When during a session of the nationally popular BBC Television’s University Challenge series, the programme’s host, top television presenter Jeremy Paxman, asked,

‘Which statesman during the 1920s found he was in debt because he liked to buy women’s pink silk pantaloons?’ 

The normally knowledgeable students were stumped for an answer.  There was considerable consternation when Paxman revealed that the culprit was none other than Winston Churchill.

Keith Moss, a member of the International Churchill Society, gasped at any suggestion that his idol could have been a fetishist.’ 

Historian Kenneth Rose said that it might have been a reference to Churchill investing in firms that made women’s clothing, in which case the question was perhaps indelicate. 

Both pundits might have been better informed by referring to the book, Winston Churchill, as I Knew Him, authored by Violet Bonham Carter. 

In her biography, she concedes that ‘Churchill’s pale pink underclothes were made in very finely woven silk.’   She added that he spent something like £80 on them.

Few, even today, would spend such a sum of money on women’s underwear. 

The value of £80 in the 1920s would be approximately £4,569.42 today based on inflation calculations. The British pound has lost about 98% of its value since 1920, with an average inflation rate of 3.93% per yearIn the 1930s, such a sum was the equivalent of about sixteen weeks of a working man’s hard life. 

Questioned by Miss Bonham Carter, Winnie Churchill had replied that the ‘garments were essential to my well-being. 

‘The delicate skin on one small part of my anatomy demanded the finest covering.’  Such then is the ‘man’ so many gave their lives for, whose decisions and calamities brought unimaginable misery and death to untold millions.  TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

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