Ooo-eee. How'd you like to be that "Minister of Food?" I bet that sumbitch never ate another egg as long as he lived.
Or the Minister of Transport? You're in the middle of a war of survival, your country's an island; troops, fuel--and food--have the damnedest time getting in and out, and your Prime Minister declares you and your ministry are waging a "war on flowers" and brings this holocaust before the whole government!
There is little that is not known about Winston Churchill, including how funny he was. I would guess though that among those things less widely known is the "funniness" that these communications show was so deep in his soul. For Churchill was not intentionally being funny here, these were official State communications that he considered--and which undoubtedly were taken by the recipients to be--very serious indeed.
My guess is that these are not as widely known because they are from the appendices to Churchill's six-volume work The Second World War. Six volumes. The appendices. They are from volumes three and four only. The appendices to volume three are 156 pages, those in volume four 127 pages. The entries posted here are from...an appendix in these appendices, found also in the other volumes, called "Prime Minister's Personal Minutes."
I intended to end this series on these minutes with those on the length of telegrams but couldn't resist appending the story about the iconic Karsh portrait. I had intended to end with the telegrams because of the irony. Churchill complaining about wordiness? Six-volume Churchill? One million word Marlborough Churchill? The "Winston hours" Churchill who exhausted FDR?
Irony is unintended humor.
"Prime Minister's Personal Minutes" provide a candid view onto the soul of Winston Churchill. We see him here guileless and caring: about eggs or flowers or ice cream because they would improve the hard lives of the British people. Time and again one reads of people who knew Churchill describe him as unusually without malice. "No man is a hero to his valet," is the saying but the people, even the unfortunate Minister of Food one imagines, who worked for Churchill loved him (Not so by contrast, those who worked for FDR). Guileless and sincere: one of Churchill's contemporaries said "Winston was often right but when he was wrong. Well, my God." Sometimes wrong and stubborn. Always sincere. The "Moral of the Work," as Churchill put it on the frontispiece of each volume of The Second World War is:
In War: Resolution.
In Defeat: Defiance.
In Victory: Magnanimity.
In Peace: Goodwill.
Guileless and funny: Who doesn't like to laugh? Churchill was beloved for being funny. The ironic eggs/flowers/ice-cream funniness is part of the soul of the English people it seems to me also. One thinks of "Janet! Donkies!;" I think also of "The Poznan." And one thinks of this English irony, not lost on Churchill, that in 1945 his Conservative party was defeated at the polls and he was turned out of office as Prime Minister.
Photo: Frederick Marquis, First Earl of Woolten, Minister of Food, egg hater.
