Andrew Roberts Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts: Churchill, 150 Years On

Richard M. Langworth — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 14:00:35 +0000

Podcast: Secrets of Statecraft, Hoover Institution

I was honored to be invited to join Lord Roberts, author of Walking with Destiny at Secrets of Statecraft. It was fun to chat with the author of the foremost one-volume life of Churchill, about where Sir Winston stands on his 150th birthday. We mutually concluded that he stands as tall as ever.

“No, I don’t think it was Mr. Churchill. It’s been like that quite a long time.” (Punch, 14 August 1940, by kind permission of Gary Stiles and Topfoto)

Mistakes real and imagined

Andrew Roberts: “It’s sort of classic, isn’t it, that the more you look into Churchill’s actual actions, the less the detractors really have to say? They’ve a few lines that they can come out with, especially obviously, on social media. But when you actually dig into the truth, there’s less and less behind it. Would you say that’s fair, historically?”

Richard Langworth: “Yes, I think so. Of course there are many cases where he made mistakes, serious ones. They never seem to come up. Instead we always get these long trails of red herrings.”

AR: “Let’s go into some of them.”

And we did: all criticisms are here: the real, the imagined, the preposterous. We covered the gamut, from women’s suffrage to the Bengal Famine.

Churchill today

AR: “Now tell me why you think that 150 years after his birth, we should still be interested in Churchill, what he has to teach us today.”

RL: “That’s a tall order, Andrew.”

AR: “Sorry, old boy, that’s why you’re on.”

RL: “First, I like what you said at the end of the Netflix documentary. Who else could still make people laugh sixty years after his death? I mean, we will say that about Groucho Marx. But a politician? Can you think of another one?

“Beyond that, we need to remember him because he spoke everlasting truths about the relations between peoples, about governance, about the value of liberty. Those are as relevant as ever today.

“I was alive and sentient in 1959, which was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. And I don’t remember anything like as much attention paid to him as we do to Churchill today. Of course, we live in a different era, an age of 24/7 saturation media. But he does seem to be permanently on everyone’s mind.

“As to what appeals about him: Sir John Gielgud said ‘Churchill was as ordinary as any of us and as extraordinary as any of us can hope to be.’

“But of all answers to that question, I always come back to Sir Martin Gilbert‘s. He was asked to explain Churchill in just one sentence. Sir Martin didn’t hesitate: ‘He 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.’”

“No Cutlet Uncooked: Andrew Roberts’s Superb Churchill Biography,” 2018.

“Reviewing Netflix’s Churchill at War: The Things We Do For England,” 2024.

“Churchill at 150: ‘A Certain Splendid Memory,’” 2024.

“Get Ready for Churchill’s Anti-Sesquicentennial,” 2024.

“Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare,” 2020.

Churchill’s Legacy Today: Undented in the Digital Age

Richard M. Langworth — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 17:56:31 +0000

“This truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.” —Winston S. Churchill, House of Commons, 17 May 1916

Q: His legacy today?

Peter Baker of The New York Times recently reviewed a new book which delivers some sharp arrows toward Winston Churchill and his legacy. Baker writes that the text labels Churchill “not just a racist but a hypocrite, a dissembler, a narcissist, an opportunist, an imperialist, a drunk, a strategic bungler, a tax dodger, a neglectful father, a credit-hogging author, a terrible judge of character and, most of all, a masterful myth-maker.” [They forgot white supremacist and Cossack-killer—see comment below. RML]

In addition, during a protest over the killing of George Floyd last year, demonstrators in London targeted the iconic statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. Underneath his name someone had spray-painted the words “was a racist.”

This seems to be an ongoing theme: to demolish a great figure in history looking through a 21st century progressive lens. Despite this harsh treatment, does Churchill’s legacy today remain intact? —B.L., via email

A: Hardly dented

Thanks for your message. I think there is scarcely a dent in Churchill’s legacy today: First because most of the charges are false. Second because they ignore what really matters. Only a small fraction of people believe this stuff. For example, a 2020 Facebook page simply entitled “Winston Churchill” acquired over 20,000 followers in nine months, and almost all the posts are supportive.

I thought Mr. Baker’s review in The New York Times was rather good. Though not terribly learned, it perceptively grasps the essential point:

None of our historical idols were as unvarnished as the memorials we build to them. The question is: What are they being honored for? Which contributions to history do we celebrate?…. Churchill has been venerated despite his manifest flaws, not because of them. Statues in Parliament Square and elsewhere are meant to remind us of his finest hour, not his darkest ones.

A jail cell for that warmongering “Naval Person” was Dr. Goebbels’ prescription for the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1940. (Lustige Blätter [Funny Papers], Berlin, January 1940.)

In other words, the statues do not honor the Churchill of the Dardanelles, the Black and Tans, the Gold Standard, the India Bill or the Abdication. (See “Fatal Flaws: Churchill Wasn’t Perfect.”) They honor something more important.

Another reviewer, Richard Aldous in the Wall Street Journal, is more comprehensive than Baker. (Transcript available.)

But to deal with this barrage of distortion really takes a specialist, like Andrew Roberts, for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. (The accompanying cartoon, incidentally, was first published by the Third Reich. It is amusing that the Cancel Culture now views Churchill more or less as the Nazis did.)

Cases for the defense

“There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable, and that which is highly illuminating.” —William F. Buckley, Jr.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has been making “the case for the defense” against the fanciful deconstruction of Winston Churchill for years. For over fifty refutations of common charges by highly qualified scholars, explore our “Truths and Heresies” department: https://bit.ly/30xfjWq

Specifically you may find these articles of interest:

“Cambridge: The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill: A Review”

“Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s ‘Racist’ Epithets”

“Stop this Trashing of Our Monuments—and Our Past“

Churchill: Andrew Roberts for the Defense (Daily Telegraph)

Richard M. Langworth — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 18:56:51 +0000

Thanks, Andrew Roberts

The London Daily Telegraph is sponsoring a series of podcasts featuring conversations with historians about attacks on national heroes. On September 1st, Steve Edginton engaged with Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts on the Woke Movement’s number one bogeyman: Winston Spencer Churchill….

“To many,” writes the Telegraph,

Winston Churchill is the man who saved not only Britain but the world from Nazi tyranny. But to some, Churchill represents the evils of the British Empire: racism, colonization and violence. The wartime prime minister’s statue in Parliament Square was tarred with the words “racist” after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. So, hero or villain?

I appreciate Andrew Roberts’ very kind mention (minute 22) of my book, Churchill by Himself, a cornucopia of 4000 notable Churchill quotations. It also includes close to 200 “Red Herrings,” which WSC never said: listed here and frequently updated. So, full disclosure: I am highly biased. I consider Andrew Roberts one of the good guys.

Honesty as best policy

Mr. Edginton has done his homework, and confronts Roberts with a cornucopia of charges. As in his Churchill biography, Walking with Destiny, Andrew honestly acknowledges where Churchill went wrong. (Yes, of course, in a political life from the cavalry charge at Omdurman to space travel, he went wrong—sometimes embarrassingly wrong.)

So what about the Black and Tans in Ireland? Edginton asks our historian. Are the charges true? Andrew Roberts answers in one word: “yes.” Churchill did not create the paramilitary constabulary which wrecked violence in Ireland in 1920-21. But he defended them long after their activities were indefensible. For more on the subject scroll to “Ireland and the Jews” in “Defcon 1: The Battle for Churchill’s Memory.”

A shade of difference

I differ with Andrew Roberts over Churchill’s view of the women’s vote. We agree that in the 19th century, young Winston was adamantly, if privately, against it. (So too, was his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill. Many women in those days fancied politics a vulgar game for rowdy men and drunks. Not until government began to grow and affect their own daily lives did they decide they needed to take a hand.)

At any rate, we slightly differ on Churchill’s 20th century views. A.R. says he followed the Liberal Party’s general line against suffrage. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith was definitely against it. I’ve never found a Churchill a statement opposing votes for women in the 20th century. True, he equivocated, and on occasion seemed to hold back in the face of clamor. But his wife Clementine was a major influence on his attitude. His daughter Mary always said, “Papa grew in favour of votes for women when he realized how many women would vote for him.” (In the 1945 election that turned him out, it was the male vote that went against him; women voters were evenly divided.)

Don’t miss this video

As a capsule defense of Churchill from libel and slander, this 30 minutes is well worth viewing. Mr. Edginton is sharp and precise, and ably represents that cases made against the man. Dr. Roberts is at his best, in a stalwart defense, giving way only when the facts show that Churchill had something wrong.

Churchill and Burke: “Spontaneous Humour, Unparaded Erudition”

Richard M. Langworth — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 17:23:58 +0000

1. Roberts on Burke

Reprised below are my small contributions on Churchill and the great Irish statesman and thinker Edmund Burke (1729-1797). It was eclipsed in 2019 in a brilliant speech by Andrew Roberts which the Hillsdale College Churchill Project offers here. Dr. Roberts spoke after receiving The New Criterion 7th Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. He also discusses Churchill on Burke in a video interview with James Panero.

2. Churchill on Burke

A reader writes:

I’d like to congratulate you on Churchill by Himself, but I could not find any Churchill comments on Edmund Burke in the index. I thought Burke deserved a mention, but it’s your book, so it’s your call (and may I add, it has been one of the best treasures that has ever landed on my lap!) —V.T., England

Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately the index is the worst feature of the book, and completely missed Burke. The 2016 Rosetta ebook, Churchill in His Own Words, is of course searchable. Both it and the 2012 international edition also contain a useful phrase index. Click these links or see the revolving books to the right >>>>.

Despite the index’s silence, there are five Churchill quotes on Burke, and a sixth by an observer….

1897: “What shadows we are…”

Looking at these shapeless forms, confined in a regulation blanket, the pride of race, the pomp of empire, the glory of war appeared but the faint and unsubstantial fabric of a dream; and I could not help realising with Burke: “What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue.”

Churchill was writing here of British dead in the campaign in the Northwest Frontier of India. (See The Story of the Malakand Field Force.) He nonetheless admired valiant enemies, like the Dervishes in The River War: “…their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.”

1939: “Importunate chink” of grasshoppers

[Burke said:] “Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”

Churchill was quoting Burke to Colin Thornton-Kemsley, chairman of the Chigwell Conservative Association, who wanted to dismiss WSC for his anti-Chamberlain rhetoric. When Churchill became prime minister, Thornton-Kemsley sent him his apologies. “I want to say only this,” he wrote. “You warned us repeatedly about the German danger and you were right: a grasshopper under a fern is not proud now that he made the field ring with his importunate chink.”

Churchill replied: “I certainly think that Englishmen ought to start fair with one another from the outset in so grievous a struggle and so far as I am concerned the past is dead.”

1941: Anglo-American unity

The great Burke has truly said, “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors,” and I feel it most agreeable to recall to you that the Jeromes [Churchill’s maternal forebears] were rooted for many generations in American soil, and fought in Washington’s armies for the independence of the American Colonies and the foundation of the United States. I expect I was on both sides then. And I must say I feel on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean now.

The BBC had actively worked to keep Churchill off the air in the Appeasement years, but by 1941 they couldn’t get enough of him. Here he is broadcasting on 16 June 1941, six days before Hitler attacked Russia. His theme, as ever, was Collective Security, and he yearned for America to enter the war.

