Flashback, December 1931: Churchill Nearly Killed in Car Accident

In what may have been the low point of his decade outside the British Cabinet, Winston Churchill was struck by a car late one evening while crossing New York’s Fifth Avenue, barely escaping with his life.

Even Churchill’s alleged “premature” birth (likely a story concocted by his parents so that Victorian society would not know they had slept together before marriage) led biographer William Manchester to joke: “He never could wait his turn.” That same boundless, ceaseless energy explains how his near-fatal accident on December 13, 1931 occurred.

From the start of his public career 30 years before, the future Prime Minister had the reputation of a young man in a hurry. At age 37, he was named First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of America’s Secretary of the Navy. Yet the same dash and energy led him to incur risks, including backing the disastrous 1915 Dardanelles expedition, a controversy that threatened to leave him with the same fate that befell his father Randolph: “a man with a brilliant future behind him.”

Even after painfully working his way back into the upper reaches of the government, Churchill had thrown it all way, resigning from the “shadow cabinet” of Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin, in profound (and mistaken) disagreement with its position on Indian independence.

Now he not only had more time on his hands than ever, but a continuing, pressing need to meet his extravagant expenses. Personal economy was impossible for this former Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary), so he needed to earn sizable sums when he wasn’t attending sessions of the House of Commons.

Like the earlier American statesman Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill saw writing as a means of earning a livelihood while keeping his name before the public. He had started a book tour in December, with his first lecture, “Pathway of the English-Speaking Peoples” (a characteristic theme of his later writings and work), being particularly well received.

Around 10:30 pm on December 13, Churchill was running late for an appointment with Bernard Baruch. Having forgotten the address from the last time he visited two years before, he was fuming at himself when he stepped out of his taxi. That might have made him doubly forgetful that American cars drove on the opposite side to British ones, so he looked left instead of right. He hadn't gotten too far when a car going 35 miles per hour threw him to the pavement.

Rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, Churchill was diagnosed with a scalp wound, two cracked ribs, considerable bruises and pleurisy. When the motorist who hit him visited the out-of-power politico, Churchill assured the 26-year-old Italian-American--so distraught that he had called the hospital repeatedly to check on the victim’s condition--that the accident was all his own fault, since he hadn’t been looking in the right direction. (I hope that the motorist held onto the autographed book that Churchill gave him before he left, A decade later, when the author had finally reached the top of the British political ladder, the value of the signature had grown exponentially and would have earned a nice sum for the Yonkers man, identified in contemporary press reports as either a cabby or an unemployed truck driver.)

Churchill sent a telegram to his friend Dr. Frederick Lindemann, asking him to calculate the force of the impact involved in the accident. The Oxford University physicist complied, but couldn’t resist the teasing suggestion that Churchill’s chubbiness had cushioned him from the full force of the car.

Churchill had hoped he could continue with his lecture tour, but lingering weakness while in the hospital convinced even this famously obstinate man that it was out of the question. Instead, he made do by turning the accident into an article for Britain‘s Daily Mail. (“I do not understand why I was not broken like an egg-shell or squashed like a gooseberry,” he wrote.)

On New Year’s Eve, he and wife Clementine sailed for Nassau in the Bahamas for further rest and relaxation. Even with beautiful weather, that must have been a sweet agony for this most restless of men.

I first came across the story of Churchill’s near-fatal accident in the superb 1980s Masterpiece Theatre mini-series, Churchill: The Wilderness Years, 1929-1939, starring Robert Hardy in the finest performance I’ve seen of the great man. It was brought to my attention once again by Matthew Continetti’s article, “A World in Crisis,” in the January 3 issue of The Weekly Standard.

Continetti’s article is a maddening mishmash--one moment offering striking parallels between the world situation at the time of the accident and our own, the next moment setting out preposterous similarities between the American President that year, Herbert Hoover, and Barack Obama. But one of his points seems incontestable: “if the car had been traveling just a little bit faster, the history of the twentieth century would have been irrevocably altered.”

How, exactly? Let’s assume for a second, for the sake of argument, two otherwise eminently contestable points: 1) that America would have willingly helped a different British Prime Minister as the mother country faced the Nazis alone in 1940; 2) that Britain’s Parliament and public would have followed another leader in standing fast. What then?

Would a different Prime Minister have established as good a working relationship with Franklin Roosevelt as Churchill? Not likely. For all their policy differences (downplayed in Churchill's war memoirs), it still seems clear that the two were basically simpatico. Both men, because of their WWI governmental experience, loved their country’s navies; both had a flair for the telling phrase; both had been instrumental in moving their country toward the modern welfare state (as David Lloyd-George’s Liberal Party colleague, Churchill championed old-age pensions and unemployment insurance two decades before the New Deal); and both possessed abiding affection for the other’s country (FDR graduated from the Anglophilic prep school Groton; Churchill’s mother was the Brooklyn-born beauty Jennie Jerome.)

Which British politician would have replaced Churchill as the face of British defiance? No Labour Party figure would have done so; not only did they not have the votes to take charge in 1940, but during the 1930s their strongly pacifist wing had been no better than most of the Conservatives in appeasing Hitler.

Among Conservatives, Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had been the alternative to Churchill at the time of Chamberlain’s resignation as Prime Minister. But the Labour Party quickly indicated that Halifax was unacceptable in leading any coalition War Cabinet.

Which of Churchill’s fellow “insurgents” (Conservative opponents of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy) would have stepped to the fore? Consider the list: Leo Amery, Duncan Sandys, Harold Nicolson, Godfrey Nicholson, Leonard Ropner, Derrick Gunston, Ronnie Cartland, Ronnie Tree, the Duchess of Atholl, Paul Emiys-Evans, Vyvyan Adams, Louis Spears, Bob Boothby, Victor Cazalet, Brendan Bracken and Jack Macnamara. While they were figures of undoubted talent, none had Churchill’s extensive experience--nor, even more crucially, his ability to frame an argument for public consumption through oratory.

Alternative history--i.e., speculation on how the past might have turned out given a change in an event--can be fun to explore, and Churchill himself delved into it while visiting America, even writing about how a win at Gettysburg would have resulted 40 years later in an anti-German pact among Britain, Theodore Roosevelt and the Confederate President, Woodrow Wilson.

But one trembles to think what would have happened if "The Last Lion" had not been around to roar against Hitler--and all lovers of words would be left with an immense gap, minus the speeches tand memoirs this Nobel laureate for literature would pen to steel his nation for its "finest hour."