”

He usually requires me to bath[e] him at night, and he holds court to Sir Charles, one or more secretaries, and any odd visitors who may be around, while I’m doing it!…. He’s very interested in his blood count, which is done every day, and now talks knowledgeably about ‘pollywogs’ and ‘Eowins.’ Actually he is a lot better now, but it’s been a fairly bad hemolytic strep pneumonia, and might have developed—after all he’s 68, although he doesn’t look it.”

Sixty-eight was a lot older then than it is now. But the patient was having none of age. When he complained of head pains, Doris rubbed his head with oil of wintergreen. This became a ritual in which the PM reverted to his beloved music-hall songs: “Wash me in the water / Which you washed your dirty daughter in / And I wilt be whiter / Than the whitewash on the wall.”

At Chequers

By March 3rd, Mrs. Rose continued, the patient was much improved, and Doris Miles was the only nurse sent with him to Chequers, the PM’s official country residence. Her letters are full of admiration for the old house which, despite its grandeur, she found homey. One night the PM called her to a window. “…those are our boys going to Germany, we can rely on them.” Overhead, writes the author, “passed a flight of British bombers from nearby RAF Abingdon heading east at the start of the Battle of the Ruhr.” Stirring times in sterner days.

Doris Miles left Chequers in mid-March, her work done, but not before a humorous ceremony. “I had to march into the dining-room after dinner (all male) and present him with a ruby-red capsule on a silver try, to be told, ‘The price of a good woman is above rubies.”’ The usual cynics spin this as gauche misogyny. In truth Churchill spoke with a twinkle, and both of them knew it. “He is, of course, a little naïf when he preens himself on not losing a night’s sleep,” Doris wrote. “He forgets that he takes precaution each night to prevent such a mishap, in the shape of a little red tablet.”

* * *

Doris lived to be 100, glad at the end that her last twenty-seven years without Roger were over. This is far more than a Churchill book. We cannot convey its riches in a small space. It is well worth the read. It describes two people deeply in love, separated by war, with shrewd observations of life at the top; and at the bottom, amid the blacked-out streets of shattered London. Readers will profit from Jill Rose’s exposition of those times. They truly exemplify “the Greatest Generation.”

“Mama is part red Indian…”

No exception to the family belief (until she saw contrary evidence) was Churchill’s daughter Mary. “I remember my daughter Emma, playing with her friends,” Lady Soames recalled. “Suddenly she warned them not to misbehave. ‘Mama, you know, is part red Indian, and if we are naughty she will go on the warpath.’” The Churchills had adopted an old legend that Indian blood ran in their veins.

In 1963 the National Congress of American Indians named Sir Winston Churchill “Chief Ba-ja-bar-son-dey,” which means “Great Leader of Men.” They sent him the battle costume and headdress of a Sioux warrior, “Chief White Man” suitably enough, from South Dakota.

The tunic is of buffalo hide. It bears the remains of enemies killed in battle. Carefully preserved at Chartwell, it has strands of attached black hair, most likely from scalps, but only a few drops of dried blood: Chief White Man was evidently a dexterous scalper. (Chartwell’s devoted staff provided these photos for my book. The artifacts are too fragile for open display and are carefully stored.)

The family held a firm belief. Their Iroquois blood came from Sir Winston’s mother Jennie’s maternal grandmother, Clarissa Willcox, who (like Jennie) had a dark complexion. Exactly how this transpired no one ever precisely defined, but there was no doubt that they broadly accepted the idea. The rumor had a life of its own—perhaps because it was fun for the Churchills to believe.

“Damned cheek!…”

Randolph Churchill, who began the great biography Hillsdale College is now finishing, loved the story, and even embroidered it. Flying once into Johannesburg, Randolph was incensed by an immigration form asking him to state his race—an important matter in Apartheid South Africa. “Damned cheek!,” he shouted, and began writing furiously:

Race: human. But if your object is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocahontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe.

Churchill genealogist Elizabeth Snell cut through all this joyful humbug when she revealed that Clarissa Willcox’s mother, Anna Baker, was the daughter of Joseph Baker and Experience Martin, children of English settlers, who married in Massachusetts in 1760. Logically, Mrs. Snell asked, do we accept family legend? Or do we accept “the simple, forthright facts as recorded by Anna’s colonial family in their probate records”?

Randolph’s insistence extended to his son Winston. In the 1990s after he’d published a book of his grandfather’s speeches, my wife and I drove Winston to see Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts. There we encountered an Indian (or a staffer dressed like one). Winston popped out of the car and introduced himself. “You know,” he said, “we might be related!”

Back in the car I said, “Winston, you’re as Indian as my cat.”

“Never mind,” he retorted. “It’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

Tall Tales continue…

…when Churchill enters Parliament. As President of the Board of Trade, he seals the fate of the Titanic. As Home Secretary he interferes with police battling anarchists in Sidney Street, sends troops to smash striking Welsh coalminers, and fights against Irish independence.

And then there’s the silly canard that Churchill was a lifetime opponent of votes for women. Continued in Part 3…

Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

Part 2: Alice Bateman

Two other Westerham common folk who benefitted from Churchill’s characteristic kindliness were Tom and Alice Bateman, farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Percy Reid, a stringer for a London newspaper, who kept an eye on Chartwell doings after World War II, wrote charmingly of a cattle sale in his book, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham (Folkestone: Regency, 1969):

Capt. and Mrs. [Mary Churchill] Soames—who then lived at Chartwell Farm—were at the sale most of the time and [their children] Nicholas and Emma were also taking a child’s interest in what was going on. A daughter of one of the cows offered for sale that day grazed quietly in a less distinguished field nearby. As a calf it had been given to Tom and Alice Bateman, brother and sister, farming in a small way nearby, by Winston Churchill when he heard that they had been out of luck in their farming.

“Pedigree?” repeated Alice when asked about her two-year old Shorthorn: “I suppose we could have had the pedigree if we’d liked but then—we don’t farm their way.” A touch of rural common sense cropped up: “The paper wouldn’t make much difference to whether it was a good cow or not.”

Not surprisingly Alice Bateman had lots of time for Churchill. “Got more in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies,” she said. Alice worked for three years at Chartwell. “Not to sleep in,” she made clear, quickly. “Always has a word for you, has Winston. So has Mary, his daughter.”

Phil Johnson, a Westerham livery agent and sometime Churchill driver, told me a delightful story showing another side to Alice. Once the great man, being driven up the hill to Chartwell from Westerham village, found her trudging along the road to her farm and stopped his Humber limousine. His impulse was to offer her a lift, but realizing she would be too proud to accept one, he shouted encouragement: “Come on Alice, you can do better than that!”

“G’wan, you fat old man, you get out of that car and walk yourself, you’ll live longer!” Alice retorted.

“I’ll outlive you, Alice!” chuckled Churchill, who liked to claim (inaccurately) that he took exercise only as a pallbearer for friends who had exercised all their lives. “You will not!” Alice shot back. “And he didn’t,” Phil Johnson added, “Alice survived him by six or eight years.“

“Kent folk don’t make friends easily,” wrote Percy Reid. “Theirs is a sturdy independence which is readily mistaken for surly insularity. Once won over, however, Kentish people will remain your sincere if somewhat over-frank friends for good. It was somewhat on these lines that the unusual relationship, which finally developed between Westerham folk and Churchill and his family, grew up.”

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With thanks for kind assistance in research to Paul Courtenay, Phil Johnson and Andrew Roberts, and to a dear friend, the late Grace Hamblin.

continued in part 3…