1951: “Reform without injustice”

A generation would no doubt come to whom their miseries were unknown but it would be sure of having more to eat and bless Stalin’s name. I did not repeat Burke’s dictum, “If I cannot have reform without injustice, I will not have reform.” With the World War going on all round us it seemed vain to moralise aloud.

Churchill is here writing in his fourth volume of Second World War memoirs, The Hinge of Fate. WSC was never given to moralizing—or, as we hear so disgustingly often today, “virtue signaling.” Morality was prominent in his make-up, but in war for him the first priority was “Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror.”

Collin Brooks 1893-1959 (Wikimedia Commons)

3. Collin Brooks: “Where gusto is the prime quality”

One more reference to Burke in is on page 18. It is a lovely quotation by Collin Brooks about Churchill the conversationalist in Churchill by His Contemporaries (1953). Brooks captures the quality that endeared Churchill, even to political opponents:

“Never was a talker so variously gifted, so ardently listened-to, so little of a prig; never was a man so wedded to precision and verbal nicety so little of a pedant…. Sir Winston would have been equally welcomed by Falstaff in Eastcheap, Ben Jonson at The Mermaid, or Burke and Johnson at The Mitre, that is, in any coterie where the talk is masculine, the wit and humour spontaneous, the erudition unparaded, and where gusto is the prime quality.”

Winston Churchill, Magnanimity and the “Feeble-Minded,” Part 2

Richard M. Langworth — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 13:12:41 +0000

Continued from Part 1…

Youthful discretions

Churchill was born into a world in which virtually all Britons, from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer, believed in their moral superiority. They preached it to their children. All learned that the red portions of the map showed where Britannic civilization had tamed savagery and cured pandemics. Churchill’s assertions, especially as a young man, were often in line with this. And yet he consistently displayed this odd streak of magnanimity and libertarian impulse.

It was Churchill, the aristocratic Victorian, who argued that Dervish enemy in Sudan had a “claim beyond the grave…no less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.” In South Africa, he asserted that Boer racism was intolerable, that the Indian minority deserved the same rights as all British citizens. (This was something Gandhi never forgot, though Churchill did—which Gandhi praised years later, when they were opponents over the India Bill.)

Fair play and magnanimity

After the Great War ended, this same Churchill urged that shiploads of food be sent to a starving Germany as the wartime blockade ended. Other leaders preferred to “squeeze Germany till the pips squeaked.” They did, and the long-term results were not good.

The Jallianwala Bagh or Armritsar massacre of Indians in 1919 found Churchill in full cry against the perpetrators. It was Churchill who in 1920 secured India’s support in the future Hitler war, and assured independent India’s military legacy. Arthur Herman in Gandhi & Churchill writes:

For every disgruntled or discouraged subaltern who joined Japan’s puppet Indian National Army, a dozen KCIOs and VCOs served with distinction on every front in the British war effort…. And the minister of war who created the KCIOs in 1920 had been Winston Churchill…. Churchill never grasped the full magnitude of what he had done, but Gandhi nearly did. Many times over the years he had spoken of brave Indian soldiers who would defend their country and then return home to carry the future burden of freedom.

In the 1920s, it was Churchill who argued that the coal miners should be compensated after the 1926 General Strike. In the 1940s it was Churchill, not FDR, certainly not Stalin, who declared carpet bombing German cities morally reprehensible. Ten years later, he denied South Africa’s demand for Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland without the consent of their inhabitants.

A singular record

No statesmen of stature exhibited such magnanimity for so long: Not the leaders of the Tory or Labour parties; not the chieftains of wars. Many who heard Churchill’s proposals shook their heads. Some thought him a mental case, a traitor to his class, or a good man gone soft. “I have asserted many times and without being contradicted,” writes historian Larry Arnn, “that Winston Churchill never said or implied that the rights of any person were conditioned upon the color of his or her skin.”

There are countless examples of Churchill’s magnanimity bucking what Andrew Roberts called “The Respectable Tendency.” He recognized and cited the rights of minorities and the oppressed long before the World Wars. He understood that the claim to liberty was not Britain’s alone, and that understanding welled up in his finest hour. Yet similar views had governed his political thought virtually from the start.

Verdict of historians

I often quote what William Manchester wrote. Churchill, he declared,

…always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions.

Martin Gilbert wrote about the thousands of documents he examined in writing the Official Biography:

I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. 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.”

Yet today some writers profess shock at Churchill’s stray, emotional, unworthy remark. Time and again, the full context of what he said produces an entirely opposite impression.

On the matter of Eugenics (Part 1), to equate Churchill’s record with “the extremities practiced to a tee by the Nazis is”—forgive me—pretty extreme.

In Defense of Churchill (4): Questions and Answers

Richard M. Langworth — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 19:14:02 +0000

Text of my Zoom address to the Chartwell Society of Portland, Oregon on 10 May 2021, 81st anniversary of Churchill taking office as Prime Minister. “Questions and Answers” are part of an iTunes audio file. For a copy, please email rlangworth@hillsdale.edu.

Questions and Answers (continued from Part 3)

From Senator Bob Packwood (who recalls shelling peas with you on a pleasant former occasion): Everybody asks what Churchill’s position would be today on the Middle East. It appears that he wanted to do right by everybody—guarantee the Jews a homeland but respect the rights of the Arabs. If that view of his is correct. would he be something closer to a pro-Zionist today or a supporter of the PLO? Did Churchill personally support The United Nations partition of Palestine in the 1940s?

February 1956 Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted 29 Nov 1947, with boundary of previous partition plan added in green. (United Nations, Wikimedia Commons)

Palestine and Israel

Churchill knew the Palestine Mandate (which in 1921 comprised Jordan as well as Israel) posed difficult demographic questions. Yet he was an eternal optimist, less cynical than most. He actually believed, in 1921, that Jews and Arabs could coexist for mutual benefit. That’s why he spoke then of a Jewish homeland, but not a Jewish state. But he did become resigned to the partition, and later the state.

Faced with intransigence, as we have been with the PLO, he always looked for ways to go around the problem—thus the Dardanelles to bypass the stalemate on the western front. But he tended not to support thugs. So I think he would try to go round the PLO by sponsoring Arab treaties of peace with Israel. It is ironic that two U.S. presidents who probably don’t agree on anything else did this successfully: Jimmy Carter in 1978, Donald Trump in 2020.

Here’s what Churchill said in 1958, long after he’d left office:

The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it would maintain its will. Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected. It is very sad, but we had all better recognise it. At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.

100 years on?

From Andrew Roberts (who needs no further introduction): Do you think the statue of Winston Churchill will be standing in Parliament Square in 100 years’ time?

Trust Andrew to toss me a spanner! I don’t even know if Parliament will be standing in 100 years’ time. After all, Orwell made London the capital of Oceania in “1984,” remember?

The job of Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith (we know where he got that name) was constantly to rewrite history to suit the party line. Everything proscribed by Big Brother was put into something called the Memory Hole and never heard of again. Statues too, I suppose. The best we can hope for is what Churchill said in 1954:

For myself I am an optimist—it does not seem to be much use being anything else—and I cannot believe that the human race will not find its way through the problems that confront it, although they are separated by a measureless gulf from any they have known before….

If he proves right, Parliament and the statue will endure.

Churchill vs. the Appeasers

Reading Britain At Bay, by Alan Allport, I was struck by just how much hung in the balance early in the war. What personality traits did Churchill possess that made him able to rally a nation and lead so effectively? How were they shaped during his life and how did he draw on them? How do those traits contrast with those of Mr. Chamberlain, whom Allport characterizes as vain, boring, spiteful, friendless, and lacking intellectual curiosity?

There’s a good review of Allport by Professor Raymond Callahan on our website. We also offer an annotated bibliography of works about Churchill. There are now over 1150….18 in 2020 alone.

You have to remember that Chamberlain and many of the appeasers, like Stanley Baldwin, started as businessmen. They had no experience of war, except that it interfered with business. Andrew Roberts makes this point. Hardly any leading appeasers—Chamberlain, Baldwin, Sam Hoare, Horace Wilson, fought in the First World War. (Halifax, who fought with distinction, was the chief exception.) Yet all the leading advocates for defying Hitler were veterans—Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Louis Spears, Roger Keyes, Alfred Duff Cooper.

Ask yourself why that was. I think those who had fought knew what war would be like. So they wanted to stop Hitler before it came to that. The appeasers thought they could make deals with him, like any other businessman.

When war did come, it required someone with will to see it through. Churchill had that quality. Even Baldwin knew it. I’ll prevent war by accommodating Hitler, he thought, or pit him against the Russians. Baldwin had no place for Churchill in his cabinet. But he also said—and this is a direct quote: “Anything [Winston] undertakes he puts his heart and soul into. If there is going to be war—and no one can say that there is not —we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.”* That was the difference between them.

*Baldwin to J.C.C. Davidson, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 687.

“Love me, love my dog”

“Love me, love my dog.” Victor Weisz (“Vicky”) in the News Chronicle, 23 May 1945. The beagle has gnawed the Beveridge Report, the Tory plan for postwar social reform. (Wikimedia)

Why did Churchill and his Conservative Party lose the general election and, thus, control of the government, in 1945?

This is among the most frequent questions. Churchill himself didn’t lose. He was reelected by a wider margin than in 1935. His party lost because their history was the war, and the depression before that—and because the Labour Party seemed to promise a brave new world. But after ten years the Conservatives were deeply unpopular.

There’s a funny cartoon showing Churchill before the election, holding the leash to an enormous beagle wearing a top hat, with his tongue hanging out, labeled “Tory Party.” The caption says, “Love me, love my dog.” The voters didn’t love the dog.

Best books

What three books by and about Churchill would you recommend to a new Churchill student? What three books about (not by) Churchill must you take to the Gulag?

That presumes the masters of the Gulag will permit any Churchill books!

This has as many answers as questions, but here’s a try. Among his own books, first read My Early Life. Sure it’s full of inaccuracies and special pleading. But it’s a wonderful read, full of insight into his development.

Then read Marlborough, his greatest biography. In the 1960s it was abridged by Henry Steele Commager, who ruined it. He took out the politics and left only the military. Who cares who won the Battle of Ramillies? In the original you can read all of Churchill’s political philosophy, and see the great war speeches aborning. The scholar Leo Strauss called it “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.”

Third, The Second World War. Again, it’s biased and one sided, but as he said, “this not history, this is my case.” More important, Churchill describes the war that made us what we are today. So it’s more important than The World Crisis, although The World Crisis is better written. (See “Churchill’s War Accounts: History or Memoirs?“)

About Churchill: I mentioned Andrew Roberts’ Walking with Destiny. Next the Official Biography, because you get to take 31 volumes—you’ll never run out. Third, Mary Soames’s Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill. Because this tells us what they were really thinking—a true revelation of their persona.

“Thou shalt not say…”

What would Churchill do/have done about North Korea’s escalating development of nuclear bombs and missiles, which continues as unabated under the present U.S. administration as it did under the previous one?

This raises the Mary Soames Commandment: “Thou shalt not say what Papa would do about any modern situation. After all, how do you know?” History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said, but it sometimes rhymes. I think we can get an idea from Churchill, but not the answer. After all, in 1940 the French fleet posed an existential threat, and he didn’t hesitate to take it out. But the French fleet was not a nuclear arsenal, and France was already defeated. It was not the same situation.

Cancel Culture and Free Speech

What would Churchill’s speech be to the Commons on Cancel Culture and Big Tech Censorship?

