Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (9 page)

There was some confusion as to sleeping arrangements. When Eleanor showed Churchill to the Lincoln Bedroom (not then as famous as it was to become during the Clintons'
occupancy
of the White House), he turned it down, claiming the bed did not suit him. Making himself at home from the start, Churchill then looked over the other available rooms. Alert as ever to opportunities, he chose a bedroom across the hall from Harry Hopkins' almost-permanent rooms, the Rose Room on the second floor, where Queen Elizabeth had slept on her 1939 visit with King George VI.

The Prime Minster had struck up a close relationship with Hopkins when the presidential adviser had visited Britain in January 1941, and intended to maintain it as a conduit to the President. With the strategically located bedroom secured (on New Year's Day the Prime Minister and the President would meet there for a key strategy discussion
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), Churchill then obtained offices across the corridor from the President, so they could meet at any time. Churchill's travelling map room was set up in the Monroe Room, on the ground floor, by the valuable Captain Richard Pim who had run the Map Room since Churchill's arrival at the Admiralty in 1939. Roosevelt liked it so much he had his own Map Room set up in the White House as soon as Churchill left for home. The Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, his
naval
ADC, Commander Thompson, two Scotland Yard
detectives
and Churchill's valet, Sawyers, were all assigned smaller rooms on the second floor. The other members of the Prime Minister's party, including Churchill's personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson, were billeted at the Mayflower Hotel.

Many years after the event, Alonzo Fields, the White House chief butler from 1931 to 1953, wrote a chatty
memoir
,
My 21 Years in the White House
. Fields records the secrecy, excitement and chaos of the Prime Minister's visit. On 22 December 1941, the day on which Churchill arrived at the White House, just after six p.m. Fields said he

No matter: Fields recognised Churchill immediately.

Fields goes on to describe the alcoholic beverages he served the British Prime Minister. He thus became partially responsible for some of the tales that have sprung up about the Prime Minister's drinking habits. According to Fields, on Churchill's first morning at the White House on 23 December, the Prime Minister summoned him to his
bedroom
and said:

Probably untrue. Fields later recounted another
conversation
he had with Churchill, who was in a joking mood:

Fields may not be the most reliable of reporters, either because of a fallible memory or a desire to add spice to his book and sell tickets for the subsequent
dramatisation
which toured the United States. Take the matter of breakfasts:

François Rysavy, White House chef at the time of Churchill's visits to FDR, has a different story to tell. He recalled serving the distinguished visitor “apples, pears and other fruits and a large pot of tea” for breakfast, which he says the Prime Minister consumed after his morning
sherry
.
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Then there is what in my view is the more reliable report, from Lady Williams (née Portal), who worked as Churchill's secretary from 1949 to 1955. She recalls that Churchill, after waking early, around seven or seven-thirty a.m., preferred a simple breakfast of orange juice, a boiled egg (a special daily treat since eggs were rationed in Britain to two per person per week), tea or sometimes coffee and a bit of fruit. He would then begin to work in bed. The sherry story has led to some of the misconceptions discussed in the chapter dealing with Churchill's preferences for certain kinds of alcoholic beverages. Lady Williams describes the whisky ordered by the Prime Minister with his breakfast as just a “tumbler of barely coloured whisky, heavily diluted with water, which was put by his bed and it would last all morning”.
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No Sherry. The Prime Minister would have been delighted if his daily White House breakfast tray included poached eggs
every
day, given rationing restrictions at home.

