‘I asked all my friends, My grandpa’s a bulldog. What sort of dog is yours? No one had a good answer’

As she a launches a contest ‘to inspire’ in Churchill’s name, his devoted granddaughter tells of discovering his legend

HE may be Britain’s greatest ever statesman and wartime hero of international fame but to a young Celia Sandys growing up, Sir Winston Churchill was simply “grandpapa”. She was just two years old when the Second World War ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, so did not know of the colossal contribution he had made to save the nation from Hitler’s invading armies.

Her first clue to the reverence and respect other people had for her cigar-chomping, snowy-haired grandfather was the day the postman knocked at the door with a surprise parcel for her.

“Inside was this magnificent toy bulldog,” recalls

Celia, 76, whose mother Diana was Churchill’s oldest daughter. “He was on wheels and if you pulled him along, his head moved from side to side.”

Celia was delighted, but a little confused. It wasn’t even her birthday. But her mother told her it had been a gift to her grandpa who “thought you might like it”.

“Well, that puzzled me even more because I thought, ‘Why on earth would anyone send a grown man a toy dog’,” she laughs. “My mother explained it was because he had been called a great British bulldog.

“The next day at school I went around all my friends and said, ‘My grandpa’s a bulldog, what sort of dog is yours?’ No one had a good answer for me, I’m afraid.”

IT WAS Churchill’s famous “bulldog spirit” as prime minister that buoyed the nation during the war years, even when the fight against the Nazis looked lost.

And this message of resilience has renewed purpose for Celia now, the day after the 75th anniversary of VE Day, as we fight the current enemy of our times, coronavirus.As a direct response to the pandemic, and to coincide with VE Day, the International Churchill

Society has launched a global competition asking participants to write or deliver their own message of hope against Covid-19.

“Coronavirus is a war, it’s just that we can’t see the enemy,” says Celia. “In some ways it’s more frightening if you don’t know your enemy,” she adds. “No one thought in the war that if you got on to a bus the enemy might be there but now you might get on a bus or Underground and it could be right there.”

The contest asks applicants to submit original text of up to 300 words or a video of no longer than 60 seconds for an entry that will “Inspire Like Churchill”.

The winner of the first prize, judged by a panel including Celia and Randolph Churchill, a great-grandson of Churchill, will receive an £8,000 donation for a frontline health organisation of their choice.

“We want to mobilise the English language and stir hope and unity at this tragic moment,” says Celia, who is encouraging young and old to take part.

She believes there is no greater example of inspiration than that of her grandfather.

“A lot of people said we couldn’t win and at certain points it looked pretty bad, but he never wavered and always went on,” she says.

“If he hadn’t shown the country that he believed in it, or made sure they believed that he believed we could win, then we couldn’t have won the war.”

But Celia, who has written five biographies of Churchill, remembers a gentler, more relaxed figure at his Chartwell country house estate in Kent where he loved to paint and host dinner

AUTHOR OF FIVE CHURCHILL BOOKS: Granddaughter Celia has fond memories

parties. “He was a very affectionate grandfather,” she says. “He was determined his family life was going to be happy, loving and affectionate, and indeed it was.”

Her memories are of a man who was witty and entertaining, who loved to dress up in his velvet suit and surround himself with his pet dogs.

Was he haze of always enveloped in a smoke? “Of course he loved his cigars but it was more often, what he called ‘dead in the ashtray’, than in his mouth,” she jokes. “But he liked to have one around him.”

“By the time he was at Chartwell he was quite old but we would walk around the garden together and look at his animals,” she says.

“We used to feed his goldfish and visit the horrible black swans, who were fierce, before seeing the pigs.”