I don’t know, but what I’ve said about Cancel Culture is based on his thought. We can learn from it. For instance, in 1933, he spoke about much the same impulses in British life:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within…. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.…Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.

As to censorship, he would say what he said in 1952: “Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that are said; but on the whole we would rather lump them than do away with it.”

Of course he never met up with social media. That presents a real problem. Umberto Eco said: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community … but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.” I don’t know what Churchill would say about that. But he would not censor anybody.

Russia and Ukraine

What do you believe Sir Winston’s view would be today respecting Russia’s military presence on its border with Ukraine? Do you believe he would have perceived parallels with 1937-39 continental Europe?

I take refuge in the Mary Soames Commandment. We cannot say what Papa would do today. We can guess—keeping his principles in mind. He was a great proponent of coalitions, domestic and international. He would want to bring the forces of liberty together on such threats. That suggests what he preached in the 1930s: collective security. Today we have NATO, which he praised. (Do we still have NATO? I think so.) But Ukraine is not part of NATO. So this is the place for inspired diplomacy with nations, NATO or not, whose interests are involved.

Another Churchill?

Is there a Churchill available today? Perhaps in view of your admiration for President Macron?

It’s an incidental admiration, because I don’t admire many of his political ideas. I admire his courage and principle over the statues issue. He was adopting Mark Steyn’s precept: Unless you are prepared to surrender everything, surrender nothing.

I don’t think he’s another Churchill. I don’t see anyone out there who is, really. Do you? Remember too that Churchills only come along when the chips are down. The chips are not quite down, although they seem to be getting there.

Foreword to a Review of “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill”

Richard M. Langworth — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 21:26:05 +0000

“The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill”: A Review

The following is my foreword only to an analysis of the recent Churchill College panel, by Zewditu Gebreyohanes and Andrew Roberts. They followed a maxim of Randolph Churchill in the official biography: “I am interested only in the truth.” Every Churchill scholar is in their debt.

Foreword

Eighty-eight years ago Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Oxford Union passed a resolution: “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.” A week later Winston Churchill said: “We have all seen with a sense of nausea the abject, squalid, shameless avowal made in the Oxford Union. We are told that we ought not to treat it seriously. The Times talked of ‘the Children’s Hour.’ I disagree. It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom.”

Eight decades later Churchill himself is the target of disquieting and disgusting symptoms. Last year the Oxford Union resolved: “This House believes the British Empire is a national disgrace.”Three speakers argued the affirmative. The lone aberrant was the historian Zareer Masani. “I single-handedly contested a blatantly partisan motion and was constantly heckled,” he writes, “with no attempt by the chair or secretary to maintain order.” (Dr. Masani’s doughty riposte can be seen here.)

This year on 11 February, Cambridge, Oxford’s sometime rival, chimed in with a panel, “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill.” The title spins off John Maynard Keynes’s 1925 critique, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill. The difference was that Keynes, a scholar, offered a serious intellectual argument.

The racial imaginarium

Unlike Oxford, Cambridge, didn’t bother to hold an alleged debate. No panelists were historians. One confused Ernest Bevin with Aneurin Bevan. All three, and the moderator, agreed. Sir Winston was a racist basking in the wartime legend he created. The British Empire was worse than the Third Reich.

Herewith two fastidious seekers of truth, Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes, respond to the Cambridge panel, point by point.

“The Glorious Dead”: The Cenotaph, London. (Andrew Shiva, Creative Commons)

As in 1933, there are those who tell us not to take this seriously. Trimmers who profess admiration for Churchill excuse it by saying that, after all, it’s only free speech. A better description would be flagrant injustice. We can argue all day about the pros and cons of Winston Churchill or the British Empire or the American Founding. If we do it seriously, with respect and intellectual curiosity, we advance our ability to draw our own conclusions.

But “a seat of learning,” as Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph, “must uphold learning.” To salt a panel with prejudiced speakers, presenting only the negatives, allowing no contrary opinion, is not serious academic enquiry. It is blindness by those who never hear the other side, don’t want to hear it, and don’t want others to hear. It’s character assassination. Or at least, confession of the weakness of the argument.

“If all you have is a hammer…”

The reaction to Roberts/Gebreyohanes was not long in coming. Instead of engaging on any single one of their points, it consisted of pejoratives. They produced “a dishonest and racist paper.” They want “academics of colour who challenge the Empire shut down.” In other words: disagree with us and you’re a racist.

An old saying provides the answer to that: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Click here to read Roberts/Gebreyohanes.

Fake Churchill Calumny: Subsidiary Emissions from the Odd Crater

Richard M. Langworth — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 20:22:09 +0000

Crater eruptions: “Isn’t it enough to have this parent volcano continually erupting in our midst? And now we are to have these subsidiary craters spouting forth the same unhealthy fumes!” —Churchill’s reply to the son of a harsh critic, freshly elected to Parliament, who immediately began attacking him.

From one crater to another

No sooner does the campaign for Churchill’s memory quell emissions from one crater than another one erupts. The campaign to delegitimize Churchill as Hero continues, but the main volcanos have already erupted. Now we have the odd subsidiary crater spouting the same old stuff. Not much is new, so this is only for the record.

On July 1st in Forbes emitted “Churchill the Failure: The Paraxodical Truth about the Best and Worst Leaders.” This was sent to their corrections department (no reply):

* * *

The author makes insightful points about leadership. He then constructs a narrative about Churchill based on the eruptions of critics who crop evidence to suit themselves. (1) Racial slurs in Churchill’s conversation are extremely rare. (2) Without the diaries of Leo Amery, hearsay evidence cited to show Churchill’s “hate” of Indians would not exist. Indeed, Amery’s own diaries include racist terms Churchill never used. (3) Churchill in WW2 praised “2.5 million Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu [and] the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers.”

(4) Amery’s alleged Churchill quotes are all from 1942-44. In that period, according to Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Almost everything Churchill said about Indians was related to the nationalist movement. Negotiating with nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderates were demoralized and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis to win. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) In truth, Churchill and his Cabinet pulled out every stop to alleviate the Bengal Famine. Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Churchill and Gandhi, writes: “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.”

If we condemn Churchill for the rare racial epithet, should we also condemn Amery, who made them wholesale? What about Gandhi, who said nothing about the famine? In South Africa Gandhi wrote that whites should be “the predominating race.” Blacks, he said, were “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” Gandhi racist? Surely not. We must look at the total picture of every historical figure. Amery served honorably. Gandhi led India to independence. Churchill saved civilization. All three were good and decent men. But there are differences.

The Crater Halifax: death of a thousand Post-It notes

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, protestors surrounded the Nemon statue of Churchill in a “Walk Against Winston.” There was no spray-paint or attempts to pull it down. These polite folk were armed with Post-It notes. They included the familiar litany of false charges, out of context quotes. Of course there was hearsay from Leo Amery (see above): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Terry Reardon replied on behalf of the Churchill Society Canada: “Attacks on Winston Churchill in the Canadian media are nothing new. On our website are replies to articles in the Toronto Star and the National Post.”

Reardon referenced Arthur Herman’s definitive article on the Bengal famine (above). It laid out fact after fact on the causes of, and Churchill’s actions to alleviate, food shortages. He also attached Churchill’s 8 October 1943 directive to the new Viceroy, Lord Wavell, which is even more definitive. From The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, 421:

Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages…. Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good. No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand…. The declarations of His Majesty’s Government in favour of the establishment of a self-governing India as an integral member of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations remain our inflexible policy.

* * *

The reply, from one of the Walk Against Winston organizers: “Churchill and his government’s policies directly and unquestionably contributed to massive death and suffering in the case of the Bengal Famine. While Churchill’s role in opposing Hitler is significant historically, I don’t think the masses of brown and black people who he and his fellow ruling elites colonized, dispossessed, exploited, and consigned to oblivion would agree with your laudatory and rose-coloured characterization.”

How do you answer people who refuse to rebut or even acknowledge facts? They know what they think. They’ve read their Twitter and Facebook. It is all generalities, without a source or a reference. Don’t bother them with the truth. They’ve already made up their minds.

Déjà vu all over again

An article called “Rethinking Churchill” ran on ORF, a website founded in 1990 “at the juncture of ideation tempered by pragmatism.” In a two-part article, the author repeated the same charges refuted three years ago by Soren Geiger for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project: “By my count, he makes twenty-two distinct claims about or against Winston Churchill in his 900-word article,” Mr. Geiger wrote. “I could deal with each of these one at a time. But here I will examine some of the most serious. In so doing, I aim to reveal his allegations against Churchill as unfounded and his historical analysis as embarrassingly sloppy.” To read, click here.

In ORF, the author adds another one: “The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes [Churchill] authored on the World War II led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to grant him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments.”

This may play well in the Twitterverse. Few there will know that Churchill’s prize in literature came before his vainglorious self-serving WW2 volumes were complete. The Nobel Committee cited his works of “historical and biographical description.” They particularly singled out Marlborough and My Early Life. You can look it up. So much for that crater.

Reader response

Mr. Geiger’s article above is entitled, “Winston Churchill the Racist Warmonger.” Scroll to the comments and you will find a reader reply. It mainly repeats all the above points, which the reader had clearly accepted. I responded. Most of it you’ve heard before. But for ease of reference, I include it here:

Dear Reader: Thank you for reading. Not a bad idea at all.

(1) Now please read Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” (2) Next read “Churchill on India,” particularly Churchill’s words to Gandhi and Nehru—hardly those of a despiser. Churchill believed India should have self-government; what he opposed—and, yes, acted against—was the Congress Party’s Brahmin dominance. Hence Churchill to Ghanshyam Das Birla: “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Gandhi’s reply: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

(4) Next, read Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) Before you accept Leopold Amery’s hearsay Churchill quotes, read “Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets’” to learn how many occurred in Amery’s (but not Churchill’s) everyday speech. Was Amery mouthing Churchill, or himself?

* * *

(6) For what Churchill really thought about Indians read “The Indian Contribution in WW2”: “The glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma…. The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war.” This man hated Indians?

(7) On “poison gas,” read “Churchill and Chemical Warfare,” and learn the difference between tear gas (which he unfortunately labeled “poison”) and the gasses Germans began using in wartime. On “Aryan stock,” read “Churchill Derangement Syndrome,” for where and when he said it (and see last paragraph below). In the same piece, note that the “camel dung” crack is hearsay.

Nor is it possible to excuse Churchill as “a man of his time.” In fact he was far in advance of his time. From ages 25 to 80, examples abound of his concern for the rights of peoples of all colors, particularly in South Africa (you can read about that, too).

Bottom line: Churchill was human. He made mistakes, sometimes big ones. His language is almost absent of racial slurs, but he did believe a hierarchy of races existed back then. That is not the remarkable fact. The remarkable fact is that he consistently defended human rights. One has only to read to learn—something besides outbursts on the Twitterverse.

The “pernicious vermin” crater

A five-year-old article in The Diplomat was linked recently in another Churchill attack:

Churchill massacred the Pashtuns in Pakistan who were mounting an insurgency against British rule. He described the Pakistani people as “pernicious vermin” and recounted his actions as “proceed[ing] systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”

But The Diplomat made clear what this new attack didn’t. Churchill was abhoring the desecration of Muslim graves, and punishing the desecrators. It’s always best to let him talk for himself. From his despatch to the Daily Telegraph, published 9 November 1897 (Cohen C48) Churchill wrote:

Inayat Kila, 28 September— The line of march on the 22nd lay past the village of Desemdullah or Bibot, in which the severe fighting of the night of the 16th had taken place. In company with several officers I rode to look again at the ill-fated spot. [The gravesite] was horrible and revolting. The remains had been disinterred and mutilated. Remembering that a morning journal is read to large extent at the breakfast table, I do not intend to describe the condition in which these poor fragments of humanity were found.

