I have been searching to no avail for a recording (VHS or DVD) of a one-man stage performance of Churchill by Robert Hardy in 1986 for the Public Broadcasting Network. PBS has no records older than five years. Can you help? —R.S.
The Robert Hardy performance you are looking for is “Churchill” in the David Susskind “Leaders” series, a 90-minute one-man show produced by WNET and broadcast by PBS in 1986. It was full of inaccuracies—Hardy is a superb Churchill, but his “Wilderness Years” performance, scripted by Sir Martin Gilbert, was far more accurate.
The producers sent me a VCR at the time, and videotapes were probably available once from PBS. To find one, try searching Google or eBay for “susskind churchill” or similar word combinations. Here is my review from Finest Hour 52, Summer 1986 (not on the Churchill Centre website):
It’s Not Winston, but It’s Human
Sir John Gielgud, who ought to know better, leads it off, sending me scrambling for a notepad: “Just after the end of World War II, Churchill was voted out of office.” (Wrong: the war was still on.) “He found himself without any immediate means.” (Wrong: the advances on his war memoirs were enormous, and in August 1946 a group of generous friends relieved him of the burden of Chartwell by buying it for the National Trust, providing that he and his wife could live out their lives there).
“And so he embarked on a lecture tour of America,” Gielgud continues. “This is what you might have seen if you were seated in the audience in Los Angeles, Chicago or Kansas City.” (Wrong and wrong again. Churchill’s final American lecture tour was in 1932. In 1946 he gave the Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, addressed the Virginia Assembly, made three other short appearances and went home. Seated in an audience in Los Angeles or Chicago or Kansas City, you’d have been more likely to have seen the McGuire Sisters.)
The first time I watched this performance I almost got up and left. By round three the edges had blurred and the rough spots had smoothed, and I began enjoying it. Admittedly I am too close to my subject. And all those involved in “Churchill” are such nice people that I hesitate to complain. As Lady Soames has often reminded us, however, serious people have a responsibility “to keep the memory green and the record accurate.”
The problem with “Churchill” is twofold: (1) It plants an inaccurate image of WSC in the mind of the average viewer. (2) It is laced with errors, the correction of which would have lost none of the drama and warm humanity which are its most admirable features.
Churchill never “delivered a series of informal talks across America” in 1946, as the producers state. Why say he did? Why not admit, as script writer James Humes said, that this is a composite picture, drawn from WSC’s writings?
Churchill made it a rule, when abroad, never to criticise his political opponents at home. Why then cast him in an ill-suited role as stand-up comic, stumping America to deliver one-liners about “sheep in sheep’s clothing” (an unproven remark about Attlee)?
Robert Hardy deserves full marks for holding his audience, which responds with hearty laughter. (Both he and Humes had wanted only 60 minutes, but the sponsors insisted on 90. One of the problems of public television is that it must rely on sponsors, who have no business determining program lengths.)
Hardy has Churchill’s mannerisms down perfectly and of all Churchill portrayals, his is the most convincing. But the first reaction of anyone moderately steeped in facts is that this Churchill is a vulgar caricature, exercising—in 1946 of all years—an inordinate degree of levity. Is the truth so boring that it cannot prevail?
Churchill would not have joked about his being seen as dunce and wastrel by his father. He would never have claimed that Victorian Britain “ruled all India,” which it never did; or called his Army assignment there “a life sentence…east of nowhere.” He would not have said that the Lloyd George Coalition lost the 1922 election because of his work over the Middle East and Ireland. (“In spite of” would be more accurate.) He would not have called Jock Colville “Jack,” or made the unattributed remark about Montgomery (“in victory insufferable”). He would not have pronounced the scene of his 1915 political downfall as “Gall-i-po’-li.” Most particularly, he would not have said he resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer because of the “Tory appeasers”; such a thing never happened. Churchill resigned as Chancellor, before not after the Depression, because the Conservatives lost the Spring 1929 election—long before Hitler came to power and appeasement became a policy.
I will not bore you with my two pages of inaccuracies, but here are some of the more crucial: At Malakand, Winston says, “the whole company was ambushed—except me.” In the Sudan, he says he wrote for the Morning Telegraph (a weird merger of Morning Post and Daily Telegraph)—about dervishes nicknamed “whirling” because of the way they twirled their sabres. In Parliament he says, “I made my oath to Queen Victoria and took my seat in October 1900.” (He made his oath to King Edward VII and took his seat on 14 February 1901.) He says he proposed to Clementine “in a gazebo” and that he heard the news broadcast about Pearl Harbor in Downing Street. (It was the Temple of Diana and Chequers, respectively.) His famous aside, “Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on,” was delivered in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street, not in a speech to the House of Commons. After Pearl Harbor he says he sailed for New York—what he did was sail to the Chesapeake, and fly into Washington from Hampton Roads. Why couldn’t all this have been looked up?
Some of Churchill’s words are actually from other people: “Always give the train a sporting chance to get away” was said by Clementine Churchill. “That dear and excellent woman” (Mrs. Everest) was from a line by Gibbon, whom WSC quoted. “When all save Englishmen despaired of England’s life” was said at Churchill’s honorary U.S. citizenship ceremony in 1963 by President Kennedy. Churchill’s private secretary said of the alleged crack about the only traditions of the Royal Navy (“rum, sodomy and flogging”) that WSC liked it, butdenied saying it. The phrase actually dates back two centuries.
Many of the quotes that are Churchill’s are misplaced. “Shot at without result” was said about Cuba, not Malakand. “Boneless wonder” (singular) was a blast at Ramsay MacDonald, not the Tory appeasers. Other quotes are vaguely familiar but hopelessly muddled: “They asked what my program would be—I told them Victory”… “Give us your faith and your trust” (for “trust” read “blessing”). And some are far wide of the mark: “a bull who carries his own china shop with him,” if said at all, was said about Dulles in the 1950s, not the State Department in the 1940s. When King George VI summoned Churchill on 10 May 1940 he said, “I want to ask you to form a Government,” not “take over the Government”—there is a difference.
On the merits the script is disappointing. But with all its flaws and inaccuracies, the performance brings out the greatest characteristic of Winston Churchill: that essential humanity which made him so different from other world leaders past and present. James Humes noted another quality: “What is important for us to know today is that Churchill told his audiences not what they wanted to hear but what he wanted them to hear.” And Sir John Gielgud, making up for his introduction, closes the show with words to remember: “Churchill was as ordinary as any of us—and as extraordinary as any of us can hope to be.”
