Ah, it’s 61 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).
![A photo of the Grade II listed country house, Birch Grove, in 1962. Pevsner described it as “an unhappy union between Queen Anne and a mansard [roof] that weighs the house down”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*nCJH8SvTRjcj__ve3Lp19w.png)
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 that one — there was another who was Downing Street Press Secretary 1957–1963), 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:
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 January 1963, de Gaulle famously said ‘non’ to our joining, and 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 with responsibility for negotiating the UK’s entry to the Common Market. 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
In the words of Ed Ruscha:
If you’ve enjoyed any of this, you may also like the story of de Gaulle and Churchill’s funeral…
