In the winter of 1941, per Mental Floss, he was in the United States on official business. As the new year rolled around, business turned to pleasure and he arrived in Florida’s much-ballyhooed Palm Beach. Here, too, he felt the irresistible urge to take a swim in the ocean but apparently felt no such urge to don any swimwear before stripping off and doing just that.

Needless to say, the British Prime Minister bobbing around in the sea completely naked isn’t the sort of thing fellow beachgoers would happen to see every day, but Churchill was supremely unconcerned about such trivial matters. According to Mental Floss, he responded to his bodyguard’s concerns with his trademark wit. If people were that desperate to catch a glimpse of him, he reportedly said, “it is their own fault what they see.”

He was not so flippant, however, when a curious shark appeared. The Prime Minister was in no danger, he later wrote in his memoirs (per Life magazine), as he was told that it was merely a species of “ground shark.” Nonetheless, he reasoned later, it is no better “to be eaten by a ground shark as by any other,” and he decided against venturing very deep into the water after that.