“Rose-lipt Maid­ens, Light­foot Lads” 

con­tin­ued from part 1…

“Stop that!” Seat­ed beside him at his first appear­ance before the Churchill Society—the sec­ond Churchill Tour on 17 Sep­tem­ber 1985—I had caught Mar­tin Gilbert rif­fling through a brief­case crammed with sheets of yel­low foolscap, toss­ing some out as the min­utes ticked by before his lec­ture, “Churchill’s Lon­don: Spin­ning Top of Memories.”

It was the first time I would hear a Gilbert speech, and here he was, culling it already. “This is my ‘Speech Form,’” he explained, refer­ring to the term Churchill used for his speak­ing notes. Unlike Churchill, whose typed speech notes includ­ed every word, the lines picked out like vers­es of the Psalms, Martin’s sheets each con­tained only a few hand­writ­ten words. When he began, he would pull one out, glance at the line, toss it aside and ad-lib flaw­less­ly for five or ten min­utes. Then he’d pull out anoth­er and the process was repeat­ed. Before he start­ed, he would self-edit him­self by omit­ting sheets he thought might run too long.

“A bore is some­body who tells every­thing,” my best edi­tor told me. But here at this time, at the Wal­dorf Hotel in Lon­don, we want­ed Mar­tin to leave noth­ing out. We were Churchillians. We would hang on every word. But Mar­tin kept culling, sym­pa­thet­ic to his audi­ence, deter­mined to fit his talk into what he thought was the right amount of time.

A Gilbert lec­ture, wrote Matthew Gould, British Ambas­sador to Israel, was a mix  of “humil­i­ty with humour and extra­or­di­nary com­mand of detail, with­out grand flour­ish­es or great cadences, keep­ing his audi­ences rapt in attention….an under­stat­ed and dif­fi­dent style which often left me feel­ing he was on the verge of run­ning dry, only to answer every ques­tion with a great depth of knowl­edge and understanding.”

His writ­ten work is much the same. Crit­ics would com­plain that he was too method­i­cal, too “stuck” on chronol­o­gy. But for Mar­tin, as Andrew Roberts observed, chronol­o­gy was the key. It was his job in the “Great Work” to place the read­er on Churchill’s shoul­der, per­son­al­ly observ­ing the march of events—to explain what hap­pened when, and what stemmed from it.

Let oth­ers make broad pro­nounce­ments about whether Churchill was wise or fool­ish; Mar­tin Gilbert made his views plain from his selec­tion of mate­r­i­al. And few ever chal­lenged the valid­i­ty of that selec­tion. The only times I saw him dis­grun­tled were when lat­er writ­ers treat­ed as a rev­e­la­tion some fact or anec­dote he’d pub­lished decades before.

I mar­veled at Martin’s spon­tane­ity. His pub­lic voice was the same as his pri­vate one: con­ver­sa­tion­al with vast recall, and a stu­dious dis­re­gard for “revi­sion­ist” non­sense. He knew the sto­ry so well, you see. He knew it hav­ing sift­ed through more papers, doc­u­ments, inter­views and tran­scripts than any­one else on the plan­et. His words sim­ply flowed, fact upon fact, with irrefutable log­ic. Always he would por­tray the same Churchill, a char­ac­ter with human faults and frail­ties, dri­ven by a love of lib­er­ty and his fel­low man. “I nev­er felt that he was going to spring an unpleas­ant sur­prise on me,” Max Hast­ings quot­ed Mar­tin as say­ing. “I might find that he was adopt­ing views with which I dis­agreed. But I always knew that there would be noth­ing to cause me to think: ‘How shock­ing, how appalling.’”

Asked once to describe Churchill in a sin­gle sen­tence, Mar­tin said noth­ing about blood, toil, tears and sweat: Churchill, he said, “was a great human­i­tar­i­an who was him­self dis­tressed that the acci­dents of his­to­ry gave him his great­est pow­er at a time when every­thing had to be focused on defend­ing the coun­try from destruc­tion, rather than achiev­ing his goals of a fair­er soci­ety.” I think this illu­mi­nates Martin’s Churchillian opti­mism that some­how, in the end, “all will come right.”

Many authors, like Dou­glas Rus­sell, remem­bered how hon­ored they were by a Gilbert fore­word to or approval of their own books. In my own book of quo­ta­tions, Churchill in His Own Words, he not only wrote the intro­duc­tion, but coined the best pro­mo­tion line a pub­lish­er could hope to have: “unput­down­able.” I was both embar­rassed and hon­ored by his praise.

His gen­eros­i­ty was unend­ing. A devout Jew, he nev­er failed to wish his Gen­tile friends a Hap­py Easter—even those who were not par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious. With me at a Boston book­shop he pulled book after book of his off the shelves, paid for them, and inscribed them on the spot. I won­dered how many authors could vis­it a shop and find four of his books on the racks (or what the shop own­er thought of this stranger scrib­bling in his stock!)

A con­stant friend, Mar­tin was always been there for us, answer­ing com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions, pro­duc­ing schol­ar­ly arti­cles, trav­el­ing to lec­ture at con­fer­ences as dis­tant as Alas­ka, guid­ing tour par­ties from Lon­don to Suf­folk, where he showed up at Stour, Ran­dolph Churchill’s old home, shed­ding tears of memory.

His phe­nom­e­nal recall rarely missed a ref­er­ence. When I offered him the toast, “Rose-lipt maid­ens, light­foot lads,” Mar­tin exclaimed: “Hous­man! From Out of Africa” (Syd­ney Pollack’s great film with Streep and Red­ford, based on Isak Dine­son’s book).

Mar­tin always down­played and offered no details of his work for suc­ces­sive prime min­is­ters from Mar­garet Thatch­er to Gor­don Brown, but he did once share an amus­ing anec­dote. In the Mid­dle East to meet with the Pales­tin­ian leader Yass­er Arafat, Prime Min­is­ter John Major intro­duced Mar­tin as “my guru.” Con­ster­na­tion and a buzz of chat­ter arose in the Arab del­e­ga­tion. It final­ly emerged that they weren’t sure what a guru was! Yet the Prime Min­is­ter had exact­ly described Martin’s role.

Last autumn I had the hon­or to pro­duce a festschrift issue of Finest Hour in Martin’s hon­or, where twen­ty writ­ers and friends spoke of his devo­tion to his­to­ry, his gen­eros­i­ty and friend­ship. His wife Esther was one of the con­trib­u­tors, and able to read each piece to him. She says he sig­ni­fied that he under­stood. I am so glad we were in time.

The time you won your town the race 

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheer­ing by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all run­ners come,

Shoul­der-high we bring you home,

And set you at your thresh­old down,

Towns­man of a stiller town.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lin­tel up

The still-defend­ed challenge-cup.

—A.E. Hous­man, A Shrop­shire Lad

_____

First pub­lished in Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014