The Churchill Series – Jan. 16, 2007

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

Yesterday’s post mostly concerned the young Guards officer, Archibald “Archie” Sinclair, who served as Churchill’s adjutant when he commended a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front during the winter of 1915/16. Churchill and Sinclair formed a friendship in battle that lasted until Churchill’s death in 1965. Sinclair survived him for another five years.

In Winston Churchill and His Inner Circle John Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary during both his premierships, describes Sinclair and his relationship with Churchill:

Sinclair had an air of distinction. With his fine features, black hair and swarthy complexion he resembled a Spanish grandee rather than the Highland chieftain that he was.

His delivery as a speaker was slow. He had a stammer which attracted attention and lent emphasis. His oratory was not of the first order, but his words were carefully chosen and he has a gift for imagery and allusion. …

He was more a nineteenth-century Whig, like Churchill himself, than a twentieth-century Liberal. Starting his career in the fashionable Second Life Guards, he became in due course second-in-command of the battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers that Churchill commanded in the trenches during the winter of 1915-1916. For both of them this brotherhood in arms, short thought it was in time, was an unbreakable link, forged in war but maintained in peace.

Sinclair followed Churchill first to the War Office and then to the Colonial Office as his military private secretary in the years following the Armistice of 1918. He accompanied him on his travels to the Arab countries and elsewhere. Then he went into politics himself.

The two friends were briefly of the same party, for Sinclair was elected Liberal M. P. for his own county of Caithness in 1922; but Churchill soon crossed the floor, back to the Conservative benches where his parliamentary career had begun. They parted at political crossways, their personal relationship remaining undisturbed.(pgs. 219-220)

They remained friends throughout the thirties. They both opposed appeasement, Sinclair, if anything, a more passionate opponent of appeasement than Churchill, if such a thing is possible.

When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he asked Sinclair to serve as Secretary of State for Air. Sinclair served in that office until 1945.

I’ll post further on Sinclair and Churchill tomorrow.

If you like to “read ahead,” Wikipedia has what looks to me to be a reliable Sinclair bio entry.