‘He insisted on taking his pet canary along’: Holidays with my grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill
Surrounded by maps of battlefields, troop deployment charts and scrambler telephones in the Churchill War Rooms, the command centre deep below Whitehall where her grandfather Sir Winston directed operations, Celia Sandys related an amusing anecdote about his love of luxury.
“He was once asked at the Plaza Hotel in New York what he would like during his stay,” she said.
“He replied, ‘I am a simple man. My tastes are simple. I am easily satisfied by the best’.”
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It was an incongruous epitaph to recount to the cruise media gathered in the austere military setting of London’s War Rooms, which were built to withstand the bombs that rained down on London during the Blitz, but Sandys knew it would raise a laugh from her audience.
Sandys is the ambassador for luxury river cruise line Tauck. With almost 100 years of escorted touring experience under its belt, the company has made serious inroads into the European river cruise market in recent years.
Its stock-in-trade is small ships with an intimate atmosphere, and Sandys will speak on numerous cruises from April through October this year. On special departures passengers have the chance to spend an exclusive evening with her. And as a close relative of one of the 20th century’s most historic figures, who is prepared to tell so many compelling stories about him, her company guarantees a rare form of entertainment.
Sandys’s mother was Churchill’s eldest child, Diana, and her father was Lord Duncan-Sandys, a former Cabinet minister and member of Churchill’s wartime government, so she not only knows all about the levers of power but also has easy access to people of influence. She has written several books about Churchill and is in great demand as a lecturer on cruise ships.
There is a wonderful photograph of Sandys with her grandfather in one of her books, Chasing Churchill: The Travels of Winston Churchill, in which she retraces his journeys to parts of the world where many of his adventures took place, from India’s North-West Frontier to South Africa.
In the photo Sandys, a gamin-like teenager, is seated in the back of a limousine next to Churchill, who is wrapped in a bear-like, fur-collared brown coat, with an outsized white Stetson perched above his impish face, smoking the inevitable fat cigar.
It was taken in 1959, shortly after she joined him on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht Christina, which was sailing from Monte Carlo for a cruise around the Greek islands. Sandys, a fan of cruising, reveals that, bizarrely, Churchill insisted on taking his pet canary Toby along for the ride; it was allowed to fly around his stateroom.
Maria Callas was a fellow guest on what turned out to be the floating incubator for her torrid romance with Onassis. The Greek shipping tycoon left his wife Tina shortly after the cruise.
Churchill insisted on taking his pet canary Toby along for the ride; it was allowed to fly around his stateroom
Sandys didn’t take to Callas; she describes her as “dowdy”, wearing “a garishly coloured floral jumpsuit that looked as if it had been run up from chintz curtains”. She also recalls the opera star pretending to enjoy singing along to the old music-hall number Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) with Churchill and Gracie Fields, when the Rochdale songbird came aboard in Capri.
“For Callas there was always something wrong,” she adds. “If the air-conditioning was on, she wanted it off. If the stabilisers were down, she wanted them up. It was almost as if she felt it was expected of her to complain – and complain she did. It became clear that something was going on between Ari and Callas. My mother, my grandmother and I watched it all unfolding and met every evening to gossip about the day.”
Sandys, a mother of four, is a graceful woman with a patrician air. After the eventful cruise on Christina, she enjoyed several holidays with Churchill at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where he would hold court every summer.
In Chasing Churchill she recounts dining there with Onassis and Greta Garbo one day, when the actress announced that she had a problem. “Churchill asked, ‘What did Miss Garbo say?’ and Ari replied, ‘She says she is too hot in her English lambswool underpants, so proposes to take them off.’ By then, all eyes in the restaurant were on Garbo and she executed a striptease beneath the table. ‘Poor lamb,’ said my grandfather, patting her on the knee as the garment was removed.”
It was somehow unnerving to listen to such tales just feet away from the monk-like cell where Churchill slept during the Blitz, yet Sandys is the first to agree that there is no finer calling card than mention of her grandfather’s name.
For example, it won her a private lunch with Fidel Castro at his palace in Havana. Churchill had reported on Cuba’s war of independence in 1895.
“Castro fired question after question at me about my grandfather’s involvement in the Boer War,” says Sandys. “He had beautiful hands which he used to great effect to emphasise what he was saying. He took great pleasure in telling me he had ensured my grandfather was supplied with cigars right up until his death.”
Churchill, she says, had only one regret in life: “He wished he had been a better painter, but one of his canvases sold in New York for more than two million dollars.”
Sandys was among the family members at Churchill’s bedside when he died in 1965, “with his faithful marmalade cat by his side”. Not a dry eye in the house.