* * *

I must, however, invite the reader to consider the degradation of mind and body which can alone inspire so foul an act. These tribesmen are among the most miserable and brutal creatures of the earth…. intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more dangerous, more destructible than the wild beasts. Their religion—fanatic though they are—is only respected when it incites to bloodshed and murder. [As soon as] these valleys are purged from the pernicious vermin that infest them, so will the happiness of humanity be increased, and the progress of mankind accelerated.

So the “pernicious vermin” Churchill spoke of were not the “Pakistani people.” They were the barbarians who desecrated the graves of Muslim and Sikh soldiers. He hoped for “the happiness of humanity.” He said they didn’t respect their own religion. Which is approximately what many Muslims say about terrorists who don’t respect their religion today.

The “stone him” crater

BBC “Civilizations” offered a delightful article. “Churchill, on the pedestal…stone him.” This article repeats the charges Andrew Roberts refuted last year, and takes a stab at Roberts’ Churchill biography. I think the problem is that Dr. Roberts devoted more space to the Churchill family cat than to the dead in Libya. Not sure, though.

Fighting back: “The truth is great, and shall prevail.” *

Increasing signs that the search for truth survives. *”Don’t bother to read the comments”—same old stuff.

Why Churchill’s Leadership was Indispensable, Joseph Laconte, National Review.

“Churchill Out of Context,” Editorial Board, Toledo Blade

G. P. Taylor: “Stop Snowflakes and BBC Denigrating Winston Churchill,” Yorkshire Post

Cathy Gungell, “Is it Time to Stop Calling Churchill a Racist?“, UK Conservative Woman

Dominic Sandbrook, “Why should we be forced to pay for a BBC that portrays Winston Churchill as a mass murdering racist?”, Daily Mail

Edward G. Marks, “In Defense of Keeping Churchill’s Name on School,” Bethesda Magazine

Bradley Gitz, “The Age of Dumb,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “In London, fake anti-fascists fighting imaginary fascists vandalized a statue of a real anti-fascist who fought real fascists by the name of Churchill. Or as another wag more succinctly put it, ‘Wait till they hear about the guys he fought against.'”

Thoughtful articles by historians

Heartening in the face of all this is the determined pursuit of truth by Indian scholars. Thanks and a tip of the hat to:

Zareer Masani: “Churchill a War Criminal? Get Your History Right.” A historian and broadcaster, Dr. Masani is the author of three books on India and is the biographer of Indira Gandhi.

Reddit: An India-based writer who thinks for himself and goes to the sources to debunk popular mythology in a Churchill attack on Reddit.

Tirthankar Roy: “The British Raj According to Tharoor: Some of the Truth, Part of the Time.” Dr. Roy is a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and author of How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: Paradox of the Raj (Palgrave, 2019).

Kit Heren, “Historians hit out at BBC Programme saying Winston Churchill was Responsible for ‘Mass Killing,‘” Evening Standard

Video: “The Case for Churchill”

Churchill historian Andrew Roberts in a fair and balanced interview by Darren Grimes. Among other shibboleths, he covers Churchill “quotes” in his doctor’s diaries (minute 19). These were often imaginative afterthoughts, added twenty-five years later.

Dr. Roberts’ biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, calmly lays out the unvarnished truth, including Churchill’s flaws and mistakes. But as Roberts says, it’s easier to scrawl “racist” on a statue than it is to read a 1000-page book.

Defcon 1: The Urgent Defense of Churchill’s Name and Legacy

Richard M. Langworth — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:40:12 +0000

Case for the defense: “If we allow our monuments and statues and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, and claims of people being offended by our built environment that has been around for decades and sometimes centuries, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation. We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomized and balkanized into smaller and smaller communities, which ironically enough is something racists want too.” —Andrew Roberts

Defense of the good

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has joined many other groups and individuals in defense of the good. The good in this case is the name and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill.

Who would have thought, a few weeks ago, that anyone would suggest moving his statue from Parliament Square? Because it was defaced? Statues of Lincoln and Gandhi also suffered. Even the statue of Nelson Mandela is boarded up—a defense in his case from neo-Nazi demonstrators. What a world we live in.

Some advise we beat a retreat before these expressions of unlearned ignorance. Let’s fence off Parliament Square, they say. Or move the statues to museums. NO.

Please read Andrew Roberts’ “Stop this Trashing of our Monuments—and our Past”. It is one of the finest pieces he has ever written:

Churchill’s attitude to the native peoples of the British Empire, for example, is a nuanced one that cannot be summed up by three words spray-painted on his statue. He undoubtedly make remarks and the occasional joke about non-white people that today we would find completely unacceptable…. he also made equally or more disparaging remarks about Europeans too. Unlike Karl Marx, Churchill never used the N-word, which dyed-in-the-wool racists tended to in those days…. throughout his life, Churchill fought to protect the non-white peoples of the Empire.

Churchill’s life matters

We have assisted others in defense of Churchill’s good name, responding to ignorant articles full of factual distortions. One of these refuted a particularly egregious article in the June 15th Sunday Times. The Churchill Project has been in the forefront of correcting myths, distortions and lies. For example:

“Winston Churchill the Racist War Criminal”

“Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine would have been worse”

“Was Churchill A White Supremacist?”

Racist epithets:

Were they part of Churchill’s routine vocabulary? You read this everywhere, sometimes from respected historians. Is it true? We decided to find out. Are there multiple occurrences of the worst pejoratives in Churchill’s words? No. In fact they are rare. Some of the worst are entirely absent—untraceable to Churchill. The vast majority that do occur are not in his writings or speeches, but in memoirs or diaries by colleagues—which makes them hearsay. One colleague in particular sprinkled racist terms throughout his diary, and then ascribed them to Churchill. Click here for the link when published.

Not “a man of his time”

His defenders sometimes excuse Churchill by saying he was “only a man of his time.” That is not good enough. From age 25, when he argued with a Boer captor about native rights, to age 80, when he denied South Africa’s claim to Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, he was viewed as a naive progressive by the forces of repression. True, he was sometimes paternalistic. And, says Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn, “you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense….

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights. Therefore to say that Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember was that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

Nothing can save us if we will not save ourselves

The time for courtesy and niceties, for backing off to avoid confrontation, for hoping things will die down, is over. The truth must refute excessive, unlearned, biased assertions. Winston Churchill was aware of this long ago, when he spoke following St. George’s Day, 1933:

“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within… from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength…. from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals…. from acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.… Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”

Let’s hope we have not learned nothing since then.

__________________________________

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Churchill’s Inspirations Bedizen the Pages of History

Richard M. Langworth — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 14:44:53 +0000

Excerpted from “Which Historical and Contemporary Figures were Churchill’s Inspirations?” Written for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, February 2020. For Hillsdale’s complete text and illustrations, please click here.

We are often asked which historical and contemporary personages most influenced Winston Churchill’s thought and statesmanship. One is right to start with Lord Randolph Churchill, Napoleon, Clemenceau and Marlborough. The classics open another avenue. Readers can find pithy remarks by Churchill on many of the following figures in Churchill by Himself.

Lord Randolph Churchill

His father was the first of young Winston’s political inspirations, and the subject of his first biography. “Like Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches,” Winston wrote. “In his speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a wealth of knowledge, which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.” Alas, Randolph died too young. His son remarked in My Early Life: “There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” See also John Plumpton, The Writing of Lord Randolph Churchill.

Seekers of Churchill’s inspirations must read his essay “The Dream”—an imaginary 1947 conversation with the ghost of his father, who died in 1895. Read also the excellent appreciation of the piece by Hillsdale College Churchill Fellow Katie Davenport. “The Dream” originated when, at the dinner table, WSC was asked what historical figure he would like to see filling an empty chair. His reply was instantaneous: “Oh, my father, of course.”

Bourke Cockran’s oratorical inspirations

There is no doubting Cockran’s significance. Churchill was quoting him to a later Democrat politician, Adlai Stevenson, in the mid-1950s. (Stevenson had to look him up!) Cockran was vital not only to Churchill’s oratory, but to his political thought:

It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations, but his conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard…. He taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ. He could play on every emotion and hold thousands of people riveted in great political rallies when he spoke…. Above all he was a Free-Trader and repeatedly declared that this was the underlying doctrine by which all the others were united. Thus he was equally opposed to socialists, inflationists and protectionists… In consequence there was in his life no lack of fighting.

Is this not the very description of Churchill himself? There is a fine book on the subject. Becoming Winston Churchill, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, is the standard work on their relationship.

John Morley and “Mass Effects”

Like Cockran and Churchill, John Morley tried always to avoid war. Unlike Churchill, Morley was a pacifist. He resigned from the Cabinet when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Earlier that year, Churchill paid Morley a fulsome tribute: “For many a year he was an ornament of our Debates, and his learning and intellectual elevation, his brilliancy of phrasing, and the range of his experience, constitute assets and qualifications which the Government value in the highest degree.”

Morley is Churchill’s first subject in his book Great Contemporaries. In it he refers to his famous essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” which deplored the rise of the state and the homogenization of thought and politics:

Such men are not found today. Certainly they are not found in British politics. The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the war have swept the shores bare. I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch…. The world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, “Whither?” And to these few only a babel responds.

Clemenceau: faithful but unfortunate

Known as “The Tiger” for his aggressive politics, Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister, 1906–09 and 1917–20. His determination to win the war was legendary. In 1917 Churchill heard Clemenceau declare, “no more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues, neither treason nor half treason—war, nothing but war.”

One might say Clemenceau was a kind of French Churchill (or the nearest France came to one). They were alike in another respect: both were dismissed in their hour of victory. Churchill’s words about himself apply to Clemenceau, and remind us of the Churchill family motto, “Faithful but Unfortunate.” In 1940, Churchill wrote, “I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.” Thus also Clemenceau, shortly after his own world war ended.

Marlborough’s parallels

Churchill, a superb military historian, describes Marlborough’s campaigns with precision. But considering WSC’s inspirations, one might ponder the Great Duke’s geopolitical aspects. Leo Strauss, for example, called Marlborough: His Life and Times “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” His essay is in Harry Jaffa, ed., Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston Churchill (1981).

Andrew Roberts places Marlborough among WSC’s inspirations in his Churchill: Walking with Destiny:

Churchill’s strategic views, already profoundly affected by the Great War, were to develop significantly during his writing of Marlborough as he considered how his ancestor approached coalition warfare. “It was a war of the circumference against the centre,” he wrote of the War of Spanish Succession, just as it was to be for Britain after the Dunkirk evacuation…. [Churchill] admired Marlborough’s single strategy above the “intrigues, cross-purposes, and half-measures of a vast unwieldy coalition trying to make war…. Not for him the prizes of Napoleon, or in later times of cheaper types.”

