Quotes

Churchill's Quirks

...for Churchill sleeps naked and remains so on such sorties [looking for his valet in the morning]. He will don a robe when visiting other homes, "in deference," as he puts it, to his hosts' "views of propriety," but at Chartwell he feels free to roam around nude; as one of his servants will later explain, it seems "completely natural to him." It did not seem natural to a young housemaid who has just left his employ. Looking up the stairwell one morning she beheld, on the top step, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill in the buff--all 210 pounds of him--a massive pink man with a bald, smooth dome and broad if slightly stooped shoulders, glaring down at her, as one of Winston's secretaries remembers, "like a laser beam." The girl fled the house shrieking. She has [since] sent for her belongings and her pay.


source: William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone: 1932-1940, 8 tags: Churchill, Idiosyncracies

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