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.

I published in 2010 an account of Churchill’s youthful (circa 1910-12) fling with Eugenics, a pseudo-science popular at the turn of the century. Eugenics favored sterilizing or confining the “feeble-minded” to “maintain the race.”

This drew an irate letter from a reader who said he will never think the same of Churchill, knowing that he could have supported such horrendous ideas:

No truly educated intelligent person, even in those early years, can have bought into Eugenics. Churchill’s was not just a fling of youth or immaturity but the decided opinion of a nearly middle-aged man. His support of Eugenics could only lead to the extremities practiced to by the Nazis.

Our article simply outlined the factual history of Churchill’s youthful Eugenics fling. It certainly was a fling, because he abandoned it quickly. So indeed did most intelligent people, though not all of them. Proponents included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft. Holmes wrote the famous 1927 Supreme Court opinion in Buck v. Bell that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

To say that “no truly educated intelligent person” could adopt such views reminds me that a terrible lot of educated intelligent persons quite happily adopted Nazism and Bolshevism.

Eugenics in retrospect

That aside, students of Churchill need always to consider the wider picture. A good start is the excerpt we published with that article, from Paul Addison’s Churchill on the Home Front:

Churchill’s intentions were benign, but he was blundering into sensitive areas of civil liberty. Yet it is rare to discover in the archives the reflections of a politician on the nature of man. Churchill’s belief in the innate virtue of the great majority of human beings was part and parcel of an optimism he often expressed before the First World War.

Professor Addison was always a go-to authority for balanced, thoughtful reflections on Churchill. He implies that the First World War tempered Churchill’s optimism. Certainly the Second did.

To assert that a fleeting belief in Eugenics disqualifies Churchill as a hero is to surrender his legacy. In current contentions, our maxim is: Surrender nothing, lest you lose everything. A brief encounter with bad science is a mistake many make. Few however can sensibly claim to have saved civilization.

Concluded in Part 2...

A Corpus of Excellence

Paul read for an undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Oxford before moving to Nuffield College, Oxford for postgraduate study. In 1967 he became a Lecturer at Edinburgh University and subsequently a Reader for twenty-three years. He became an Endowment Fellow in 1990, and Directed the Centre for Second World War Studies from 1996 to 2005.

Paul wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the London Review of Books. Primarily, his wife Rosy remembers, he aimed “to make making history accessible, understandable and comprehensible to his fellow human beings.”

We met in mid-1994, when Barbara and I hosted our seventh Churchill Tour. Our second in Scotland, it was a notable adventure, taking us all the way to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. There we saw, on full-color sonar, the shape of HMS Royal Oak on the bottom—torpedoed by U-47 in 1939. It was an eerie image, like that of USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Our tour began with a vast exhibit of Churchill in political cartoons, organized for us at Edinburgh University by Paul, and David Stafford, his longtime colleague. From then on, I paid attention, and read every book of theirs I could lay my hands on.

Paul Addison wrote and edited ten Churchill works, listed below. His classic, still a “standard work,” was Churchill on the Home Front (1992). Atypically for most Churchill writers then, Paul took the approach of studying the domestic side of WSC’s politics. Until this book, the prevailing impression was that Churchill was bored with domestic issues. Methodically Paul showed how completely wrong that was, weighing the evidence with  grace and understanding.

“High sense of the British moment”

Paul understood the statesman’s greatness, warts and all. “Which warts,” William Buckley said, “do not deface Churchill because of the nobility of his cause, and his high sense of the British moment.” Nothing will ever surpass 1940—but Churchill accomplished much else. Paul limned the peaks, and the valleys. Churchill’s faults like his virtues were on a grand scale, he would say. But there’s no doubt that the latter heavily outweighed the former.

Here is an example: Churchill’s youthful fling with Eugenics, and the idea of sterilizing the mentally incompetent. There was quite an uproar about this when it was “discovered.” (Read: someone finally found it in the public records.)

