The Churchill Series – Mar. 1, 2007

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

In Winston Churchill and His Inner Circle, Sir John (“Jock”) Colville, who for most of WWII served as Churchill private secretary and later became a close personal friend of both Winston and Clementine, tells us:

Churchill trusted all who worked for and with him, and in those whom he grew to know well he was prepared to confide even his innermost thoughts.

Some of his private secretaries became his lifelong friends and all of them formed part of that secret circle to which he would often refer, glaring round the dining room at wartime meals, when he was about to launch into a confidential discussion of military operations or foreign policy.

They never let him down: there were sometimes leakages from the Cabinet, but never from the officials whose duties, on social as well as on ordinary working occasions, gave them access to views, information and items of gossip for which the press would have been willing to pay a small fortune and the enemy a vast one. (pg. 86)

It is remarkable how many people Churchill trusted and confided in and how few could be considered to have violated his trust.

What Coleville means by “glaring round the dining room at wartime meals” has to do with Churchill’s frequent practice during the war of reminding those around the table, after the meal was finished, of their secrecy oaths; and then presenting them with some critical issue to hash over. He would sometimes assign people roles to play. So he would tell the group he was going to tell Stalin there would be no invasion of France in 1943 to take some pressure off the Russian army.

Stalin would naturally be angry. What could Britain do to mollify him? “You, Coleville, you’re Stalin. Start thinking about what you’d demand from us when I give you the news. “Prof, (his science adviser, F.A. Lindemann), do we have the shipping to deliver more aide to Russia?” “Hastings (Gen. Hastings Ismay, his military aide), what sort of equipment does the Russian army most need and can we spare any if the Prof says we have the ships?”

So it would go, often for hours.

And Colville was right about their keeping Churchill’s confidences. I can’t think of a single instance during the war where a member of his staff did that. In fact, I can’t think of a single instance of an unintentional leak although I don’t doubt they occurred. from time to time.