We Shall Drink Them On the Beaches

BY Kane Daniel

Our collective psyche holds legendary drinkers like Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway in wary regard despite the abuse they inflicted on themselves and those closest to them. We brush over the ugliness that so often characterises alcoholism, or at the very least we romanticise it. As the old saw tells us, history is written by the victors. And these people are victors because they demonstrate an individual’s ability to live life while being three sheets to the wind. Theirs is a life free of the downtrodden misery suffered by most who answer Bacchus’s call. Instead it is full of achievements that forever amended the course of our collective history. They show us what it is to live life without giving a fuck.

And if there were two men who lived life without giving a fuck, believe me, they were Churchill and Hemingway. They both stand above all others, albeit on slightly unsteady feet, as historic figures, leaders in their respective fields and consummate drinkers. Their public lives were tied to their private drinking in a sort of boozy symbiosis. These were men who, despite a multitude of differences, drank constantly and in truly heroic amounts.

Appropriately enough, the cocktails for which Churchill and Hemingway are famous provide the best prism through which we can analyse these men’s lives and thus answer a question that may not be strictly necessary to ask. The question is, of course, who was the more legendary drinker – Churchill or Hemingway?

First, Churchill. A man whose drinking was so profligate that a champagne house (Pol Roger, for those interested) not only created a prestige cuvee named after him but also made the bottle a standard imperial pint rather than the usual 700ml because he felt the standard bottle size was too much to drink before breakfast.

Champagne aside, the drink that best represents Churchill is the martini. In semiotic terms, what is the martini? What does it represent? Its very strength indicates that the person who habitually drinks it is going to be somewhat of a lush. Yet alongside this is how storied the martini is, and how much it has been romanticised. The idea that it is the zenith of cocktails, the essence of what they stand for, is essentially a cultured idea. Thus we have the perfect metaphor for Churchill’s drinking: desperation clothed in refinement. Here I can’t resist adding my favourite Churchill witticism. When Liverpool socialist MP Bessie Braddock confronted him at a dinner party by for being too drunk, he devastatingly replied, “And you, Madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.”

Now on to Papa. The drink that best encapsulates him would no doubt be the eponymous Hemingway daiquiri. But to read about it, you’ll have to follow in the great man’s footsteps.

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