Near the end of his life Winston Churchill said, “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Ordeal or not, Sir Winston met his Maker this week (Jan. 24) in 1965. He was 90 years old.
Throughout his long life Churchill was known as a prodigious drinker of alcohol — whether that hastened his end seems unimportant given that his end came after nine decades — but from an image standpoint Churchill is much better remembered for his other vice, the ever-present cigar clamped in his teeth. Few photos of Churchill, and even fewer drawings or caricatures, show him without one, and in fact he smoked nearly a dozen cigars a day.
Granted, he enjoyed them, but Churchill also believed that his cigars helped portray him as a calm, confident leader who knew that even in the darkest days of World War II, Great Britain would prevail. In that sense, his ever-present cigar perfectly meshed with Churchill’s rotund shape and face — he was the iconic “English Bulldog,” calmly puffing on his cigar regardless of the tempest around him.
Although Cuban cigars were his favorite, he smoked many brands, including the Royal Derby Longfellow and the Romeo y Julietta. Typically, he would stock several hundred cigars wherever he resided, and he was such a devoted cigar smoker that he was even particular about the matches he used to light them. He imported cartons of the Canadian-made, two-inch cedar matches because they burned longer, meaning he could wait until after the match head’s sulfur had burned off before lighting his cigar. That way, the sulfur’s odor wouldn’t interfere with the cigar’s aroma or taste.
One result of Churchill’s worldwide fame as a cigar smoker was the thousands of cigars he received as gifts from admirers the world over, which Churchill greatly appreciated, but which caused Scotland Yard and British Intelligence (MI5) many headaches because it would have been easy for Great Britain’s enemies to lace those cigars with cyanide or other toxins, or even hide heat-generated explosives in them. Alas, testing his cigars meant destroying them, which Churchill refused to countenance, so in the end a “compromise” was reached in which Scotland Yard and MI5 did “random” (infrequent) tests.
And still he survived. He even smoked in the military airplanes that flew him to various conferences and meetings around the world, often sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, next to a vented window so that his cigar smoke didn’t bother the pilot, but also so that a spark from his cigar wouldn’t ignite the gaseous fumes that often permeated the cockpit, which would have resulted in him prematurely meeting his Maker.
