Odd this day

Ah, it’s 62 years to the day since Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary that Charles de Gaulle’s blood was being stored in his fridge.

It wasn’t his main fridge in the house, because — according to Peter Hennessy’s Winds of Change — that one

was ‘full of haddock and all sorts of things’ for the coming lunches and dinners. So another fridge was found and plonked in the coach house, preserving the general’s plasma, standing there, as Macmillan put it, “like an altar to Mithras”

de Gaulle was making an official visit to the UK, and had specifically asked that he stay at the then Prime Minister’s family home, Birch Grove, so the two men could talk as “vieux copains” (old friends).

The blood plasma was needed in case of an assassination attempt — and de Gaulle’s fear of such an eventuality was proved founded when Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry tried to do him in the following August (inspiring The Day of the Jackal).

The story of the special fridge turns up in a few books, including Peter Mangold’s nicely titled The Almost Impossible Ally, which says the French didn’t only upset the cook:

Dorothy Macmillan was also distressed to find that Yvonne de Gaulle was

a very difficult woman to entertain … Won’t go to the Hunt … nor even (nearing desperation now) the Pavilion at Brighton.

That’s according to Harold Evans (not the newspaper editor — there was another who was Downing Street Press Secretary 1957–63), who also described his own impressions of de Gaulle in his diary:

Harold Macmillan’s entry for this day in 1961 goes on to say that “De Gaulle now hears nothing and listens to nothing”, and:

The tragedy of it all is that we agree with de G on almost everything. We like the political Europe (union de patries or union d’Etats) that de G likes. We are anti-federalists; so is he. We are pragmatists in our economic planning; so is he. We fear a German revival and have no desire to see a reunited Germany. These are de G’s thoughts too. We agree; but his pride, his inherited hatred of England, (since Joan of Arc) his bitter memories of the last war; above all, his intense ‘vanity’ for France she must dominate make him half welcome, half repel us, with a strange ‘love-hate’ complex. Sometimes, when I am with him, I feel I have overcome it. But he goes back to his distrust and dislike, like a dog to his vomit. I still feel that he has not absolutely decided about our admission to the Economic Community. I am inclined to think he will be more likely to yield to pressure than persuasion.

Because the whole visit was, of course, about trying to get Britain into that new-fangled thing, The Common Market, but it was all in vain. In 1963, de Gaulle famously said ‘non’ to our joining, and then did it again in 1967.

Mind you, he did also once say that Britain had a “deep-seated hostility” to European integration, so maybe he had a point. Still, one of the best descriptions of him comes from Edward Heath, then Lord Privy Seal. In his 1998 memoir (with the magnificently pompous and humourless — and therefore very on brand — title The Course of My Life), Heath said de Gaulle

was a man who was never rude by mistake

…and if you’ve enjoyed any of that, you may also like the story of de Gaulle at Churchill’s funeral :

Odd this day