Grand tours: A voyage around my grandfather

Writers' adventures in literature: Celia Sandys recounts Winston Churchill's wartime trip across the Atlantic on board HMS Queen Mary

Sunday 13 April 2003 00:00 BST
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Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was a tireless traveller, whether for work or leisure. During his lifetime he made a comprehensive attack on the atlas, travelling to destinations ranging from Cuba to South Africa, the Middle East to the Mediterranean, North America to the North-West frontier. Celia Sandys, his granddaughter and biographer, made the first of many journeys with him aboard 'Christina', the Onassis family yacht, recounting this and other adventures in her new book 'Chasing Churchill; The Travels of Winston Churchill'. This extract sees Churchill, despite recently returning home ill from the 1943 Casablanca conference, setting out across the Atlantic.

A bout of pneumonia followed Churchill's return home. Confined to bed, he continued working: "That is what does me good." By May 1943, conscious of serious divergences in Allied strategy, he decided he needed to cross the Atlantic yet again. The Boeing flying boat could not be used because of late ice on the northern route, and Churchill's doctors did not want him to fly at the height required by a bomber. It was decided, therefore, to cross in the Queen Mary.

Elizabeth Layton had taken Churchill's dictation for two years, but had hitherto been excluded from the travelling entourage because of the unsuitability for women of the previous means of transport. Born in England and brought up on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, she had returned to London to work with the Red Cross. A trained shorthand typist, she had been recruited through an employment agency by Number Ten. Having succeeded where others failed, she found herself the Assistant Personal Secretary to the Prime Minister. Now, with an Atlantic crossing in prospect, she screwed up her courage and asked if she might go. The reply was immediate: "Why didn't you ask sooner." Twenty-four hours later she was aboard as the ship sailed from the Clyde on 5 May.

The luxury liner the Queen Mary had been converted to a troop ship capable of carrying 15,000 men. For this voyage the main deck, where the Prime Minister and his entourage, and the map and conference rooms were accommodated, had been restored in a very short time to almost pre-war standards.

At one point in the voyage British code-breakers reported that a U-boat was fifteen miles ahead of the Queen Mary. Churchill at once gave orders for a machine gun to be put in his lifeboat, saying, "I won't be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy." However, no torpedoes or any of the hundred or so U-boats operating in the North Atlantic were seen, and the Queen Mary arrived in New York on 11 May. The conference, a series of separate meetings code-named "Trident", lasted a fortnight. General Brooke described such events as "the most exhausting entertainments ever". For Elizabeth Layton, accommodated in the White House with the Prime Minister, the pace was even hotter and the hours longer than in London, but she had an hour or two off every other day to sample such shopping and food as had long since been unavailable at home.

On 14 May, it being a Saturday, Roosevelt invited Churchill to accompany him and Mrs Roosevelt to the presidential retreat, Shangri-La (now called Camp David), in the Allegheny Mountains, Maryland. With them was Harry Hopkins, the President's aide, who as they approached the battlefield of Gettysburg quoted from John Greenleaf Whittier's Civil War verse, "Barbara Frietchie".

"Shoot if you must this old grey head,

But spare your country's flag," she said.

When no one else in the car offered to add to these lines, Churchill started from the beginning:

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn ...

And demonstrated his prodigious memory by reciting the remaining fifty-eight lines of the complete poem. "No one," he later wrote, "corrected my many misquotations."

The poem came up again eight days later at a White House dinner. Jane Plakias, a family friend of the Roosevelts and then a young girl of twenty-three, was one of the guests, as she recounted in a letter to her grandmother the following morning ... "We were standing there when [the elevator] came down and the door opened and there stood Winston Churchill ... He smiled at our astonished faces and held out his hand, saying 'My name is Winston Churchill' as though we didn't know."

Then follows an account of the dinner, each of the principals "obviously enjoying it best when they were in the limelight ... I do think [Churchill] has greater depth, but there is great rapport in their interest and turn of mind. They seem to have become real personal friends." Churchill wanted to know who had written "Barbara Frietchie", and the President asked Jane Plakias, who could only remember "the couplet we all know which the President recited in unison with me. Whereupon Mr Churchill almost rose in his seat in his great glee and proceeded to recite the entire poem ... It was a tour de force and the table gave him a big hand ... Another dissertation was on the subject of his recent pneumonia. He discussed at length the battle of the streptococci germs, how he had never had to fight anything that could become a grandmother in nine minutes, how he had been planning to outwit the germs with military strategy which would have put Montgomery to shame".

'Chasing Churchill; The Travels of Winston Churchill, Celia Sandys' (HarperCollins, hardback rrp £20). 'Independent on Sunday' readers can order a copy for £17. Call 0870 900 2050 and quoting code 838D. Offer ends 31 May.

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