Yeah, you read that right. Winston Spencer Leonard Churchill, worshipped by neocons as a monumental, more than human demi-god, had an eye for the lads. Or so says Michael Bloch in his diverting 2015 opus, Closet Queens Some 20th Century British Politicians. Although there’s no good evidence that Sir Winston ever went to bed with a boy, he definitely had an eye, and a weakness, for a pretty face, as long as there was a penis attached.
I stumbled across Closet Queens in a rather odd way, which I’ll describe in some detail, even though it may bore the hell out of you. I recently ran a fairly long post, When William Gladstone died, did something else die too?, jumping off a biography of four-time British prime minister William Gladstone by Roy Jenkins, himself a long-time parliamentarian, though never prime minister.
As it turned out, I had already read several books by Jenkins back in the early oughties without actually focusing on him as an author—biographies of Churchill himself and another 20th century British prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. Reading the Gladstone book, I was struck by Jenkins’ obvious nostalgia for an England that he never experienced, a nostalgia that, as both a Welshman1 and a Labour Party member, he might not be expected necessarily to share, though clearly he did.
Anyway, this made me think about Jenkins rather than his subjects, so I read a few more of his books, including his autobiography, which was quite interesting, in many ways, and made me think about writing a piece about him. When I consulted the Wikipedia write-up of Roy, I learned a number of more interesting things about him, which he had left out of his own book, including the fact that, as an undergrad at Oxford, he had had a “passionate” affair with Anthony “Tony” Crosland, another Labour big-wig to be, although as adults it appears that both were strictly hetero swingers, both quite aggressive swingers, in fact, particularly amusing in Roy’s case, because he quickly became plump and bald, with horned-rimmed glasses, no less, the perfect picture of dreadful middle age.
Wikipedia led me to Closet Queens, and the charges/revelations about Churchill struck a particular chord with me, because I have been entertained for decades by the efforts of Churchill cheer-leaders, and I’m including Jenkins here, to portray the marriage of Sir Winston and wife “Clemmie” as some sort of grand and gallant alliance of two larger than life characters, reshaping the world to their will, very much in the manner of many American liberal historians when writing about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, even though both couples contrived to spend a great deal of their time apart, which is the only way, one strongly suspects, that they could keep their marriages “together”.2 Neocon stalwart Gertrude Himmelfarb used to make me laugh, loudly, back in the day, when she struggled, as she often did, to present Winnie and Clemmie as paragons of Victorian virtue, still taken at face value back then (at least, Gertie certainly pretended to), even though acknowledging that their parents, who were actual Victorians, spent a good deal of their time screwing their heads off.
I recently prowled around Jenkins’ biography of Churchill, which I bought and read some 20 years ago, first when I was writing a long post about the beginnings of World War I and later when reading Jenkins’ book about Gladstone made me think about Jenkins himself. Somewhere in the book (which is not searchable, since it’s not available as an ebook), Jenkins remarks on Churchill’s “tendency to surround himself with men more louche than himself” and elsewhere refers to these men as Churchill’s “acolytes and cronies,” but otherwise leaves us wondering: How “louche” was Churchill himself, and how louche, and in what manner, were these “acolytes and cronies”.3.
Well, louche is as louche does, right? I’d learned from Wikipedia that Roy knew from louche, but Jenkins says nothing that would explain either how louche Churchill was himself or much loucher than he were his acolytes and cronies. Closet Queens gave me a chance to find out, and it was well worth the read.
Churchill, despite being an eminent “catch”, being a member of one of the most illustrious families in England, and obviously determined to have a great future before him, did not marry until 33, in 1908, the same year in which he became the youngest cabinet member since 1866. Although he unsurprisingly had admirers, Bloch says he was widely regarded as a he-man woman-hater, ignoring them in society when he was not actively rude. No one seems to have thought of the coupling as a love match, and Churchill apparently regarded Clemmie as largely a major domo cum baby machine.