Napoleon: writer and statesman

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon vies with Walking with Destiny in quality, a fine source for naming Napoleon among Churchill’s inspirations. Dr. Roberts explained that Churchill’s admiration was for the statesman and writer, not the dictator:

As an English Tory, I was expecting not to like Napoleon when I took up my pen…. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable parts of researching this book to discover that of course the Emperor had a hugely engaging personality and attractive character…. I like to think of [him] as the Enlightenment on horseback. The builder, the educator, the encourager of science and industry, the self-made man, the thinker, the writer, the giant and the genius. Instead my countrymen only see the soldier, the conqueror, the invader. They blame all the Napoleonic Wars on him—ignoring his pleas for peace and despite the fact that many more wars were declared on France than he declared against others.

Classical philosophers

Churchill’s inspirations extend to several classical authors or philosophers, like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and of course Thucydides. Paul Rahe, in “Why Read The River War?”, compares Churchill’s book with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War: “Nowhere can one find a subtler depiction of the moral and practical dilemmas faced by the statesman in a world torn by conflict. Moreover, Thucydides’ environment was bipolar—as was ours in the great epoch of struggles on the European continent that stretched from 1914 to 1989….”

See also Justin Lyons’ “On War: Churchill, Thucydides and the Teachable Moment”: “Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach. To convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done is the essence of political leadership.”

The works of William Shakespeare figured high with Churchill, who knew many plays by heart. He alluded to Shakespeare more often than any source other than the King James Bible. Shakespeare probably doesn’t’ qualify among Churchill’s inspirations. Rather, he was a rich source of the deathless phrases that punctuated Churchill’s expression.

Churchill read many more classics in his self-education as a young man. (For the full list, see his autobiography, My Early Life, Chapter IX, “Education at Bangalore.”)

Life Amid Chaos: “The Hope Still Lives…The Dream Shall Never Die”

Richard M. Langworth — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 22:37:33 +0000

My brother Andrew Roberts inspired this post, when he asked for Churchill quotations about childbirth. Yes, even now, friends have brought a new life into the world. Three months ago, my son and daughter-in-law did likewise.

Life Goes On

On 30 May 1909, Clementine Churchill was pregnant with their first child, Diana. Winston, asking her to practice social distancing, wrote these beautiful words: “We are in the grip of circumstances, and out of pain joy will spring, and from passing weakness new strength will arise.”

Four and one-half decades later, his daughter Mary was a fortnight overdue for the birth of Charlotte, her fourth child. “It’s an extraordinary business this way of bringing babies into the world,” Churchill observed to his doctor. “I don’t know how God thought of it.”

Life and its perils influenced the Churchill family planning. In 1945 his wartime secretary, Elizabeth Nel, was leaving to marry. ” You must have four children,” the boss instructed her. “One for Mother, one for Father, one for Accidents, and one for Increase.” The Churchills were as good as their word. Only after the tragic loss of their fourth child, Marigold, did they plan the replacement fourth, Mary. We are so lucky for that life.

Even into a terrible world

The other side of the coin is not so celebratory, as Churchill quotes go. Of course, it came at a low point in history: 30 November 1940. That was his 66th birthday. It was also the christening of his second grandson, Winston S. Churchill. And it was a time when bombs rained down on London, and “all save Englishmen,” in President Kennedy‘s words, “despaired of England’s life.” It was “a very emotional day,” recalled his daughter-in-law Pamela:

I remember it as being one of the rare moments I had seen Winston in church. In fact, I think it was the first time any of us had been down to the church at Chequers. Winston was very emotional about the whole ceremony, and, with tears in his eyes, kept saying, “Poor child. What a terrible world to be born into.”

.

Virginia Cowles, who was also present, remembers different words. They seem a little more melodious:

I had always heard that the Prime Minister’s emotions were easily stirred and at times he could be as sentimental as a woman, and on this occasion I had proof of it, for he sat throughout the ceremony with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Poor infant,” he murmured, “to be born into such a world as this.”

“The stars in their courses”

We may take courage from Churchill’s eternal faith and fortitude. optimism. Life was no better by 16 June 1941. Britain and the Commonwealth still stood alone. Russia was still bound to Germany by their hangman’s pact. There was no sign of America coming in. Churchill was undeterred. He recalled the old Boer expression, “All will come right.” And he took to the airwaves:

Is the tragedy to repeat itself once more? Ah no! This is not the end of the tale. The stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of mankind. Not so easily shall the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily shall the lights of freedom die. But time is short. Every month that passes adds to the length and to the perils of the journey that will have to be made. United we stand. Divided we fall. Divided, the dark age returns. United, we can save and guide the world.

“The hope shall never die”

As in 1940 and 1941, a different hunter is armed with a different deadly weapon. Churchill’s courage still applies.

I have already sent many friends this message to students and faculty of Hillsdale College by my boss and friend, a great man, Larry Arnn. I commend it to you again. It reminds me of the Tom Hanks chaaracter the end of Saving Private Ryan: “EARN THIS.”

I am now going to quote someone I have never quoted before: Ted Kennedy. Because it fits the moment. Because it highlights the small ray of collegiality and joint endeavor that may—for a time—replace vituperative politics. It certainly applies to us at Hillsdale, and I hope also to you. For as Ted Kennedy said: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Message from the Prime Minister, September 1940.

Churchill’s Potent Political Nicknames: Adm. Row-Back to Wuthering Height

Richard M. Langworth — Sat, 14 Mar 2020 13:24:02 +0000

Sporadically, pundits compare Donald Trump with Winston Churchill. There’s even a book coming out on the subject. I deprecate all this by instinct and will avoid that book like the Coronavirus. Surface similarities may exist: both said or say mainly what they thought or think, unfiltered by polls (and sometimes good advice). But Churchill’s language and thought were on a higher plane. Still, when a friend said that Churchill never stooped to derisive nicknames like Trump, I had to disagree.

Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun.

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Pick first annoyed WSC by Pick refusing on ethical grounds to publish a clandestine newspaper to subvert the enemy. He said he had never committed a mortal sin. Churchill then referred to him derisively as “the perfect man.” (Wikimedia Commons)

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Arthur Balfour (Wikimedia)

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927. “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971), BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

Churchill Derangement Syndrome: A is for Aryans, R is for Racism

Richard M. Langworth — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 15:28:48 +0000

“Quality local journalism”

In our electronic Speaker’s Corner (the Internet), Winston Churchill is beset by haters. Their knee-jerk spouts are laced with out-of-context quotes and preconceived notions. Call it Churchill Derangement Syndrome. Where is the truth? Perhaps we need a Derangement Index. Click on “A” for Aryan Supremacy, “B” for the Bengal Famine, etc. A handy reference to every derangement you can access with a couple of clicks.

An e-zine called This is Local London, describing its offerings as “quality local journalism,” is a standard example. Well, maybe not so standard. “The Problem with Glorying Winston Churchill” was written not by a historian or researcher, but a student at Wallington County Grammar School. If this what they’re teaching in British grammar schools, the Prime Minister has a bigger problem than Brexit.

It’s a tongue-lashing for the ages. “Blind worship and romanticisation [sic] of Churchill…is dangerous to our understandings of race and understanding” [sic]. Especially given “the harrowing reality.” What is that? Why, you doofus, it’s Churchill’s “virulent racism, sympathy for fascist and extremist ideology.” Yet—can you believe it?—we still airbrush his “horrible actions and distasteful racist, xenophobic venom.” Why do we glorify “this self-identified white supremacist as a figure worthy of acclaim?”

Derangement Primer

Herein we encapsulate this episode of Churchill Derangement in alphabetical order. Young Reporter’s accusations are in italics. Incorrect, unsourced, inaccurate or otherwise false quotes are marked with curly brackets {like this}. They are not worthy of quotemarks.

“A” is for Aryans

Churchill’s conviction of the {superiority of the Aryan race} “is starkly reminiscent of Hitler’s.” Churchill said whites were ‘a stronger race, a higher grade race.’ ” Churchill’s “almost Nazi belief that ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’…compelled him to engage in a number of imperial conquests.”

First, question: What imperial conquests? Churchill said “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph” in 1901 when he was 27, the Empire long established. He spoke of “a higher grade race” to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937. Hardly reminiscent of Hitler and his plan for genocide. (N.B.: Unfortunately for him 100 years later, Churchill often said “race” when he meant “nation.” Just as he said “poison gas” when he meant tear gas—in retrospect, a bad gaffe.)

In “today’s political climate” such words sound bad. But saying “everybody thought that way in 1901 or 1937” is a poor defense of Churchill. The real defense does exist. Anybody can read it. Perhaps “Young Reporter” should read it:

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist…. You can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense. The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights. Therefore to say that Winston Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

“B” is for Bengal Famine

“Churchill orchestrated the Bengal famine, exporting grain and being responsible for the unnecessary deaths of four million Indians.”

This vicious, tired, and hackneyed accusation has been a routine derangement since an ill-researched book made the claim a decade ago. That book was reviewed by the distinguished Gandhi biographer Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine would have been Worse.” How so? All you have to do is read.

“D” is for Dung Eaters

Churchill also likened the Palestinians to {barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung}, Young Reporter writes..

This derangement is based on hearsay, though I wouldn’t dispute the context. Michael Makovsky, in his excellent work Churchill’s Promised Land, credited Malcolm MacDonald, then colonial secretary: “He told me I was crazy to help the Arabs, because they were a backward people who ate nothing but camel dung.” Makovsky wrote: “While these might not have been Churchill’s exact words the gist of the comment jibed with what he had thought of the Palestinian Arabs at least since encountering them in the early 1920s.” So Churchill had his prejudices—which didn’t stop him from urging fair treatment of Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

“E” is for Eugenics

Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races and warned the Prime Minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin, not to appoint him to Cabinet as his views on race and eugenics were so thoroughly antiquated and morally reprehensible.

Not much derangement here. Yes, circa 1912, young Churchill had a fling with Eugenics. He abandoned it within two years. Deciding it was an affront to civil liberties, he never spoke of it again. Churchill never warned Baldwin not to appoint him—from the mid-1930s he desperately wanted to be appointed. Baldwin excluded Churchill for his incessant rearmament demands. My book, Churchill and the Avoidable War, spends several chapters on all this. I would be happy to make a gift of it to Young Reporter—provided he promised to read it. By all accounts Baldwin was more of a white supremacist than Churchill.

“G” is for Gallipoli

“Churchill was also at the helm of the diabolical Gallipoli campaign during World War II, in which tens of thousands of British civilians died unnecessarily as a result of Churchill’s needless competence.”

Yes, Young Reporter did say “World War II” and “needless competence.” He means World War I and needless incompetence. But Churchill’s diabolical helmsmanship was over the Dardanelles, not Gallipoli. He neither planned nor directed the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Also, he learned from his mistakes. After World War II he wrote of the Dardanelles: “…a supreme enterprise was cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position. Men are ill-advised to try such ventures. This lesson had sunk into my nature.” Some derangement.

“H” is for Hitler

Churchill’s “sympathy for fascist ideology” begins with Hitler. In 1935, he wrote: “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

Churchill wrote that in the Evening Standard on 17 September 1937, after he had been attacked by the Nazi press as an enemy of Germany. He said he’d been wronged, mentioning all his overtures to Germany after World War I. These included shipping food to blockaded Hamburg, repatriating prisoners, opposing France’s invasion of the Ruhr, and so on.

Before the sentence quoted, he wrote: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” At the time, Churchill was walking on eggs. His article had to clear the Foreign Office, anxious not to insult dear old Adolf. Even so, there is nothing that suggests “sympathy for fascist ideology.” In fact, Churchill had Hitler’s number from the get-go. You can look it up.