A detailed report by Harold Macmillan, subsequently Prime Minister himself, indicated that there were
circumstances 
under which the Prime Minister preferred a more ample breakfast. In June 1951, as part of a campaign to demonstrate to his party that he was sufficiently vigorous to continue to lead it despite his age, Churchill participated in a 21-hour debate in the House of Commons, “crowned all by a remarkable breakfast, at 7:30 a.m., of eggs, bacon, sausages and coffee, followed by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar. This latter feat commanded general admiration”.
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BOAC breakfast menu, on flight to Washington, June 1954

Perhaps the best way to resolve these conflicting
recollections
and reports about the Churchillian breakfasts is to consult Churchill himself. On his last trip to the US as Prime Minister, in June 1954, aboard a BOAC flight, he had his
son-in
-law, Sir Christopher Soames, start to annotate a printed menu. Apparently finding that editing process tiresome or
complicated, Soames eventually started afresh and wrote Churchill's preferred order on the reverse side. It specifies almost exactly what Lady Williams, who was on the flight with the Prime Minister, earlier described as Churchill's favourite breakfast. Soames humorously writes “wash hands” after the last words “whisky soda” and, finally, he writes “cigar”. Note that the washing of hands precedes handling the sacred cigar, and that Churchill was permitted to smoke a cigar aboard the flight. (This menu was auctioned off in 2009. The price anticipated by the auctioneers was £1,900 but so highly do Churchillians value such treasures that it sold for £4,800.)

The Churchills and Tango at Chartwell,
1933, by William Nicholson

One thing is certain about Churchill's early-morning
dining
preferences: they included solitude. Even at the White House, where he was eager to maximise his time with the President, when it came to breakfast, Churchill would
breakfast
alone. His view was clear:

Neither the simplicity nor the privacy Churchill
demanded
of breakfast served as models for the lunches and dinners and he unquestionably noticed the difference between the management of the presidential household and his own
residences
in the UK. Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, principal White House housekeeper from 1933 until 1946, was in charge of all menus and foods, and of all servants, meal planning and purchases. She is generally acknowledged by all who were subjected to her foods and menu-planning to be the worst housekeeper in White House history. She had run a
bakery-from
-home in Hyde Park, New York. Mrs. Roosevelt, having
taken a fancy to her home-made breads and pies, invited her to Washington in 1933 to be head housekeeper at the White House, and retained full confidence in Mrs. Nesbitt in spite of her lack of experience and the numerous missteps
during
her on-the-job learning, and in spite of the President's constant complaints about her cooking and her menu choices. Even the President of the United States was not master at his own table so long as his wife supported the White House cook. Mrs. Roosevelt, preferring the outside arena of policy to the management of the social aspects of life inside the White House, saw little need to
modernise
the White House kitchen, which was “like an
old-fashioned
German rathskeller with a great deal of ancient architectural charm”. The icebox was lined in wood, Mrs. Nesbitt's predecessors had left no cookbooks, and there were only a few utensils. Fortunately for future researchers, Mrs. Nesbitt decided that when she left the White House she “was going to leave behind complete lists”.
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So we have detailed menus, with her notes, of every lunch and dinner – but not breakfast – served at the White House while the Prime Minister lived there.

Mrs. Nesbitt paints a picture of the British delegation:

Most of the thirteen dinners, and some of the lunches the President and the Prime Minister shared, began with the cocktail ceremony. Roosevelt was known for his robust and unusual cocktails – the proportions of his martinis were said to be “unfortunate”.
32
Charles “Chip” Bohlen, one of Roosevelt's diplomats and his interpreter at Teheran, says the martinis were made with a “large quantity of vermouth, both sweet and dry, with a small amount of gin”.
33
No
mention
of the infamous Argentine vermouth to which he had introduced his British guest at Placentia Bay.

The first White House dinner at which Churchill had an opportunity to deploy his combination of charm and draw on the careful planning he had done before and during his transatlantic voyage, was at a “semiformal” dinner on the day he arrived, 22 December 1941.
34
A note on the menu reads “17 people 8:30 Mrs. R.”
35
Seventeen
people
settled down for dinner; one, the Prime Minister, also settled down to work. Guests that night included Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, and Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, both with wives; British Ambassador Lord Halifax and Lady Halifax; Beaverbrook, British Minister of Aircraft Production; Mrs. Bertie Hamlin, wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and an old Roosevelt friend; the President's wife and Harry Hopkins. Mrs. Hamlin recalls the President's champagne toast at the end of the dinner: “To The Common Cause”. That surely was music to Churchill's ears.