A gallant defence of Churchill’s health habits
Don’t worry: this is not yet another superfluous biography of Winston Churchill. It is a book about his health, by a doctor – a retired New Zealand orthopedic surgeon, to be precise.
If you study the famous bulldog-pose photograph by Karsh of Ottawa in 1941, which forms the frontispiece of this book, you will see quite clearly that there is a scar on Churchill’s brow. This was the result of his British tendency to look the wrong way when crossing the road in countries that are so foolish as to drive on the right. In December 1931, he was hit by a car in New York, and badly enough injured on his forehead and thighs to put him in hospital for a week. Then he got pleurisy.
Churchill’s health events provide a good insight into his life, and Beasley assists this by tabulating the great man’s afflictions at the end of each of his nine decades. In the third decade (1894-1904), for example, he suffered a knee injury steeple-chasing, a dislocated right shoulder after grabbing a ring on the wall of Bombay Harbour when landing in India for the first time, a thumb laceration when hit by a splinter from a rifle range in Bangalore, and claustrophobia and panic attacks when hiding in a mine in South Africa for three days after escaping his Boer captors. In that same decade, he had his speech defect investigated, and suffered what Beasley calls a “fugue”, drying up while speaking in the House of Commons.
In his fourth decade, he was attacked by a whip-wielding suffragette who tried to push him under a train. After the First World War, he was in a small air crash (he was the pilot). In 1921, he badly grazed his wrist when thrown from a camel as he visited the Sphinx with Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell. In 1922, his appendix was removed by the comically named Sir Crisp English.
When prime minister for the second time, in the early Fifties, Churchill went to a luncheon at Trinity House, and put down his lighted cigar into an open box of matches. He burnt his fingers. The cigars were an added medical complication, although Beasley thinks he flourished them more than he smoked them. In an unpressurised aeroplane flying to Moscow (via the Mediterranean and Tehran) in 1942, oxygen masks were issued to all passengers. Churchill had his adapted so that he could smoke his cigar while wearing it.