Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (24 page)

Long after the war, Montgomery would arrive at Chartwell “lugging a case of plum brandy he had brought from Marshal Tito as a gift to Churchill, or a case of port from the Portuguese Prime Minister, Salazar”.
24
The Portuguese Ambassador in London gave Churchill six cases of port,
25
a drink the young Churchill had been warned off by Dr Hunt years earlier.

Although Churchill was careful to obey all the rules, there was an occasional assertion of privilege. Historian
Max Hastings, never one to minimise what he believes to be Churchill’s failings, notes that at one dinner party at the Savoy the Prime Minister, to the consternation of “the
ascetic
” Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, contravened rationing regulations by ordering both fish and meat
courses
.
26
But this must have been a rare event. Hastings also notes that the “Prime Minister’s wife often found it no easier than her compatriots to find acceptable food”.
27
Which explains Commander Thompson’s previously cited recollection that Churchill, when in America, “enjoyed roast beef or steak so much that, with rationing in force at home, he often saved half his portion at dinner-time and had it for breakfast next morning”.
28
It also explains why, when entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt and other visiting Americans at the No. 10 Annexe – Churchill’s wartime above-ground home and office – Mrs. Churchill apologised for the food: “I’m sorry, dear, I could not buy any fish. You will have to eat macaroni.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, after another dinner, noted without enthusiasm: “They gave us little leftover bits made into meat loaf.”
29

Finally, in his campaign to ensure that rationing was
accepted
, Churchill focused relentlessly on keeping regulations to the bare minimum necessary to support the war effort. Rationing is inherently intrusive on daily lives, and the Prime Minister knew that regulators had a tendency to make it more intrusive than necessary. In July 1941 he minuted Lord Woolton:

Are you getting enough to eat?”

J.J. Llewellin, who replaced Lord Woolton as Minister of Food in December 1943, received a similar
minute
urging him to “cut out petty annoyances … [in] the
private
lives of ordinary people”.
31
As the Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook (later Lord Normanbrook) noted: “There was in fact a strong bond between Churchill ‘and ordinary people’. Their interests lay close to his heart, and he was always concerned to promote their welfare.”
32

As the Prime Minister understood those interests, they included some rather specific dietary requirements.
Understanding
the British love of beef and his own preferences for it (“personally I am a beef-eater,”
33
he wrote in 1933) might have been among the reasons he pressed his ministers to
include
in British diets beef, beef and more beef. He advised Lord Woolton:

If beef was not to be had, there was always pork:

And if neither beef nor pork, there were always rabbits. In June 1941, Churchill minuted Lord Woolton:

There were few aspects of the nation’s consumption with which Churchill did not concern himself. He always had time for matters relating to British well-being and morale, finding the time to:

There are many other celebrated stories illustrating Churchill’s remarkable attention to detail when it came to maintaining a rationing scheme. But perhaps the most
telling
– and most surreal – is the one involving plovers’ eggs. Plovers’ eggs were another Churchill favourite, a fact
sufficiently
well known to unleash a supply of these eggs to him from several admirers. When Sir William Rootes, a wealthy car manufacturer, sent some plovers’ eggs to the Churchills, Clementine, in her 7 April 1942 note of thanks, wrote: “They are a great delicacy and rarity and Winston is very fond of them.”
43
And when, on 20 April 1942, Audrey
Pleydell-Bouverie
, a friend of Queen Elizabeth, sent him “a few that [she] collected this weekend”, the Prime Minister, during a very difficult month and year of the war, asked that she be telephoned with his thanks.
44
In April 1944, his second cousin, the 10th Duke of Marlborough, wrote to the Prime Minister from the Dorchester Hotel: “Please accept these plovers’ eggs. There are, I fear, only twelve but I have not the personnel now available to find them.”
45
Churchill did once share his treasured eggs, at one of their regular lunches, with General Eisenhower, who remembered later that “they were golden plover … It was the first time I had ever tasted them. I loved them … He was always finding some special thing”.
46

Whether it was the Prime Minister’s special love of plovers’ eggs, or excessive bureaucratic zeal that set off the following train of events we cannot know.
47
It seems that he had “heard on good authority” that plover, partridge and pheasant eggs were on sale – by “Messrs. Fortnum and Mason”, no less – and he asked the Ministry of Food for “a special report on this which he regards as most urgent,” undoubtedly a part of his on-going desire to prevent violations of regulations that
would generate “class feeling”. Both the ministries of Food and Agriculture, and the Metropolitan Police investigated. A plain-clothes officer verified that indeed “eggs” were on sale at Fortnum’s but there was some confusion about what kind of eggs they actually were. A sales clerk told the policeman that they were gulls’ eggs, not plovers’ eggs, which were not allowed to be sold. Having checked several reference books and the Ornithological Department at the Natural History Museum, the serious-minded undercover copper reported that:

This full and detailed correspondence, which eventually involved not only the Prime Minister reporting what he had “heard” but also the ministries of Food and Agriculture, the Home Office, the West End Central Station of the
Metropolitan
Police and the London Area Egg Officer (an expert on pheasant eggs), took place during the month in which Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

This tale tells as much about the problems of maintaining a rationing scheme as it does about Churchill’s preferences for these eggs. By insisting that the scheme be applied fairly, by adhering to the rules himself (with their impact ameliorated to some degree by his special circumstances and the kindness and appreciation of friends), by pressing the bureaucracy to do what it could to maximise food production and imports,
Churchill shored up Britain’s willingness to endure the
hardships
of shortages of food and most civilian goods in order to win the war. If at times his inquiries triggered an
overreaction
from the bureaucracy, so be it. His management of the rationing scheme was one of his least remarked and most important contributions. No small achievement.

Between premierships, South of France, 1948