According to Bloch, the first of Churchill’s “young men” was Eddie Marsh, actually two years older than Churchill, a minor government official whom Churchill chose in 1905 to be his private secretary and whose official duties through the years were more or less defined as whatever Churchill wanted them to be. Marsh was very much connected with the “arts” and introduced Churchill to famous gay theatrical personalities like Ivor Novello4 and Noël Coward. He also introduced Churchill to Rupert Brooke, the once-legendary ‘beautiful” war poet who died so young he was/is famous for his pro-war poems—“swimmers leaping into cleanness”. Because why get married when you can be, you know, dead!
Churchill wrote a famous obituary for Brooke—“joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be”—that helped jumpstart his legend.
Churchill also attached to himself the “angelic” (says Bloch) Sir Archibald Sinclair, who, like Marsh, held a variety of positions that simply amounted to him being placed at Churchill’s beck and call, ultimately serving as Air Minister in World War II, but so subservient to Churchill that he was known, according to historian Max Hastings, as “the head-boy’s fag”.
Both Marsh and Sinclair were “gentleman”, but Brendan Bracken, perhaps Churchill’s most significant fag of all, most emphatically was not. Bracken was the son of an Irish stone mason, who passed himself off as an Australian orphan. At age 19 Bracken managed to get himself enrolled in Sedbergh, a prestigious “public school” (what Americans would call a private school) established in 1551, claiming to be only 15, apparently as a way to observe the privileged classes at close quarters. (It is hard to imagine that he expected to graduate.5) Bracken had a remarkable ability to convince older, powerful men that he was something and someone special, and with Churchill he struck gold. Bracken was a classic courtier, unscrupulous and self-serving, yet obsessive in the service of his “master”, possessing the flavor of both the Jesuit and the eunuch. He is credited, at least by his biographer Charles Lysaght, with convincing Churchill that he could and should succeed Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in 1940 instead of deferring to Lord Halifax,6 though the alternative story is that Halifax deferred to Churchill, in part because the times required a prime minister from the House of Commons.
Bracken never married, nor is there any credible evidence that he ever had sex with anyone, which was also true of Churchill’s two other main supports during his “Wilderness Years” in the 1930s, Desmond Morris and Oxford physics professor Frederick Lindemann, though Lindemann at least enjoyed charming the ladies and was the only one of Winston’s posse that Clemmie liked.
According to Bloch, Churchill was also obsessed for a time by his own son, Randolph, who fit the “beautiful boy” cliché quite well when young, something that deeply irritated Clemmie, so Bloch says, though he offers no evidence to validate this assertion.
Easily the most louche of Churchill’s boys was Robert Boothby, 24 years younger than Churchill. Boothby was elected to Parliament at age 24, in 1924, and ultimately accepted Churchill’s offer to become his parliamentary private secretary, though Boothby, it seems, never really fancied being the tail of someone else’s kite, even Churchill’s. Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill, portrays Boothby as the ultimate turncoat, publicly walking out in palpable disdain and disgust in the middle of one Churchill’s worst-received speeches, given in 1936, arguing that Edward VIII, everyone’s favorite infantile royal narcissist, should not be forced to abdicate but rather allowed to keep his throne and marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson.7 Bloch says that Boothby played an important role in effectuating Churchill’s replacement of Neville Chamberlain following the “Norway Debate” in 1940, but doesn’t say how, and other accounts don’t mention him. Boothby was given a minor position in Churchill’s government but soon had to resign for failing to “declare his [financial] interest” in the course of parliamentary business. It is quite fortunate for Churchill’s reputation that he and Boothby never fully meshed, for in later years Boothby was involved in an immense scandal that, fortunately for the British Establishment, did not become fully exposed until years after the events.
