Forgotten Friday – Churchill’s Cigar
Many photographs of Churchill depict him with a cigar either in his mouth or his hand. There is even one of him at the control of the aircraft that flew him home from Washington in January 1942, with a large cigar jutting out into the cockpit
In November 1985, just 10 days before his 21st birthday, Churchill – who had graduated from Sandhurst at the end of the previous year and was now a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars -accompanied his friend Reginald Barnes to Cuba, where Spanish forces were attempting to crush a rebellion by the islanders. Before leaving he persuaded the Daily Graphic to publish his reports on the insurrection. He also went to see Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, Commander-in-chief of the British Army, who gave him clearance to see the Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), and asked him to gather as much information as he could on a number of military matters.
After his excursion, Churchill wrote back to his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill ‘I Shall bring back a great many Havana cigars, some of which can be laid down in the cellars of 35 Great Cumberland Place’ – his mother’s new London home.
Churchill spent about a month in Cuba, where he filed five despatches for the Faily Graphic, saw fighting and gave sympathy for the rebel cause. On the soldierly qualities of the Spanish Troops, he told the New York World: ‘ During one attack, he was moving with General Valdez, who, as he later wrote to his mother, ‘drew a great deal of fire on to us I heard enough bullets whistle and hum to satisfy me for some time to come.’
The other lifelong habit he acquired in Cuba was smoking cigars: Cubans. He was as good as his word to his mother and brought a large stock back with him. For the rest of his life, he smoked between six and ten a day he wore a cigar cutter on his watch chain, but never used it, preferring to pierce the end with a match. Churchill was also careless with the ash, and his clothes and carpets had numerous burn marks on them!
