Secret stroke that almost killed Churchill
A new TV drama tells how an event that could have changed history was ruthlessly covered up...
He couldn’t recall great events from World War II
AT THE grand old age of 78, Sir Winston Churchill looked the elder statesman in every one of his portly inches. Wearing the blue silk sash that denoted a Knight of the Garter, the prime minister was hosting a dinner at Number 10 for his Italian counterpart. True to form, Sir Winston made a brilliant speech, in which he jokingly referred to a previous and more hostile visit made to Britain by a Roman statesman in the form of Julius Caesar.
For everybody present, this was classic Churchill, now almost two years into his second ministry, which he had secured in 1951.
Then, as dinner ended, the guests got up to go into the drawing room. However, the host himself remained immobile, and, more worryingly, suddenly slumped down in his chair.
With most of the guests already out of the room, the only person who noticed was Churchill’s son-in-law, Christopher Soames, the MP for Bedford and father of the current MP for Mid Sussex, Sir Nicholas Soames. Soames immediately alerted John ‘Jock’ Colville, the prime minister’s Private Secretary. ‘I think the prime minister is ill,’ said Soames. ‘I think something has happened.’
It most clearly had. One side of Churchill’s mouth was drooping down — a telltale sign of a stroke.
Although he had served Sir Winston for many years and could count him as an intimate friend, Colville moved calmly and swiftly with the polished ease of a professional civil servant.
‘It was obvious that he was unwell, and we had to get everybody to leave without drawing any attention to the fact,’ Colville would recall.
‘And somehow we succeeded in doing that, and I don’t think anybody noticed that in fact he was ill.’
Also present at the dinner was one of Churchill’s daughters, Mary, who was married to Soames.
‘My father’s speech was slurred and he was unsteady on his feet,’ she later said, ‘but we managed to get him upstairs to his bedroom.’
A call was put in to Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, who had also served the prime minister throughout the dark days of the war. Unfortunately, Moran was out that evening, and so, with political discretion put before medical treatment, it was agreed that things were best left until Moran could arrive the following morning.
When he did so, Moran diagnosed a stroke and ordered Churchill to stay in bed. But showing typical Churchillian spirit, the prime minister cast his sheets aside as soon as the doctor had gone, and chaired that Wednesday morning’s Cabinet.
While Harold Macmillan — then a minister — noticed that the PM was a little white, and the Chancellor Rab Butler thought him somewhat quiet, nobody suspected that anything was seriously wrong. But it was. After travelling down the next day to his country seat, Chartwell in Kent, Churchill’s condition rapidly deteriorated. He started to lose control of both his left arm and left leg.
Lord Moran told Colville that he suspected the life of Britain’s greatest wartime leader might shortly come to an end.
What happened next was extraordinary — a mixture not only of almost miraculous physical recuperation, but also the astonishing ability of the Establishment to cover up an event that would have totally altered the course of Britain’s political history.
The story of Churchill’s stroke, in 1953, will be told in a TV film to be aired on ITV later this month, and starring Michael Gambon.
The programme is called Churchill’s Secret — and secret his dramatic illness most certainly was.
And the events were most certainly high stakes. For while he recovered at Chartwell, Churchill ordered that only a very select few should know what had taken place. Not only were the public not to be informed, but the crisis was also to be kept from most of the government, including the Cabinet itself.
What made the situation even worse was that Anthony Eden, the deputy prime minister and foreign secretary, was also gravely ill. On the very day of Churchill’s stroke he was in the United States having major surgery to correct a severely damaged bile duct.
Had Churchill’s stroke become public knowledge, then it is possible he would have been forced to resign. With Eden too ill to replace him, one candidate for prime minister was Rab Butler, the chancellor of the exchequer.
However, that was by no means likely, and a scrabble for leadership could have had a profoundly destabilising effect on the government, and perhaps forced a general election.
The man who found himself at the epicentre of events was Jock Colville, who was given the tasks of covering up the stroke, and of trying to keep the machinery of government running with an incapacitated prime minister and deputy prime minister.
Initially, Churchill demanded that there should be a total Press blackout, and that it should not even be revealed that he was ill.
However, Colville, despite his loyalty to the prime minister, felt that was a mendacity too far.
‘I could not obey Churchill’s injunctions to tell nobody,’ he later wrote. ‘The truth would undoubtedly leak to the Press unless I took immediate defensive action.’
