Peals of laughter and Churchill’s tears of joy
ON THE death of King George VI, a tearful Winston Churchill lamented to his private secretary Jock Colville that the new monarch was ‘only a child’.
However, he soon found that the Queen was not to be trifled with.
Her father had taught her that she should try to keep ministers on their toes — and Colville later revealed one example. He had, for days, been trying to get Churchill to focus on an important despatch from Iraq, without luck.
At the prime minister’s next audience at the palace, however, the Queen asked him: ‘What did you think about that most interesting telegram from Baghdad?’
Churchill had to confess that he had not actually read it.
‘The Queen had caught him out,’ Colville admitted.
Both monarch and prime minister enjoyed their weekly meetings.
In his diaries, the Queen’s private secretary Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles wrote that they were invariably lively: ‘I could not hear what they talked about but it was more often than not punctuated by peals of laughter, and Winston generally came out wiping his eyes. “She’s en grande beauté ce soir,” he said one evening in his schoolboy French.’
Many years later, in June 1953, Churchill suffered a serious stroke while serving his second term as PM.
Although he was 78 and clearly on the wane, there was no obvious mechanism for removing a reluctant prime minister.
The only person who could respectfully ask him to go was his sovereign. But at the age of just 27, the Queen was not going to eject the man who had saved the free world alongside her father. (In the event, Churchill had recovered by November and didn’t step down until 1955.)
When he died ten years later, aged 90, the Queen was adamant that he should be granted the same formal farewell as her father.
Breaking with protocol, the Royal Family arrived at the funeral before the Churchill family, left before them and issued instructions that there was no need to bow or curtsy. The Queen even sent Churchill’s widow, Clemmie, a carriage, equipped with rugs and hot water bottles, to ward off the January chill.