The Churchill Series - Sept. 19, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

We are continuing today a “walk in Churchill’s footsteps” we started yesterday at The Savoy Hotel from which we walked East, past Charing Cross Station and up to the corner of Trafalgar Square, a very easy walk of less than 10 minutes.

After crossing the square we came to The Admiralty building from which the King summoned Churchill to Buckingham Palace in the early evening hours of May 10, 1940. We had just walked under Admiralty Arch and were starting our way up the Mall to the palace, a distance of a less than a mile.

We stopped at that point and continue now.

As you walk in the direction of the palace look to your left. You’ll see one of London’s loveliest parks, St. James. It has a lake which at its end closest to the Admiralty contains an area called Duke Island because - well, you can guess why.

Churchill loved St. James Park. When he was First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915 and again from 1939 to 1940, the park was “in his backyard” because the First Lord lived as well as worked at the Admiralty.

During his first tenure as First Lord, Churchill often took his young children to see and feed the ducks, geese, swans and birds that nest in the island area.

During WWII Churchill frequently took his walks in St. James, which is also close to Downing Street. His principal bodyguard, Inspector Walter Thompson, tells a number of stories about those walks, often taken during blackouts. Thompson would beg Churchill not to go out in the blackout but off they went. One evening Churchill almost walked into a tree trunk.

The next day, a desperate Thompson convinced Churchill to let him make an adaptation to Churchill’s walking stick.

Thompson taped a flashlight (he called it “a torch”) to the end of Churchill’s stick. Then he taped a kind of “collar” around the light end of the torch so only a narrow beam shone from it. With the aid of that device, Churchill had no more close encounters with tree trunks in St. James.

Tomorrow, well turn away from Buckingham Palace and walk toward Churchill’s two favorite London destinations: Parliament and 10 Downing Street.