Colville took the unusual step of writing to three Press lords — Camrose, Beaverbrook and Bracken, who owned, among other papers, the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times — and summoned them to Chartwell. They soon arrived, and Colville explained what had happened, before asking them if they could gag the whole of Fleet Street.
Colville knew this was an outrageous request. But amazingly, thanks to their loyalty to Churchill, the peers agreed. The only information issued to the Press that Saturday was a communique that Churchill was in ‘need of complete rest’, and that he must ‘lighten his burdens for at least a month’. No specific medical reasons were given, and the public was given to understand it was simply overwork.
Meanwhile, the indefatigable prime minister started to astound Lord Moran with the stirrings of a recovery. Some physical movement returned, although he was still very weak. Moreover, his powers of concentration and memory were clearly affected.
He told Moran that he could now no longer remember many of the great events of World War II, a particularly cruel side-effect for the man who had guided the country through those dark times. Churchill was also clearly scared. ‘Do you know anything about dreams?’ he asked Moran. ‘Can doctors tell what they mean?’
‘Only up to a point,’ Moran answered. There was a pause. ‘He looked to be so upset that I was frightened he might have another stroke,’ Moran recalled. But Churchill was not about to have another stroke. In fact, he was on the path to recovery.
‘He had the most extraordinary powers of recuperation,’ Colville wrote in his memoirs.
‘Before very long he started asking for official papers and reading the Foreign Office telegrams and so on.’
During his recovery, Churchill still kept to his daily routine and indulgences, which exasperated his
Press barons agreed to gag Fleet Street
doctor. When one confidant arrived at Chartwell, Churchill served him a glass of champagne.
‘My illness,’ he said, ‘though it should have been mortal, never prevented me from having a square meal and a pint of champagne to go with it.’
But Churchill was undoubtedly frustrated. While Rab Butler chaired the Cabinet and Lord Salisbury acted as Foreign Secretary, the prime minister detested being away from the political action of Westminster and Whitehall.
But he was also worried whether he would ever be well enough to continue in politics.
‘I must be sure I can master the House of Commons,’ he said.
‘I’m not worried about anything else, but if I can’t master the House then I must not go on.’ One person who had a deep and legitimate interest in Churchill’s condition was of course the Queen, who had only been crowned on June 2 that year.
Although it is not clear exactly what Her Majesty knew, it would have been within her powers to have insisted that the first of her prime ministers should resign on the grounds of ill health.
The truth is, Churchill was unsure whether he would recover, and he had no desire to relinquish power, only to find himself getting better.
Churchill pushed himself hard. On July 24, just over six weeks after the stroke, he started some light work.
Knowing that he was still unwell, he did admit to the Queen on Sunday August 2 that he was considering retiring, but he would decide in a month’s time, when he could fully anticipate whether he would be well enough for the party conference in October. The Queen appeared to agree.
On August 18, he chaired Cabinet, but he was clearly not himself. However, the prime minister was determined to show the Queen that he was on the mend, and he had promised her he would go with her to the St Leger race meeting at Doncaster on September 12, which also happened to be his and Clementine’s 45th anniversary.
Lady Churchill was dead set against the idea, and insisted the couple should not join Her Majesty.
‘You will be watched by loving but anxious and curious crowds,’ she wrote to her husband on September 3. ‘It would be rather an effort to keep up steady walking.’ In the end, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill managed to go to the races and pulled it off. ‘It was a happy day,’ recalled their daughter Mary, and none of the crowds seemed to notice anything was amiss.
After a trip to Balmoral, Churchill went to the South of France to recuperate, and his condition rapidly improved.
When he returned, he made a barnstorming speech at the Conservative party conference in Margate. As Mary Soames observed: ‘The speech and its delivery were a brilliant success: “retirement” talk faded away.’ Incredibly, Churchill had got away with it. He had hoodwinked the entire nation, and had made a full recovery from a condition that kills and cripples so many.
There was, however, one irony about the whole episode, as Sir Anthony Nutting, a minister at the Foreign Office, later explained.
The government, he claimed, had continued to operate, ‘very efficiently’. ‘It is no reflection on Winston Churchill’s leadership, but for a time we didn’t really miss him,’ he admitted.
Once again, as is so often the way with British politics, perhaps the true, quiet victor of the day was Sir Humphrey.