Churchill’s Eugenics was a fling because he abandoned it quickly, along with most intelligent people. But some readers were outraged. “I can never think good things of him again,” one said. “No truly educated intelligent person could adopt such views.” (Well…a lot of educated intelligent persons happily adopted Nazism and Bolshevism.)

Dr. Addison showed us the balanced way to look at this issue. Churchill’s intentions were benign, he wrote. “but he was blundering into sensitive areas of civil liberty.” Then he drew a deeper lesson no one else had contemplated:

Yet it is rare to discover reflections of a politician on the nature of man. Churchill’s belief in the innate virtue of the great majority of human beings was part and parcel of an optimism he often expressed before the First World War.

This was perceptive, broadminded and fair. And Paul also explained why Churchill was unique. Few politicians reflect on “the nature of man.” Fewer still  believe “in the innate virtue of human beings.” Such understanding is a rare thing among writers of history.

His Work Abides

Books by Paul Addison

The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War 1 (1977, rev. 1994). A rigorously researched study of the crucial moment when political parties put aside their differences to unite under Churchill and focus on the task of war. But the war years witnessed a radical shift in political power, dramatically expressed in Labour’s decisive victory in 1945.

Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945–1951 (1985, rev. 1994). Vast changes in British society followed the most destructive war ever known. Britain reshaped itself with high ideals and a collective desire to enjoy the fruits and opportunities of peacetime.

Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (1992). “A tour de force on Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and a subtle portrait of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian.” —Kirkus

Churchill: The Unexpected Hero, Lives and Legacies Series (2005). In the Second World War, Churchill won twice: over Nazi Germany, and over a legion of sceptics who derided his judgement and denied his claims to greatness. One of the best “brief lives” ever published on Winston Churchill.

* * *

Winston Churchill, Oxford VIP Series (2007). Text from Dr. Addison’s Churchill entry for the new Dictionary of National Biography. Hailed as a miniature masterpiece, an even briefer life than Unexpected Hero. It is dramatic and penetrating despite fewer than 150 pages. The ideal book to read if you read nothing else about Churchill.

No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (2010). Studies the vastly changing character of British society since the end of the Second World War. A series of peaceful revolutions transformed the country. The peace and prosperity of the second half of the 20th century appear as more powerful solvents of settled ways of life than the Battle of the Somme or the Blitz.

The Connell Guide to Winston Churchill (2016). A short, incisive guide based on the author’s Dictionary of National Biography entry. Text is arranged in Q&A format and designed to answer young people’s questions about Churchill. It analyzes his extraordinary career and looks at the radically different ways in which historians have seen him.

Editor – Contributor

Time to Kill: A Soldier’s Experience of War in the West (1997). Foreword by Len Deighton. Papers by numerous scholars. Based on a University of Edinburgh symposium on the Second World War seen through soldiers’ eyes, from Africans under European to command, to Soviet women fighting alongside the men, to ordinary “squaddies” on the front lines in all theaters of war.

The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain (2000): Paul and Jeremy Craig compile the work of seventeen accomplished historians on every aspect of a history-changing battle. No survey could be more wide-ranging or fascinating. First published in 2000 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle, since reissued.

Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (2006). Paul, Jeremy Craig and a panel of experts reassess the evidence and the issues, including whether the Dresden bombing constitutes a war crime. The book considers why Dresden has come to raise military and ethical questions on the waging of total war.

Further tributes

Ian S. Wood’s eloquent memorial in The Scotsman: “Paul had no time for some of the simplistic vilification of Churchill that crept into this debate. He saw Churchill as someone of ­volcanic energy and true courage, though ­unable to shake off the prejudices of the era which had formed him…. In the end, Paul wrote, ‘the recognition of [Churchill’s] frailties and flaws has worked in his favour. It has brought him up to date by making him into the kind of hero our ­disenchanted culture can accept and admire: a hero with feet of clay.'”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project shortly publishes my separate tribute from a scholarly aspect, together with a compilation of all his Churchill writing from his university thesis to articles, contributions and chapters in other books by Professor Antoine Capet.