The Churchill Series – Feb. 2, 2006

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


It’s late in the evening of May 30, 1929. The results of that day’s General Election are coming in. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Government, in which Churchill serves as Chancellor of the Exchequer, is taking a drubbing.

Baldwin and Churchill follow the election returns in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing. A Cabinet Secretary describes the scene:

[There sat the PM] with narrow slips of paper on which he inscribed the three lists as they arrived. At [another desk] sat Winston doing similar lists in red ink, sipping whisky and soda, getting redder and redder, rising and going out often to glare at the machine himself, hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge.

As Labour gain after Labour gain was announced, Winston became more and more flushed with anger, left his seat and confronted the machine in the passage; with his shoulders hunched he glared at the figures, tore the sheets and behaved as thought if any more Labour gains came along he would smash the whole apparatus.

His ejaculations to the surrounding staff were quite unprintable.

There we see the famous Churchill temper.

But Churchill was quick to calm down. He almost always made amends. And he didn’t carry grudges. Late in life that he said Hitler was probably the only man he he'd ever hated.

When I think of Churchill’s temper outbursts, I often recall Shakespeare’s words in Richard II

”Small show'rs last long, but sudden storms are short”

I hope you’re back on Monday.