Garfield’s gripping novel: fictional biography?

The late, prolific Brian Garfield wrote this book four decades ago, yet I am still asked about it—and whether it could be true.

The story Mr. Garfield tells seems impossible—fantastic. An eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Creighton leaps a garden wall in Kent one day. He finds himself face to face with the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament. He will later know the great man by the code-name “Tigger.” It is 1935.

Christopher, who continues to invade Chartwell, impresses Churchill with his audacity and pluck. Four years later, aged fifteen, he is recruited into the British Secret Service by a pair of spy-masters known as “Owl” and “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Christopher’s climacterics

Garfield’s young warrior then accomplishes a succession of what Churchill might call “climacterics.” He warns that Belgium plans to surrender to Hitler. (One book reviewer said “without a fight.”) Advance knowledge of the Belgian collapse enables the British to pull off a fighting retreat, saving 338,000 French and English soldiers at Dunkirk.

But Christopher is just getting warmed up. Next, he finds secret U-boat pens in Ireland and blows the Germans’ most strategic cover for Atlantic warfare. Then he sabotages a friendly Dutch submarine and sends its crew to the bottom after it reports the Japanese battle fleet en route to Pearl Harbor. Churchill has concluded the Americans must not be warned—lest it enable them to avoid war. Back in London, Christopher finishes the job by murdering the only cipher clerk who has read the Dutch sub’s message. And she turns out to be one of his lady friends.

He engineers the assassination of Vichy’s treacherous Admiral Darlan, and tips off the Nazis to the Dieppe raid so they will meet it in force, convincing the Americans that it is too soon for a cross-channel invasion. Finally, when the D-Day invasion really is on, he steers the Germans into defending Calais and not Normandy. By which time Christopher Creighton is a good deal older, wiser, sadder and bloodier. But war is a dirty business!

Counter-factuals

The Belgian scenario is quite contrary to history. The Belgians fought bravely against overwhelming odds for several weeks in May 1940. Also, King Leopold issued warnings of his impending surrender in advance. The Germans never had secret U-boat pens in Ireland. (See for example Warren Kimball’s article, “That Neutral Island.” Dieppe was a disaster, but not by plan: Terry Reardon has carefully catalogued the many errors in its planning and execution. (All three of these articles are published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.)

Numerous conspiracy theories attend Pearl Harbor. One says Roosevelt knew and let it happen to get Congress to declare war. Another says Churchill knew, and kept the news from Roosevelt, so the Americans would be dragged in. This is simply silly. No American president, especially a lover of the Navy, would allow his country’s military to be so badly damaged. No British prime minister would withhold advance warning. Surely, an alerted American fleet and aircraft would have engaged the Japanese, and war would have happened anyway.

Read for entertainment, however….

But Brian Garfield spun a great yarn. Although the imagination strains over many conspiracies engineered by a boy, The Paladin is gripping, well-written and plausible. The Churchill Garfield describes tallies closely with the best accounts of his contemporaries. The vivid scenes at the “hole in the ground” (Cabinet War Rooms) are painted with authority. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Belgians and French, the British and German agents, are entirely believable. Brian Garfield is as plausible than Len Deighton, as exciting as Ian Fleming. His novel is splendid entertainment, and you should definitely add a copy to your library of tall tales.

Garfield set tongues wagging back in 1980, when promoting his new book. “The hero is a real person,” he wrote. “He is now in his fifties. His name is not Christopher Creighton.”

I’ve often thought that the Churchill novels of Michael Dobbs are so well scripted, so faithful to the real-life characters in them—and that we would not be surprised to see Dobbs’s scenes described as truth  by some careless future writer. Well, Brian Garfield had a twenty-year head start on Dobbs, and did him one better. In the 1990s, someone named “Christopher Creighton” surfaced, with a book about a secret raid on Berlin. We report, you decide.

The Irish novelist George Moore originated the tale that Sir Winston’s mother Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, slept with 200 men. Assuming she did so, say, between ages 20 and 60, she averaged five per year, a ten-week average affair (if she had them one at a time, with a couple days’ break in between). Which is a lot of lovers to maintain, given the state of Victorian and Edwardian locomotion.

However ridiculous, the claim stuck, and is regularly trotted out and embellished on a medium poor Jennie never anticipated: the Internet. It occurs so often because it’s so easy to rattle off, and prurient enough to raise a website’s Google Analytics—never mind whether it is even feasible.

Enchantress, Rosaura and Christina

I pondered the Jennie canard (Chapter 1 in my next book) when Google Alerts produced a veritable trifecta of nonsense in today’s installment of Churchill references on the Internet. (It’s not Google’s fault; they just crawl the web and the job is done by “bots.”)

You can now buy Winston Churchill’s luxury yacht. If you’ve got an extra $2.1 million, you can buy a part of history and sail off into the sunset. Winston Churchill’s 127-foot, 90-year-old yacht Amazone is for sale. The yacht is composed of three decks that can sleep up to 12 people, and was built by England’s Thornycroft Shipyard in 1936, before he became the UK’s Prime Minister. —Fox News

There were three notable yachts in Churchill’s 90-year story. One was HMS Enchantress, the Admiralty yacht. There he whiled away many days at sea when First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-15). She was sold for scrap in 1935. The second was Rosaura, owned by his friend Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne. On her the Churchills made several voyages in the 1920s and 1930s. The third is Aristotle Onassis’ Christina. She famously hosted Churchill on seven cruises between 1958 and 1962, and is still afloat, in the charter business.

Churchill never ordered or owned a yacht, in 1936 or at any other time. His finances were too fraught even to consider one. There is no trace of any vessel named Amazone in the Churchill Archives, Churchill Papers or files plumbed by author David Lough in his book on Churchill’s finances, No More Champagne.

Nonsense #1463: Success quotes

Wisdom To Live By. Quotes of the Day: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill On Drive: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” —Investor’s Business Daily

How do these nonsense stories, so often shown to be false, continue to bedizen the Internet, like Lady Randolph’s lovers? If only I had the reach of Investor’s Business Daily. Read “Churchill’s Phoney ‘Success’ Quotes” by clicking here.

Nonsense #1464: The Paladin

Peter Chelsom Set to Helm WW2 Assassin Tale The Paladin. Set during the darkest days of the war, The Paladin tells the incredible true story of how Winston Churchill orchestrated a monumental shift in the war through a top-secret program where he turned a 15-year-old boy into one of England’s deadliest assassins. —Deadline.com

Brian Garfield wrote a wonderful, “unputdownable” yarn that is utterly fictitious (which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it; it’s a gripping yarn). The odd thing about this announcement is that they first call it “the incredible true story,” and then tell us it is “based on Brian Garfield’s historical novel.” Say what?

The same Google Alert also delivers a death notice for 96-year-old Christina Morrison, who claimed that she worked as a codebreaker in Whitehall during WW2, and once encountered a late-night worker, the Prime Minister, in his pyjamas.

I have no reason to doubt the lady, and I hope she at least told the truth. Otherwise Google Alerts has set a new one-day record for the most goofy Churchillian fables in one post.