Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (15 page)

The absence of formal dinners on the first three nights of the Yalta Conference allowed Churchill to dine privately with his daughter and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary. Sarah, in a letter to her mother, reported her father’s daily routine:

And should the Prime Minister feel peckish, or should he still have in mind the advice given long ago by his gastro-enterologist that he could reduce his bothersome
indigestion by eating lightly every few hours:
29

Livadia Palace: Roosevelt’s villa and meeting room

The American delegation was assigned to the 50-room Livadia Palace built by Tsar Nicholas II as a summer retreat, because the grand rooms on the ground floor would be easily accessible to the President. Stalin had suggested the plenary meetings take place there so that the President did not have to travel between buildings. Today, there is a Churchill Room at Livadia which commemorates the Big Three’s 1945
meeting
, furnished with donated volumes about and by Winston Churchill.

Some in the American delegation were not so lucky with their room assignments. According to Edward Stettinius, his “State Department group was small enough to be
comfortably
housed at the Livadia Palace, but this was not true of the military staff, five to seven generals were housed in one room, and ten colonels in another … Some 215 American staff had access to only a very few bathrooms”.
31
Only the President had his own bathroom, but he had nowhere to hang his clothes. However, on the second floor of the palace the American military organised a mess hall where American and Soviet foods were served to the American delegation.
32

The first official dinner was given by President Roosevelt on 4 February for his two honoured guests, the Prime Minister and the Marshal, plus eleven others. The old billiard room had been converted to a dining room at the Livadia Palace, and the billiard table was used for meals. The
fallibility of eyewitnesses’ memories is demonstrated by the varying reports of what foods the Americans laid on for their British and Soviet counterparts. Edward Stettinius noted that what he calls “our” dinner was a typical American one. “Although caviar and sturgeon were added as always at every meal, we had chicken salad, meat pie, fried chicken Southern style, and vegetables.”
33
But the official State Department log lists vodka as the first item, followed by “five different kinds of wine, fresh caviar, bread, butter, consommé [an
agreeable
surprise for Churchill], sturgeon with tomatoes, beef and macaroni [very American], sweet cake, tea, coffee and fruit”.
34

There was Russian champagne, and “much
good-humoured
jesting with the President over the question of whether he had wired Moscow for 500 bottles of
champagne
, which Stalin said that anyway he would give it to the President on a long-term credit of thirty years”.
37

On 8 February, Stalin was the host at his own
conference
villa, the Yusupov Palace, built in 1909 by Prince Felix Yusupov who took part in the murder of Rasputin in St. Petersburg in 1916.

Unlike Roosevelt, Stalin included among his 30 guests
several
of his military chiefs. He also included three daughters who were in Yalta with their fathers: Kathleen Harriman, who proposed a toast in Russian, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and Sarah Churchill. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, who had been presented to Churchill in Moscow at an earlier
Stalin-Churchill
dinner in 1942, was not present.
38

Cadogan wrote in his diary that he was relieved not to have been included because he was “tired of these silly toasts and speeches”.
39
‘Alan Brooke, who had been promoted to the rank of Field Marshal in January 1944, was included and he was “not looking forward to it”,
40
after a day touring two of the sites of the Crimean War, Balaclava and Sebastopol – and, as ever, on the look-out for birds. Stettinius notes that alertness was required at all times at the dinners, as
elsewhere
.
41
He adds that there were “twenty courses, forty-five toasts”,
42
confirming Cadogan’s prediction of endless
toasting
. On the day after Stalin’s dinner, Cadogan – although not present – recorded in his diary: “The PM seems well, though drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would
undermine
the health of any ordinary man.”
43

Stettinius went on to describe this dinner as “most
cordial
, and it proved to be the most important dinner of the
Conference. Stalin was in excellent humour and even in high spirits”.
44
That night, the President told his fellow guests, he felt “the atmosphere at the dinner was that of a family”.
45

The final glass was raised in a toast by the Prime Minister to the interpreters, one of whom, Hugh Lunghi, told the author that amid all the drinking and toasting, Churchill never overdid it, remaining sober throughout the evening. After all, he was there to work: he wooed Stalin to the best of his considerable abilities, appealing for a post-war world in which the Allies remained united, one in which they could lead both the smaller and larger nations “to the broad
sunlight
of the victorious peace”.
46
Marian Holmes reports that after the dinner given by Stalin, “PM just returned from his dinner, he is next door singing The Glory Song”.
47

On 10 February 1945, it was Churchill’s turn to give the dinner at his own villa. With his usual flair, sense of drama and attention to detail, Churchill arranged for a British
regimental
guard to line the steps leading up to the villa.

And what a dinner it was. Stettinius called it an “historic evening” and noted that an “excellent dinner was served”.
49
The official menu was printed with two addresses: the Vorontsov Villa and 10, Downing Street, Whitehall, with the prime ministerial cypher also shown. The point of including
the cypher and Downing Street was to demonstrate that this was an official government dinner. Charles “Chip” Bohlen carefully preserved his copy of the menu, having had it
autographed
by the Big Three and their foreign ministers.
50

Dinner menu at Yalta, the Prime Minister as host

Dinner began with caviar, and mixed traditional Western food with typical Russian courses, many of which were similar to what had been served to the Prime Minister in Moscow.

One of the most notable features of all these dinners and of the lunches of the principals and their staffs was the
proliferation of toasts, with wine, vodka and champagne, then as now a Russian custom. But drunkenness was not a feature of the dinner on 10 February. Roosevelt took care not to down his drink after each toast. Churchill combined caution with a capacity, developed over a lifetime, to hold his alcohol. Stalin watered down his vodka. Stettinius notes: “Stalin would drink half of his glass of vodka and, when he thought no one was watching, surreptitiously pour water into his glass. I also noticed that he seemed to prefer
American
to Russian cigarettes.”
51

Several British diarists noticed that the Soviet staff crunched large numbers of apples and pears during and
between
meals, because, the myth had it, the fruits
counteracted
the enormous amounts of vodka which seemed to be required drinking.

The Big Three at dinner

Stalin carves up the Nazi bird, Allies looking on