“I” is for Indians

“Churchill openly admitted his visceral hatred of Indians, referring to them as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion,’ and that it was their fault for dying in the famine because they ‘bred like rabbits’ and because they were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans….’ Leo Amery, British Secretary of State for India, said Churchill ‘didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s’ {regarding race and eugenics}. “But, whilst there is mostly a general consensus that Hitler is a white supremacist, authoritarian mass murdering [expletive deleted], this tag is similarly applicable to Churchill.”

Churchill Derangement has a feast of words here. WSC did make those outbursts, frustrated with disputatious demands from Delhi in the midst of all-out war. William F. Buckley put them in context: “I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modem convention, of genocidal magnitude.” Indeed so.

Amery did say that to Churchill, “which annoyed him no little.” It was Amery’s job to plead India’s case—and Churchill’s to set priorities in a war to the death. Yet in the end, Arthur Herman explained: “Even Amery admitted…the ‘unassailable’ case against diverting vital war shipping to India.” Churchill’s appointment of Field Marshal Wavell as Viceroy ultimately eased India’s famine. “Far from a racist conspiracy to break the country, the Viceroy noted that ‘all the Dominion Governments are doing their best to help.’”

This is the same Churchill who wrote of the 2.5 million-volunteer Indian Army: “the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.” Was that derangement?

“K” is for Kurds

Churchill “was a man who advocated gassing the Kurds and who declared himself ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.’”

This Golden Oldie has been around longer even than the Bengal famine nonsense. The quote is easy trap for the gullible—if they don’t read the surrounding words…

It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. [Italics mine.]

For those of you in Rio Linda, or Wallington County Grammar School, “lachrymatory gas” is tear gas.

“L” is for Landslide (1945)

“It is telling that as soon as those incredibly brave soldiers returned home, they helped to vote Winston Churchill out of office in large numbers, in what was a landslide victory for the most radically left-wing Labour government in history.”

It is telling, but not in that way. In 1945, Britons voted massively for the Labour opposition (hardly the most radical in history). Not because of Churchill, who was handily reelected. Voters rejected the Conservative Party, which who had brought them a decade of appeasement and war. And for Labour, which promised a grand future. “I wouldn’t call it [ingratitude],” Churchill said. “They have had a very hard time.”

“M” is for Mussolini

Churchill was “a raving supporter of Mussolini.” He said {fascism has rendered a service to the entire world}. And: “If I were Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

My book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, devotes a chapter to “Mussolini, Law-Giver and Jackal.” Churchill did praise Musso twice. The first time (correctly quoted above), was in 1927, when WSC was Chancellor of the Exchequer. His aim was to get Il Duce to cough up the Italian war debt. (He did get some of it.) The second was in 1940 when he tossed a few bouquets at the Italian, hoping he wouldn’t join the war with Hitler. He failed. For Churchill, Mussolini then became the “whipped jackal” yelping at the side of “the German tiger.” Early on, of course, lots of people who feared Leninism were praising Mussolini. But Churchill and the Italians delivered the final verdict. They must have suffered from Mussolini Derangement.

“N” is for Nuking the Soviets

“Churchill wanted to inflict nuclear holocaust on Soviet Union in peacetime,” Young Reporter breathlessly asserts.

The truth is less spectacular. Shortly after the war, Churchill speculated privately about taking out the Soviets in a nuclear strike. He said as much to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges. Often he voiced apocalyptic scenarios to visitors to gauge their reaction. He never formally proposed to bomb Moscow to American presidents or ambassadors.

Churchill’s formal statements took a different tack, as Graham Farmelo correctly wrote: “He soon softened his line. In the House of Commons he went no further than the words he used after British relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated again, in January 1948: the best chance of avoiding war was ‘to bring matters to a head with the Soviet Government…to arrive at a lasting settlement.’” He sought that settlement through 1955. When it continued to elude him, he retired as prime minister.

“O” is for Ordinary People

“Churchill just didn’t have the interests of ordinary working classes, or indeed anyone, other than a narrow circle of middle-class straight white men at heart.”

Granted, it was pretty hard to spot non-white folks in 1904 Britain, when Churchill began being called a “traitor to his class.” (Speaking of derangement.) Why? Because Churchill, and Lloyd George, instituted the most sweeping anti-poverty legislation in British history. Taxation, old age pensions, unemployment benefits, widows and orphans support—all initiatives of the great reforming Liberal governments. Churchill was in the vanguard. He shared an understanding of the actual causes of poverty, wrote Malcolm Hill: He did not believe the state should take all responsibility for retirement, education, health and welfare. But he showed “unusual stature” in his efforts to mitigate poverty.

Ordinary people? Churchill said in 1944: “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.” Game, set and match.

“P” is for Prejudice

“Churchill’s rampant racial prejudice was considered backwards [sic], even by Victorian standards,” writes Young Reporter. “Indeed, even at the time, Churchill was seen as extremist in his ideology and at the most brutal and racist end of the British imperialist spectrum.”

By whom? Is this the same Winston Churchill who in 1899 argued with his Boer jailer in Pretoria about equal rights for black Africans? Or the Churchill remembered kindly by Gandhi for his efforts to ease inequalities for Indians in South Africa? The Churchill who, during WW2, said Americans could segregate their black soldiers if they liked, but not the British. Read the evidence. If you still want to call Churchill a racist, by all means do. But first “dig a little deeper.”

“S” is for Savages

Churchill referred to also Egyptians as “degraded savages.” He believed Pakistanis were “deranged jihadists” whose violence was explained by a {strong aboriginal propensity to kill}.

Ah, the wonders of the partial quote. By “degraded savages” Churchill was referring to a Cairo crowd which attacked the BOAC offices in January 1952. (Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 214.) In The Story of the Malakand Field Force Churchill wrote (3): “The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour.” So… Some Egyptians are savages, but not all savages are Egyptians. Some Pakistanis have an aboriginal propensity to kill, but not all killers are Pakistanis. Do I have this right? Duh!

“T” is for Tonypandy

“Churchill sent soldiers to brutally crush the strikes of hundreds of innocent, oppressed Welsh miners in Tonypandy protesting for better rights, saying, and these were his own words: {If the Welsh are striking over hunger, then we must fill their bellies with lead.}”

This derangement has been around for 100 years. Neither the quote nor the assertion are correct. Churchill specifically forbade the use of troops unless demanded by police. The last Welsh strike leader alive, Will Mainwaring, spoke to the BBC in 1960: “We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.”

“W” is for White Supremacy

In the 1955 general election, Churchill wanted the Conservatives to promote white supremacy: “The Tories should campaign on a platform of preventing {degenerate} ‘coloured’ immigration from the West Indies, along with his suggested campaign slogan for the Tories’ 1955 General election, ‘Keep England White.’”

Right in the narrow sense, wrong in the broad. Here is the reality. “Keep England White” is hearsay. It was a diary entry by Harold Macmillan after January 1955 cabinet meeting, Macmillan wrote: “The P.M. thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good campaign slogan!”

Macmillan was not given to exaggeration, but the context matters. “The P.M. thinks…” is not a quote, nor did the words ever appear in public. Macmillan followed it with an exclamation mark, which could mean that Churchill was wise-cracking. Ask yourself: Would any astute politician, even then, seriously propose “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan?

Out of context, the words seem stark. In context, Churchill was arguing for limits on Caribbean immigration. He did not discuss other black or brown people. Is this racist? We report, you decide.

“X” is for X-Rated (No attribution or off the wall)

“Churchill claimed that China was a {barbaric nation that required British partition} to bring it into civilization.” There is no attribution for this statement in his published canon.

“This was a man, who let’s not forget… force-fed the suffragettes.” Churchill force-fed nobody, opposed female suffrage only once in Parliament (when he thought more women would vote Conservative). The rest of the time he was pro-suffrage.

Truth at last!

Churchill said of Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” In the end, happily, Young Reporter stumbles over the truth:

“It would be reductive to merely credit [defeating the Nazis] to Churchill and not the role of ordinary British citizens, our allies, the 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died during that war, the Americans, the French Resistance and how their blood, strength, tears and sacrifice was pivotal….”

End of unreality, welcome to reality. Churchill himself said it was the British people around the world who had the lion heart. “I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” Or as Charles Krauthammer put it:

Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies [and] the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Young Reporter is an earnest fellow and, like many older practitioners, convinced he’s right. He “firmly rejects” Churchill’s “overstated role,” but not his overstated sins, like “the deaths of millions” in Gallipoli. But hey, he’s very young. Perhaps by the time he reaches A-levels he’ll have developed the curiosity, and integrity, to read a bit more widely.

Question for Readers: What did Churchill Mean by “Man is Spirit”?

Richard M. Langworth — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 21:54:10 +0000

“Man is spirit”

Winston Churchill retired as Prime Minister on 5 April 1955. On April 3rd, he met with his non-Cabinet ministers. His last words were reported by William Sidney, Viscount De L’Isle and Dudley, his neighbor in Westerham, to Martin Gilbert. “Man is spirit,” he told them. Then he added: “Never be separated from the Americans.”

The latter is well understood. In 1956, when he wasn’t around, there was quite a serious separation, over Suez. “Man is spirit” is harder to understand. What did Churchill mean?

A professor teaching Churchill’s statesmanship says his class is going back and forth on that. It’s a good question.

The professor asked my friend Andrew Roberts, who offered a thoughtful explanation. “Churchill meant that given spirit—by which Victorians like him meant courage, drive, gumption and spunk—people can achieve anything regardless of all other limitations. Despite appearances, we are not bound by the physical but are part of the metaphysical.” Andrew then handed off to me, as if I knew a lot more! He did send me trawling through the sources.

Something metaphysical?

Few historians have tackled the question of what “Man is spirt” meant. One was Jon Meacham, who wrote in Franklin and Winston:

“I believe that man is an immortal spirit,”: [Churchill] often said, leading Anthony Montague Browne, his last private secretary, to call him “an optimistic agnostic.” Churchill’s essential view: “Whether you believe or disbelieve, it is a wicked thing to take away Man’s hope.”

It seems possible that “Man is spirit” meant something metaphysical, as Andrew suggests, beyond the Victorian virtues.

Spirit as self-belief?

In 2006 the late John Ramsden published “Churchill: A Man who Believed,” in the Catholic magazine The Tablet. Ramsden fleshed out Montague Browne’s “optimistic agnostic”:

Churchill once said that he was not a pillar of the Church but more like a buttress—he supported it from the outside. He had been brought up in the 1880s firmly within the Anglican tradition that had then barely changed for two centuries. [In The Dream, he tells the ghost of his father he is “Episcopalian.”]

His direct involvement with the Church was though at best semi-detached…. Churchill was not a Christian believer in any conventional sense. Archbishop Fisher of Canterbury thought that WSC “had a very real religion, but it was a religion of the Englishman. He had a real belief in Providence, but it was God as the God with a special care for the values of the British people…..

What Churchill seems never to have had was a belief in a personal God. He joked as he aged that he was ready to meet his Maker, and speculated as to whether the Almighty was looking forward to their interview with equal pleasure; but he did not in fact believe in an after-life, except perhaps as some perpetual sleep in surroundings of peaceful, black velvet….

What Churchill did believe in was himself, fate, and his personal vocation to leadership…. Believing in himself as he did, he found within the capacity to make the British people believe in themselves too, a crucial historical act that even today can be cited to the cynics as proof that individuals can and do make a difference

A question for readers

Perhaps that has something to do with what Churchill was trying to express by saying “Man is Spirit.” Certainly his spirit abides, and still guides us today.

