Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table Read Online Free PDF

Under-Secretary of State for War from 1940 to 1945.

Odette Pol Roger
    Wife of Jacques Pol Roger, co-director of Churchill’s favourite champagne house. Churchill was entranced by her when they first met in 1945 and their friendship continued, fortified by the produce of the family firm, until his death. She died in 2009, aged 89.
Charles Portal
    Air Chief Marshal of the RAF, 1940–45. He served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and helped oversee the RAF’s rapid expansion in 1939. Despite disagreements, he worked closely and successfully with Churchill and advocated the strategic bombing offensive on Germany. He also won the esteem of Eisenhower. He retired from the RAF in 1945, was given a peerage and directed the British atomic energy programme until 1951. Died 1971.
Jane Portal, (subsequently Lady Williams of Elvel)
    Churchill’s personal secretary during his second premiership, 1949–55.
Emery Reves
    Churchill’s literary agent. He was born in Hungary in 1904 but naturalised British in 1940. In later life, Churchill greatly enjoyed staying with Reves and his glamorous partner, Wendy Russell, at their home, the Villa La Pausa on the French Riviera.
John Reith
    Creator of the BBC, serving as its first General Manager in 1922 and its Director-General from 1928 to 1938, shaping its public service ethos. A dour Scot, he was made Lord Reith in 1940 and held office successively as Minister of Information,Transport, Works and Planning. His relations with Churchill were fraught and Churchill sacked him in 1942. He subsequently channelled his energies into the development of new towns and harbouring grudges. Died, 1971.
Eleanor Roosevelt
    Wife of President Roosevelt. Born into a wealthy New York family in 1884, she married the future President in 1905. The marriage held together through mutual affection and shared political activism rather than love and exclusive devotion. She outlived her husband by eighteen years and, as a US delegate to the UN General Assembly, chaired the UN Human Rights Commission.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
    US President, 1933–45. A wealthy New Yorker whose distant cousin, Theodore, was also President. Confined to a wheelchair by polio in 1921, Roosevelt became Governor of New York in 1928 and was elected to the White House in the midst of the Great Depression. The extent to which his New Deal policies were successful remains contentious, although they did have positive effects on morale. His policy of neutrality – while sending supplies to Britain – ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage two months after the Yalta Conference and a month before the war’s end in Europe.
Victor Rothschild
    A member of the banking family, Rothschild became a Labour peer in 1937 and served in the British Security Service, MI5, during the war, winning the George Medal. However, his earlier friendship at Cambridge with those subsequently unmasked as Soviet spies brought him – unfairly – under suspicion. After the war he was a prominent zoologist and advised the Tory primeministers, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. He died in 1990, aged 79.
Leslie Rowan
    Civil servant. Captained the English hockey team both before and after the Second World War. Churchill’s Private Secretary 1941, and Principal Private Secretary in 1945, continued to serve and advise the subsequent Labour government on economic policy. Knighted in 1949 and died, aged 64, in 1972.
François Rysavy
    Czech-born White House chef, famed for his mastery of international cuisine. In 1957 he published an account of his time in the kitchens, complete with the favourite recipes of President Eisenhower and his wife.
Frank Sawyers
    Churchill’s valet during most of the war years, accompanied Churchill on most of his overseas trips.
Walter Bedell Smith
    Chief of Staff to General Eisenhower during the lead up to D-Day. He later served as American Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Director of the