Christmas Day

The Prime Minister no doubt is spending Christmas in Downing Street working on the Deal that needs to be approved next week by the House of Commons. It’s unclear when the Upper House gets its say. It is not the first time a Prime Minister has worked on Christmas Day.

Christmas Day 1941

For Mary Churchill, this was a Christmas of unexpected and unparalleled joy. The entire family – even Nelson, the cat – gathered at Chequers, most arriving on Christmas Eve. Sarah Churchill’s husband, Vic Oliver, whom Churchill disliked, also came. For once there were no official visitors. The house was warmed by holiday decorations: “The great gloomy hall glowed with the lighted, decorated tree,” Mary wrote in her diary. Fires burned from every grate. Soldiers patrolled the grounds with rifles and bayonets, breathing steam into the cold night air, and aircraft spotters stood freezing on the roof, but otherwise the war had gone quiet, with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day devoid of air or sea battles.

On Christmas morning Churchill had breakfast in bed, with Nelson lounging on the bedclothes, as he worked through the papers in his regular black box and in his yellow box of secrets, dictating replies and comments to a typist. “The Prime Minister has made a great point of working as usual over the holiday,” wrote John Martin, the private secretary on duty at Chequers that weekend, “and yesterday morning was like almost any other here, with the usual letters and telephone calls and of course many Christmas greeting messages thrown in.” Churchill gave him a signed copy of his own Great Contemporaries, a collection of essays about two dozen famous men, including Hitler, Leon Trotsky, and Franklin Roosevelt, this last entitled “Roosevelt from Afar”.

”From lunchtime on less work was done and we had a festive family Christmas,” wrote Martin, who was treated as if he were a member of the family. Lunch centred on a ration-times luxury, an immense turkey – “the largest turkey I have ever seen”, Martin wrote – sent from the farm of Churchill’s late friend Harold Harmsworth. The newspaper magnate had died a month before and among his last wishes had directed the bird’s final disposition. Lloyd George sent apples picked from the orchards at his estate, Bron-y-de, in Surrey, where in addition to growing Bramleys and Cox’s Orange Pippins he cultivated his long-standing love affair with his personal secretary, Frances Stevenson.

The family listened to the king’s “Royal Christmas Message,” an annual custom, broadcast over the radio since 1932. The king spoke slowly, clearly fighting the speech impediment that long had harried him – for example, a strangled start to the word “unstinted”, followed by its perfect execution – but this added to the gravity of his message. “In the last Great War the flower of our youth was destroyed”, he said, “and the rest of the people saw but little of the battle. This time we are all in the front lines and in danger together”. He predicted victory, and invited his audience to look forward to a time ”when Christmas days are happy again”.

And now the fun began. Vic Oliver sat down at the piano; Sarah sang. A cheery dinner followed, and after this came more music. Champagne and wine put Churchill in a buoyant mood. “For once the shorthand writer was dismissed”, wrote John Martin, “and we had a sort of sing-song until after midnight. The PM sang lustily, if not always in tune, and when Vic played Viennese waltzes he danced a remarkably frisky measure of his own in the middle of the room.”

All the while, Churchill held forth, expounding on this and that until two in the morning.

”This was one of the happiest Christmases I can remember”, Mary wrote in her diary late that night, in the Prison Room. “Despite all the terrible events going on around us. It was not happy in a flamboyant way. But I’ve never seen the family look so happy – so united – so sweet. We were complete, Randolph and Vic having arrived this morning. I have never felt the ‘Christmas feeling’ so strongly. Everyone was kind – lovely – gay. I wonder if we will all be together next Christmas. I pray we may. I pray also next year it may be happier for more people.”

The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson, 2020.

Mary Churchill’s final sentiments are as appropriate today as they were in 1941. Happy Christmas.