July 9, 2013

FINEST HOUR 128, AUTUMN 2005

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Andrew Carless ([email protected]) writes: “I am trying to track for a friend the date of a photograph. My friend’s grandfather (on the extreme right with his face almost out of the shot) was apparently Churchill’s temporary chauffeur when he visited Hendaye in the Pays Basque sometime in 1945. Do you have any way of tracing Churchill’s movements in the Pays Basque?”

We are always pleased to help track photos of friends or relatives with the Great Man. Here we can reliably advise that this photo was taken between July 7th and 14th, 1945. Sir Martin Gilbert records in the official biography that Churchill with his daughter Mary arrived in Hendaye on the 7th, for a break between polling-day for the General Election and the start of the Potsdam conference with Stalin and Truman. During that conference, Churchill would leave for London to hear the polling results, which had been delayed while the service vote came in. To his shock, he would learn that his parry had lost dramatically; he was no longer prime minister, and Clement Attlee would take his place at Potsdam.

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Diary of John Colville, WSC’s private secretary, Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955 (New York: Norton, 1986), 258-59:

Sir John Colville:

After a reception in Edinburgh as warm and moving as in Glasgow, he said to me that nobody who had seen what he had that day could have any doubt as to the result of the coming election. I said that I would agree if it were a presidential election.

July 5th was polling-day. The Conservative Central Office and Lord Beaverbrook both forecast a majority of at least a hundred seats for the Government. Churchill decided to take a fortnight’s holiday, the first he had had since war began. A hospitable Canadian, Brigadier-General Brutinel, who owned the Chateau Margaux vineyard, offered his house, Bordaberry, near Hendaye. The General had somehow contrived to remain in France throughout the German occupation and had been a leading conspirator in arranging for escaping Allied airmen and prisoners of war to cross the Pyrenees into Spain.

So on July 7th Mr. and Mrs. Churchill, Mary, Lord Moran [WSC’s physician] and I flew to Bordeaux. The PM. devoted most of the time to painting. He was accompanied and advised on his artistic expeditions by a talented artist, Mrs. Nairn, wife of the British Consul at Bordeaux, who had been at Marrakech when we were there in January 1944 and had won Churchill’s esteem. The rest of us walked, visited Biarritz, St. Jean de Luz and Bayonne, watched Basque dancing at Hendaye and drank the finest clarets.

In the mornings we bathed from a sandy beach. The Prime Minister floated, like a benevolent hippo, in the middle of a large circle of protective French policemen who duly donned bathing suits for the purpose. His British detective had also been equipped by the thoughtful authorities at Scotland Yard for such aquatic duties. Round and round this circle swam a persistent French Countess, a notorious collaborateuse who hoped by speaking to Churchill to escape the fate which the implacable Resistance were probably planning for her. It reminded me of the medieval practice of “touching for the King’s evil.”

The encircling gendarmes, patiently treading water, thwarted her plot, but she did entrap me on the beach. Looking at her golden locks I felt pity and hoped she would not suffer the fate of those shorn girls I had seen at Bayeux the preceding summer. I believe that in the end her good looks, and no doubt her influential connections, saved her from anything worse than a short prison sentence.

Before we left for France Churchill asked President Truman to telegraph the result of the test of the first atomic bomb due to take place in the Nevada desert. “Let me know,” he had signalled, “whether it is a flop or a plop.” When we were about to leave Bordaberry a telegram came from the President to the Prime Minister. It read: “It’s a plop. Truman.” A new, glaring light was shed on the future of the war against Japan.

On July 15th Winston Churchill left for the Potsdam Conference.