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How Much Did Winston Churchill Actually Drink?
The British wartime PM’s very expensive habit
I may be drunk, madam, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly” is a witty comeback commonly attributed to Winston Churchill. Like many of the quotes linked to him, he may have never actually said it. There is even a term for the way that pithy quotations end up attributed to Britain’s wartime Prime Minister: ‘Churchill creep’.
Ironically, despite his well-known fondness for whisky, Churchill was rarely the worse for drink. As Roy Jenkins wrote in his Churchill biography, he was “a sipper not a guzzler” and “did not drink as much as he was commonly thought to do”. His reputation for being a hard drinker was, in part, cultivated by himself to boost his tough public image.
Still, there is no doubt that Churchill drank a lot, even by the standards of the nineteenth-century British upper class from which he came. As Jenkins wrote, he remained a “fairly heavy and consistent imbiber”. By modern standards, his alcohol consumption was eyebrow-raising. Sailing to South Africa as a young war correspondent in 1899, he took with him sixty bottles of alcohol, including champagne, wine and scotch whisky. This habit continued into middle age and throughout his two premierships.