But my knowledge of Churchill and the metaphysical is thin. If any reader would like to take a stab at Churchill’s meaning, do send me your thoughts. (Scroll down to “Leave a Reply,” below.)

On Sovereignty: Churchill on the UK and Europe, 1933-1953

Richard M. Langworth — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 18:59:45 +0000

Sovereignty is back

Britain has left the European Union. “It was a transcendental night,” Andrew Roberts writes of January 31st. Read his excellent piece on Brexit and the UK’s regained sovereignty in the Daily Telegraph: “Britain has become an adult once again, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions. [It] has boldly stepped out on its own, taking a risk, certainly. But then which great historic national action has not involved some element of risk?…

By stating that no foreign law shall henceforth have jurisdiction over British law, we have thrown away the jurisprudence comfort blanket and become an adult, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions again…. “Where, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles,” starts the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, “it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world”…. Crucially, the word “empire” in that context merely meant a self-governing state, and had nothing to do with the later British Empire that spread across the globe in the following half-millennium.

For years Britons were told that the 2016 vote to leave was a nostalgia-trip back to the glory days of Empire. Not so. Absent Churchill, perhaps only Roberts could liken 2020’s sovereignty to 1533’s Restraint of Appeals. It’s not the 19th century they’re returning to—it’s the 16th!

“Quiet pride”

There are enough words of mine on Brexit and the EU, to the extent that a foreigner has a right of comment. It is more appropriate to reflect on Winston Churchill’s words. Not for the sovereignty decision (he could never imagine) but for encouragement. They underline his respect for Europe, and his “sense of the British moment.”

“Trust the people,” Lord Randolph Churchill declared, as his son reminded the U.S. Congress: “I used to see him cheered at meetings and in the streets by crowds of working men way back in those aristocratic Victorian days when, as Disraeli said, the world was for the few, and for the very few.” Britain today has a broader electorate, but Lord Randolph’s words still apply.

There’s another aspect to last night that will impress thoughtful people. “In jam-packed Parliament Square,” Robert Hardman wrote, “no one was exactly swinging from the chandeliers. There were no hysterics, no tears—and no pyrotechnics, either. Just quiet pride. After all the polarised nastiness of the past three years, Britain’s departure from the European Union was for the most part good-natured and magnanimous, if tinged with a sense of weariness.”

Is there a lesson there for America—which has also spent three weary years in polarized nastiness? We can but hope.

Churchill on Britain and Europe:

“Our country has a very important part to play in Europe, but it is not so large a part as we have been attempting to play, and I advocate for us in future a more modest role than many of our peace-preservers and peace-lovers have sought to impose upon us.” —House of Commons, 13 April 1933

“[Our] worst difficulties…come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. [And] from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.… Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.” —Albert Hall, 24 April 1933

“We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonality. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it…linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, ‘Wouldest thou be spoken for to the king, or the captain of the host?,’ we should reply, with the Shunammite woman: ‘I dwell among mine own people.’” —News of the World, 9 May 1938

In War: “Freedom is their life-blood”

“We may remember the words of old John Bright, after the American Civil War was over, when he said to an audience of English working folk: ‘At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished and was gone forever. ‘” —Broadcast, London, 1 October 1939

“[After the war] there would be a United States of Europe, and this Island would be the link connecting this Federation with the new world and able to hold the balance between the two.” —Colville Papers, 10 August 1940

“We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges. I say ‘trying to build’ because of all races in the world our people would be the last to consent to be governed by a bureaucracy. Freedom is their life-blood.” —Broadcast, London, 21 March 1943

In Peace: “The larger hopes of humanity”

“I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” —Zürich, 19 September 1946

“We hope to reach again a Europe purged of the slavery of ancient days in which men will be as proud to say ‘I am a European’ as once they were to say ‘Civis Romanus sum.’ We hope to see a Europe where men of every country will think as much of being a European as of belonging to their native land. —Albert Hall, 14 May 1947 [Quoted “in defiance” by EU diehard Guy Verhofstadt, yet perfectly consistent. I am happily a North American, at home in all its countries. But consider Churchill’s first fourteen words… As Mr. Verhofstadt honorably reminded colleagues, this is a nation that twice shed its blood to liberate Europe.]

“A high and a solemn responsibility rests upon us here this afternoon in this Congress of a Europe striving to be reborn.… If we all pull together and pool the luck and the comradeship…and grimly grasp the larger hopes of humanity, then it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age…. heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the science, the abundance and the glories of the future.” —The Hague, 7 May 1948

In his second Premiership: “Ally and friend”

“Our attitude towards further economic developments on the Schuman lines resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part. But we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or commonwealth character. Our first object is the unity and consolidation of the British Commonwealth….Our second, “the fraternal association” of the English-speaking world; and third, United Europe, to which we are a separate closely- and specially-related ally and friend.” —Cabinet Memo, 29 November 1951

“You know my views about the particular kind of European Army into which the French are trying to force us. We must consider very carefully together how to deal with the certainly unfavourable reaction in American opinion. They would like us to fall into the general line of European pensioners which we have no intention of doing.” —To Anthony Eden, 13 December 1951

“I do not myself conceive that federalism is immediately possible within the Commonwealth. I have never been in favour of it in Europe.” —To Woodrow Wyatt MP, 8 July 1952

“We are not members of the EDC, nor do we intend to be merged in a federal European system. We feel we have a special relationship to both.” —Commons, 11 May 1953

“I care above all for the brotherhood of the English-speaking world. But there could be no true brotherhood without independence founded as it can only be on solvency. We do not want to live upon others and be kept by them, but faithfully and resolutely to earn our own living, without fear or favour, by the sweat of our brow, by the skill of our craftsmanship and the use of our brains.” —Margate, 10 October 1953

Back to the future

Andrew Roberts puts January 31st in context. “I’ve heard many things described as ‘historic’—football matches, TV programmes, even a speech by Theresa May. But, as an historian, I can certify for you that Brexit night truly is historic.” We may also take heart from Churchill’s words, thinking of history: “At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished, and was gone for ever.”

But sovereignty conveys its own challenges. Sovereignty means what happens now is very much up to Britons. There is no need to cower from that. Two great wars, Churchill said, “have made the British nation master in its own house.” Sovereignty conveys mastery. “The treasures of the past. The toil of the centuries, the long-built-up conceptions of decent government and fair play. The tolerance which comes from the free working of Parliamentary and electoral institutions…. All these constitute parts of this inheritance.”

And this is no Little England. Britain owns the world’s sixth largest economy, produced by 60 million skillful people. “There is no need to fear the future,” Churchill said in another time. “I could not stop it if I wished…. Let it roll! Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

“The Respectable Tendency” and the New PM, 1940-2019

Richard M. Langworth — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 12:42:08 +0000

Anent the new PM

My friend Steve Hayward had the wit to paraphrase, in reaction to the arrival of Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, some comments about another incoming PM, eighty years ago next May. “Cambridge Cute,” says another friend of Steve’s good piece.

Speaking of Cambridge Cuties, I immediately thought of what Andrew Roberts described as “The Respectable Tendency,” the British establishment, in his great book, Eminent Churchilllians. So I dug into the sources to find more of what they said back then about the new Prime Minister. (Lightly paraphrased.)

“Coup of the rabble…”

“Even whilst the new PM was still at Buckingham Palace kissing hands, the junior private secretary and Chamberlain’s PPS, Lord Dunglass [Alec Douglas-Home] joined Rab Butler and ‘Chips’ Channon at the Foreign Office. And there they drank in champagne the health of the ‘King over the Water’ (not King Leopold, but Mr. Chamberlain).”

“Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history…. The sudden coup of the rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one. The ‘pass had been sold’ with a weak surrender to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.”

“Since the new PM came in, the House of Commons had stunk in the nostrils of the decent people. The kind of people surrounding him are the scum and the peak [bottom? -RML] came when Brendan [Bracken] was made a Privy Counsellor! For what services rendered heaven knows. The PM’s adventurism is suspect, and his promotion of those in whom he detected the buccaneering spirit, doubly alarming.”

“A bright blue suit, cheap and sensational looking…”

“He has not put his own henchmen in the highest offices. That does not prevent his detractors from convincing themselves otherwise. Butler is one of a number who contend with the fact that they are serving in an administration led by the man they have spent the best part of a decade briefing against and cat-calling.”

“His appointment sent a cold chill down the spines of the staff at 10 Downing Street…. Our feelings were widely shared in the Cabinet Offices, the Treasury and throughout Whitehall. Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment…so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified.”

“He sees no way of putting his ideas into practice at present and is not ashamed of admitting the fact. Lloyd George was afterwards offered the Ministry of Agriculture (for which the cheap press has always tipped him). He refused it because he thinks the country is in a hopeless position and he is generally despondent.”

Jock Colville: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government. But of course Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive, and should be able to get things done….”

Retrospective

Thus spake the Respectable Tendency of new Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940. Flash forward seventy-nine years. Nobody, of course, knows what Mr. Johnson will make of his honorable and ancient office. Friends of Britain must wish him well. What happens now is up to him. But opinion can change rapidly.

Back in 1940 Jock Colville soon shed his cheap blue suit. June 1940 found him in conservative pinstripes, an ardent admirer of his new Prime Minister. Correctly he surmised that the PM’s administration would “get things done.”

On getting things done today, refer to a thoughtful piece by John O’Sullivan on the now-nearly-complete Johnson Cabinet.

We report, you decide. And for historical perspective on the British establishment in days gone by, read Andrew Roberts’ book.

Brexit: Leadership Failures Over Four Generations

Richard M. Langworth — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 14:00:14 +0000

Quotation of the Season

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. —Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1936

Brexit Bedlam

For me the most adroit analysis of Britain’s Brexit Bedlam we can read to date was by Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph. You can register for free to read the article.

Will this be the year May ends before April? If Prime Minister Theresa May lasts through 5/31, Roberts says she will beat Gordon Brown (two years, 319 days) and the Duke of Wellington (two years, 320 days). Big whoopee.

Dr. Roberts goes on to opine what the right course would have been from the outset:

The cautious, bishop-like approach when she became prime minister would have been to have prepared business, the civil service and the country for a managed, World Trade Organisation-based, no-deal Brexit, without giving Brussels any guarantees on security, future domicile status for EU citizens, a divorce pay-out or indeed anything else until a negotiating timetable was agreed that was fair to both sides. Any fifth columnists in the Civil Service who were actively undermining the strategy should have been demoted; it would not have taken long for the rest to have got the message. The squealing of the Remainers would have been loud and long—especially of course on the BBC—but nothing like as bad as it has been.

Many colleagues reply to this by saying, “Sure, but hindsight is cheap.” Au contraire. Mrs. May, who is an admirable PM in many respects, had those options from the get-go. She knew she had them. She rejected them. Brexit still offers them. It is not likely that she will opt for them.

