Winston and the Churchill

On who and what we celebrate

There is a size of cigar that I enjoy but feeling a twinge of guilt for enjoying. It’s a large cigar, it’s industry standard size being 7x47, but with no official rules governing this it can sometimes go up to 7-½ inches and ring gauges vary but usually no more than 50. But the size isn’t the reason for my guilt. It’s the name given to this size: Churchill. 

We’re referring here, of course, to Sir Winston, Prime Minister of the U.K. from 1940 to 1945 (and again from 1951 to 1955), among other roles in his long career. He is one of the most celebrated men in history, remembered for his leadership during World War II. He also received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 in recognition of his “mastery of historical and biographical description.” 

There are more official honors I could list, but they’re not so relevant to what we’re discussing here. What is relevant: Churchill is also known for his prodigious drinking and cigar smoking. During his working hours, starting 9:30am, he would have around eight scotch and sodas, using his favored Johnnie Walker red label, though these were reportedly weak, with just a touch of scotch covering the bottom of his tumbler. At lunch, he would consume his favorite drink, champagne, his favorite brand being Pol Roger. He would have a bottle of champagne with lunch, though the bottle was probably a pint size, not the 750 ml most of us are accustomed to buying. After lunch was a glass cognac, followed by a nap, then back to work with the scotch and sodas. Before dinner, he would have a glass of port, then another pint of champagne with dinner, then more cognac as a nightcap. It’s said that Churchill never appeared in public drunk, and in fact hated drunkenness. I guess.

Additionally, he spent his day smoking his beloved cigars, usually around eight of those large ones I described above. He preferred Romeo y Julietas, a Cuban brand (if you smoked cigars anywhere in the world at that time, you probably smoked Cubans) that still exists today, though in the U.S. we don’t get the Cuban versions, due to the embargo. For us, we get the name Romeo y Julieta, but cigars with leaves from other cigar-producing countries, under the ownership of Altadis USA. 

But it’s clear why, with such a healthy appetite for drinking and smoking along with his status as global icon, Churchill remains a celebrated figure in the world of spirits and cigars. Not only does he have a specific size of cigar named in his honor, Pol Roger produces a champagne bearing his name, while the makers of the ultra-premium Davidoff cigars have a line named after him. 

He’s not the only one: Arturo Fuente has cigars named for Ernest Hemingway, and there’s a much smaller brand that pays homage to Mark Twain. But Churchill is the one you can’t escape, the one with size that is recognized industry-wide and coveted by smokers who want to luxuriate in the same cigar for nearly two hours (if it’s a good one—your cheaper Churchills that burn faster are going to last maybe half that time). Sometimes, that’s what I want. What I wish is that I didn’t have to be reminded of a racist and imperialist when I want one. 

And Churchill was undeniably, even proudly, both of those things. It’s an unimpeachable good that the Nazis were defeated in World War II, and whatever role Churchill played in that is to be commended, though it was mainly the Russians who were able to secure victory in the European theater, while the U.S. use of the atomic bomb (an unnecessary, horrific, needlessly damaging act in my book) ended things in the Pacific. I suppose we can clap for Churchill on that front. But it’s wrong to cast him as some defender of democracy when he was simultaneously working to ensure the continuance of the British empire, most notably by denying independence to India, then contributing to the fracture of that state along religious lines. Churchill contributed more harm than good to the modern world throughout his career in government, though that’s probably not easily quantifiable depending on who you ask. The problem is always who has been asked. 

There is no need to celebrate him. There is a need to study him, study the times he lived through, the impact he had, the effects his actions had on the world. That is the point of history. But to put his name on things is to act as if his is a legacy worthy of our reverence, when any interrogation of said legacy should leave any person of moral character bewildered and horrified. 

That’s my own judgment, but it does speak to this larger question of who is celebrated, honored, memorialized, and why. And what does it say about the people doing the memorializing? The cigar industry has no shortage of historical figures who were fans of their product—why Churchill? Before they were named after him, the size currently bearing his name were referred to as Clemenceaus by Romeo y Julieta, after Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917-1920, during World War I. He was a French radical in the late 1800s, though he broke with the party later, steered France through World War I, and signed into the law the eight hour work day. Not a terrible legacy, though I’m sure someone with more knowledge of him could poke holes in my thin representation of it here. The point is less that Clemenceau was honorable and more that there are others who could, and have been, celebrated by the makers of cigars. Churchill is a choice, one that marks a specific identity for the cigar smoker. Karl Marx smoked cigars while he worked, but that isn’t a name on any current brand list (granted, it would be weird to name a commercial product after Marx… I say this as someone that once owned a Che Guevara t-shirt). 

What cigar smokers and the cigar industry are choosing to align themselves with is a particular kind of power—that derived from violence, empire, perceived manliness, and official statesmanship. Cigars are seen as the province of the boss, both actual and in the colloquial sense. They are a symbol of status, particularly of dominant, patriarchal, affluent status. And the cigar industry courts this image. It’s not accidental that, even excluding Churchill, the names most recognized on cigar bands are those of widely celebrated white men, even as cigars were introduced to Europeans by the indigenous peoples of modern day Cuba. Tobacco is a plant indigenous to the Americas and was smoked for centuries before Columbus and other European “explorers” came to these shores and took word of it back to Europe. And while it was then mostly consumed by men, it was a communal experience, not a commercial one. 

The only brand I’ve come across that even remotely nods to this history is the boutique brand Serino, which has a cigar line named Taino, after the indigenous people of Cuba. Yet, Churchill is everywhere. 

It is a choice. It is a choice that does not have to be. Imagine some twenty years from now if a cigar maker decided they would release a brand called “Cosby” because of Bill Cosby’s affinity for cigars. They would justify it by pointing to his contributions to the world of comedy and his close association with cigar smoking. There may be outrage, but cigars are such a niche industry, and the main consumers of them are so adamantly apolitical, it would likely fly by without much interference. And generations later, people would smoke their Cosbys without thought as to what pain he wrought. 

Who we celebrate is a choice. It is completely within our control. And it says so much about where our values lie.