Boothby’s “beard”, for the straight smart set in the thirties and forties, was a long-running affair with Lady Dorothy Cavendish, the wife of Conservative MP Harold MacMillan, who would become prime minister in 1957. According to Bloch, in the 1950s Boothby, still in parliament, became a major public character, appearing frequently on television and playing the role of high-spirited aristocrat, becoming “Lord Boothby” in 1958. In his private life he was a heavy gambler and by the early sixties became increasingly involved with Britain’s most notorious, and unfortunately most glamorous, gangsters, the Kray twins, Reginald and Ronald, who supplied him with young men, something they were expert at, because they were gay as well. Boothby was linked in his sexual tastes and involvement with the Krays to Thomas Driberg, a Labour MP with a communist past, about whom an endless cloud of gossip still circles.8
Harold MacMillan had resigned as prime minister in October 1963 as a result of the Profumo scandal. In early 1964, the Conservative leadership gained information on Boothby and Driberg’s involvement with the Krays. In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror, a Labour paper, obtained a photo of Boothby with the Kray twins. The Mirror ran a story about a Tory peer involved with gangsters without naming names, which were then supplied by foreign papers not subject to the UK’s ever-convenient libel laws. However, the Labour Party was so fearful that pursuit of the case could also expose Driberg and destroy their chance of winning an upcoming election that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, through his attorney Andrew Goodman, encouraged Boothby to sue the Mirror (for printing the truth) and then leaned on the Mirror to take a dive, which cost the Mirror £40,000, damaged the cause of free speech in the UK, and kept the Krays out of prison for another five years. If the full story had come out in 1965, one can wonder what would have been left of the British political system.
Somewhat mercifully, Sir Winston died in January 1965, lucky for his posthumous reputation that “Lord Boothby” had been the least of his boys.
Afterwords
I’ve read that JFK, as president, enjoyed a “pool party” á la Hugh Hefner at Bing Crosby’s place in sunny LA, with a dozen or so naked starlets. As a senator, he frequently went on pleasure cruises with similarly inclined senators.
Shortly before the 2006 congressional election, Republican Congressman Mark Foley resigned from Congress after widespread reports that he had made repeated inappropriate comments to male congressional pages. At the time there were numerous, but studiously vague, suggestions that the Republican leadership had been slow to react to reports of Foley’s activities. These suggestions reflected the “inside” knowledge that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was a homosexual. However, no one knew at the time that Hastert, as a high school wrestling coach, had sexually abused many of the boys he coached. If the men he had abused as a coach had stepped forward in 2006, the results for the Republican Party surely would have been devastating.
1. No American, I am sure, can “really” understand the intricacies of all the resentments, linguistic and otherwise, that seethe and boil on that most fraught archipelago known (I think) as the British Isles. Wales was conquered by the English in the 13th century and formally incorporated into England, unlike either Scotland or Ireland. However, the Welsh spoke Welsh rather than English, and, among other things, Anglican Church services were conducted in Welsh, complete with a Welsh bible and a Welsh Book of Common Prayer, which, so I speculate, helped spoken Welsh survive in a way that both Gaelic and Scots (a “sister” language to English, the two diverging after the Norman Conquest (of England, not of Scotland) in 1066) did not. The Scots use English in their “kirk” while the Irish, being Catholic, until recently used Latin. It is still typical of British authors to attribute any significant character trait of anyone born in Wales to their “Welsh blood”.
2. There is no question, of course, that Franklin Roosevelt was unfaithful to Eleanor. Charges against the other three are both limited and unproven.
3. It is, in fact, remarkable just how little Jenkins tells us about these men, who were close to Churchill for decades, frequently living in his home for months at a time, and absolutely vital to his success. They pop up out of nowhere, attach themselves to Churchill, and then remain completely in the background unless their appearance is somehow essential to the narrative.
4. Novello is probably best known in the U.S., to film buffs, at least, as the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s first film The Lodger. In the United Kingdom, he’s remembered as the namesake of the “Ivor Novello Awards” for music, similar to the Grammys in the U.S.
5. One imagines that Bracken would be pleased to know that the “Sedbergh” page in Wikipedia lists him as a distinguished alumnus.
6. Supposedly, Churchill felt that the Labour Party mistrusted him so much he could not function effectively as the leader of the sort of coalition government needed to wage war effectively.
7. Rather surprisingly, Bloch no mention of this, even though he has written six (yes, six) books on Eddie and Wallis, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which frankly strikes me as pretty gay.
8. I find it very easy to believe that Driberg passed secret information to the Soviet Union, as has been charged. The various exculpatory “explanations” given his behavior—that he was such an empty-headed gossip that no one would trust him to keep a secret, or that he was such cunning manipulator that he “played” everyone, including the Soviets—strike me as more ingenious than convincing.