Churchill and Europe: Then

It almost seemed that every speaker at the recent Hillsdale College Churchill Conference was asked about Brexit in one way or another. We convened to study Churchill and the movies, one of them “Henry V.” Another kerfuffle with the French, but 600 years ago. The best insight into Churchill’s thinking is his own words. So when asked about Brexit I offered two Churchill quotations:

We are not seeking in the European movement … to usurp the functions of Government. I have tried to make this plain again and again to the heads of the Government. We ask for a European assembly without executive power.” —House of Commons, 10 December 1948

* * *

At Zürich in 1946 I appealed to France to take the lead in Europe by making friends with the Germans, “burying the thousand-year quarrel.” … As year by year the project advanced, the Federal Movement in many European countries who participated became prominent. It has in the last two years lost much of its original force. The American mind jumps much too lightly over its many difficulties. I am not opposed to a European Federation including (eventually) the countries behind the Iron Curtain, provided that this comes about naturally and gradually.

But I never thought that Britain or the British Commonwealths should, either individually or collectively, become an integral part of a European Federation, and have never given the slightest support to the idea. We should not, however, obstruct but rather favour the movement to closer European unity and try to get the United States’ support in this work. —Memorandum to the Cabinet, 29 November 1951

Churchill and Europe: Now?

That answer was incomplete, so a second question arose. “You gave us two Churchill quotes in which he opposed Britain joining a federal Europe. Does that mean you think he would be in favor of Brexit?”

Answer: No. To so conclude would violate his daughter’s First Commandment. Lady Soames always said, “Thou shalt not declare what Papa would say about any modern issue. After all, how do YOU know?”

I offered those quotes only to refute the opposite argument we hear all the time. Because Churchill wanted Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, he would now favor the creation of a European super-state.

Theresa May has much to answer for before the bar of history. But it is unfair to blame her alone for the current shambles of irresolution. The mistakes began long ago, under governments both Labour and Tory. They led to de Gaulle‘s rejection of British membership in the European Economic Community in the 1960s. After he’d left, Britain applied to join again. Even then, Britain joined a free trade association, not a federal union regulated by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

“If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election”

In 1930, Churchill wrote a marvelous essay, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” It is presented as if written by someone in an alternate world where Lee DID win the battle of Gettysburg. This precipitated (implausibly from our viewpoint) a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, a fraternal association of English-Speaking Peoples, the prevention of World War I, and with it German fascism and Russian Bolshevism. By 1930 there is the prospect of a Council of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have written, but not yet published, a parallel essay entitled “If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election.” Using some of his phrases, it explains how Churchill DID win, resulting (also implausibly from our viewpoint), in a prosperous, reinvigorated British Commonwealth, a rollback of Soviet expansion, a free Poland, an Arab-Israeli settlement, a democratic China, the evolution of Iran to a constitutional monarchy. It ends with the prospect of a Latin American free trade association led by Che Guevara. Che, an educated, practical man, has pronounced communism a failure and deposed Castro.

Safely reelected in 1945, Churchill renounces the Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods agreements, in which the United States demanded an end to Imperial Preference. Britain then organizes SAFTA, the Sterling Area Free Trade Association. The first of its kind, SAFTA spans the British Commonwealth, including India and Pakistan. They both get independence, but only after the border questions are settled and millions of lives saved by avoiding strife. SAFTA gets along fine with the U.S. and Europe. Free trade blossoms in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Back to Reality

The mistakes leading to the present Brexit debacle began with abandoning Imperial Preference. Churchill himself had supported that from 1932. Failing to render the Commonwealth a free-trade association of independent states hammered home the error.

So on Brexit, we must NOT proclaim what Churchill would say about a situation he never contemplated.

As for the present Brexit shambles, a Norwegian friend of mine offered an answer. “The best thing to do would be to go back to 1945 and start all over again.”

Clementine Churchill as Literary Critic

Richard M. Langworth — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 19:31:22 +0000

Q: Clementine as Editor

Your book Churchill By Himself is a treasure to which I frequently refer. I am a retired professor who recently lost his wife. I am preparing a memorial to her and found Churchill’s words as quoted in Andrew Roberts’ recent biography to be perfect. The sense of his words is that his wife Clementine was was a frequent, strong and fair critic of his writings, always helpful. I know that is not much to go on but I would appreciate corroborating information. —M.S., via email

A: “Here firm, though all be drifting”

I will have to ponder your question, because his remarks about Lady Churchill are mainly tributes to her as wife, friend and advisor, not literary critic–although of course she was that too. I don’t think she vetted many of his books. An exception perhaps is The World Crisis, which she experienced personally, often painfully. “Here firm,” he often said of her in those harder days, “though all be drifting.”

Her counsel was more frequently sought over his speeches, but was sometimes rejected. In 1945, for example, she warned him not to say the Labour Party would have to rely on “some form of Gestapo” to enforce their programs if they were elected. Aside from the injudicious comparison, voters had a hard time seeing Clement Attlee, the mild-mannered Labour leader, as a stormtrooper. (I can’t resist a note: In the 1980s a London friend, lifetime Labour voter, said the activities of certain London Labour councils “indeed remind me of the Gestapo.” Whoops!)

“…shaking her beautiful head [over] some new and pregnant point I am developing…”

There are probably many instances where she closely influenced his compositions. We must look out for them. (I am compiling a new, extended and revised edition of Churchill by Himself.) Her role as critic was noted by many beside her husband. One such was Lady Diana Cooper, quoting WSC in on page 512 of my book. I will elaborate on that by supplying some of the surrounding words:

Calm she also had, with a well-balanced judgment of people and situations—consistent and reliable. She often knew the sheep from the goats better than Winston did. “Clemmie sits behind me on the platform, shaking her beautiful head in disagreement with some new and pregnant point I am developing,” I remember his saying, with pride in her stable Liberalism, after some Tory meeting. Her devotion never subjected her to becoming a doormat or to taking the easier way with her high-powered Hercules.

Lady Diana’s tribute to CSC is beautiful. You can read it in a few minutes, and you should. Her son, Lord Norwich, did not know it existed until we wrote him for reprint permission. The full text (elaborated somewhat with excerpts from her other writings) is on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project website.

“Warm summer sun, Shine kindly here…”

I will keep your request in mind and add anything I find to this page. Baroness Spencer-Churchill died on 12 December 1977, outliving her husband by over a dozen years. After cremation, her ashes were placed in Churchill’s grave at Bladon at a private family service on 16th December.

My sympathies on your loss. I cannot imagine that myself, and always hope I shall go first. This was Churchill’s luck. It is, I realize, selfish. On wifely tributes, my favorite, from Mark Twain to his wife Livvy, also applies to to Clementine:

Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

“No Cutlet Uncooked”: Andrew Roberts’s Superb Churchill Biography

Richard M. Langworth — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 16:14:28 +0000

Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. New York, Viking, 2018, 1152 pages, $40, Amazon $25.47, Kindle $17.99. Also published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For Hillsdale reviews of Churchill works since 2014, click here. For a list of and notes on books about Churchill from 1905 currently through 1995, visit Hillsdale’s annotated bibliography.

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.” These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

… as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

“Bring It On”: Inspecting Dover fortifications, 31 July 1940. “I never gave them courage. I was able to focus theirs.”

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

Churchill: Scattershot Snipe and the Answers to It

Richard M. Langworth — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 15:53:49 +0000

My brother Andrew Roberts, author of the new and vital Churchill: Walking with Destiny, passes along a reader snipe which nails rickety new planks on the creepy ship Churchill Snipes. Incredible as it may seem, the writer manages to create a few we’ve never heard before. They will be added to my “Assault on Churchill: A Reader’s Guide.” As will another farrago by a loopy astronaut, about which you’ve probably already heard.

Snipe synopsis

Snipe 1) “Why doesn’t Andrew Roberts spell out Churchill’s mistakes? They were not all that innocent.”

Whole seminars could be devoted to whether Churchill’s mistakes—in fact exhaustively catalogued by Roberts—were innocent and well intended, or maliciously calculated. In forty years I’ve read nothing to indicate the latter. The charge is ridiculous.

Snipe 2) “His war tactics were not very good despite advice from Americans. In World War I he together with Kitchener proposed attacking Turkey at Gallipoli, with a total lack of knowledge of Turkish power.

Wrong. Churchill’s first impulse was to get at Germany by naval action via the Baltic Sea. On 28 October 1914 Turkey entered the war on he side of the Germans. The Turks mined the Dardanelles, bottling up the Russians, who appealed for help. Churchill ordered a naval bombardment of outer Dardanelles forts “from a safe distance,” thinking “the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over.”

Easy victories in early skirmishes made him think again, especially when Mediterranean commander Admiral Carden said he thought the Navy could force the straits. The War Cabinet believed an allied fleet appearing off Constantinople might force Turkey to surrender. The Gallipoli landing occurred months after the Dardanelles operation stalled. On-scene commanders botched both actions. All of this is clearly presented in Chapter 12 of my book, Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality. See also “Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary” herein.

Those poor Iraqis

Snipe 3) “In 1920-22 he bombed Iraqi tribes with airplanes instead of giving them independence because he wanted the oil from Mosul for his fleet.”

It wasn’t his fleet, it was Britain’s. Its oil was secured by the Anglo-Persian oil deal. Churchill wasn’t even in charge of the Admiralty in 1920-22. As Colonial Secretary he not only gave Iraq independence, he yearned to wash his hands of it. Writing Prime Minister Lloyd George, he called Iraq an “ungrateful volcano” from which Britain got “nothing worth having.” (The thought sounds eerily familiar today.)

On aerial bombing, Martin Gilbert wrote in Winston S. Churchill, vol. IV, pages 796-97: “At the beginning of June Churchill learnt from the War Office that aerial action had been taken on the Lower Euphrates, not to suppress a riot, but to put pressure on certain villages to pay their taxes. He telegraphed at once in protest to [Middle East Administrator] Sir Percy Cox. “Aerial action is a legitimate means of quelling disturbances or enforcing maintenance of order,” he wrote, “but it should in no circumstances be employed in support of purely administrative measures such as collection of revenue.”

Cox replied that the bombing had not been to punish villages for not paying taxes but to suppress rebels testing whether Iraqi authorities could rely on Britain. Churchill “withdrew his rebuke, minuting on Cox’s telegram a short but emphatic reply: ‘Certainly I am a great believer in air power and will help it forward in every way.'”

A Snipe over Gertrude

Snipe 4) “Gertrude Bell committed suicide because of him.”

Why ever for? From Churchill, Gertrude Bell got everything she wanted in the Middle East: break-up of the Ottoman Empire; Arab States in Iraq and Jordan; Arab kings Feisal and Abdullah as respective kings. (Bell hoped they would become unifying figures; Abdullah’s descendant rules Jordan today.) Bell suffered from pleurisy. She died of an overdose of sleeping pills, whether intentional or not is unknown. (Incidentally, it was Bell and Lawrence who talked Churchill out of creating a separate Kurdistan. In retrospect, doing so would have spared the region less trouble.)

* * *

Snipe 5) “Probably his biggest error was to fix the US$/£ exchange rate at 4.1 in 1929, the damage caused much unemployment throughout the 1930s.”

Rubbish. The post-World War I recession and heavy debt sank the pound to $3.66 by 1920. Under Churchill as Chancellor (1924-29) and with the Gold Standard, it rose to $4.80, its prewar level. The pound’s devaluation to $4.10 occurred after Britain left gold on 12 September 1930, over a year since Churchill had left office. Depression and unemployment caused the pound to sink, not the other way round.

Snipe 6) “All that said, no one would have had the courage to continue to battle Hitler through all the years of World War II [but] we all need to be truthful about our politicians at all times.

Good. Get your facts right, then.

Andrew Roberts Archives - Richard M. Langworth

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