The Word at War by Philip Gooden

Author:Philip Gooden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Winston and the Cross He had to Bear

[British/French: Winnie/Deux Mètres (Two Metres)]

As with some other successful and charismatic political leaders, Winston Churchill’s first name alone was enough to identify him. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, the day that war was declared, the 64-year-old Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a return to the post that he had held in the early part of World War One. Out went the signal from Whitehall to the Royal Navy, complete with exclamation mark: ‘Winston is back!’ For the general public Churchill was ‘Winnie’ and welcomed as a hero, especially during the Blitz. As the Australian Sunday Times reported in February 1941: ‘Greeted with shouts of “Good Old Winnie,” British Premier (Mr Winston Churchill) told Portsmouth and Southampton dockers, “We shall come through.”’ The affectionate diminutive spread across the Atlantic and it was as ‘Winnie’ that he was familiar to the American public.

Assisted by his jowly features, growling tones and combative nature, Churchill cultivated the bulldog image, and it may have been the Russians who first termed him the ‘British Bulldog’. This image can be conflated with that of John Bull, originally a satirical depiction of the English spirit, and referring to a bull rather than the bulldog sometimes envisaged by later generations. The name Winston continued to resonate after the war, and it is no coincidence that George Orwell chose it for his heroic, but doomed, protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), just as he chose to make him Winston Smith, thus yoking together the forename of the most famous living Englishman with the most common and recognisable of English surnames. Churchill enjoyed communicating with the American President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under the code name of ‘former naval person’.* It was an in-joke allusion to his time at the Admiralty, but Roosevelt’s nickname was nothing more elaborate than his initials, FDR.

The founder of the Free French forces, General Charles de Gaulle, was an awkward, prickly figure, acutely conscious of his position as a leader who was almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of the British and Americans for as long as he was in exile from his own country. In the run-up to D-Day, de Gaulle was furious at being excluded from the invasion planning and at the reluctance of the US to acknowledge him as head of the provisional government of France. In the event, he made a triumphal entry into Paris on 26 August 1944. To senior Americans, the 6 foot 5 inch French leader was known as Deux Mètres (a variant on a long-standing French nickname for him, Double Mètre). Less respectfully, the recurring stresses of de Gaulle’s relationship with Churchill gave the British Prime Minister critical material for what he referred to as his ‘Frog File’. More wittily, de Gaulle was also referred to as Churchill’s ‘Cross of Lorraine’, and though the phrase is sometimes attributed to him it was actually the punning invention of the British general who accompanied de Gaulle across the Channel after the fall of France in 1940.

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