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.

Oslo Variations

A reader reminds us of these obscure orations by sending one: Churchill’s dinner speech on May 12th. His source is Churchill’s Visit to Norway (Oslo: Cappelens, 1949). Curiously, we found wide variation and two omissions from Churchill’s Europe Unite. One omission involves Admiral François Darlan, who disgraced himself by refusing to safeguard the French fleet from a likely German takeover in 1940.

This raises a question familiar to quotations editors. Which is the authoritative text? My usual rule is to go by the final revised edition of Churchill’s own works, if possible. For Oslo 1948, that is Europe Unite, which had no later edition.  (The Complete Speeches usually duplicates, more or less, his speech volumes.)

What about the passages reported by Cappelens but not in Europe Unite? Were the Norwegians editorializing? Not likely. Translation anomalies are one explanation. But the omitted sections do sound like Churchill. So it’s more likely that Randolph Churchill, editing Europe Unite, deleted them.

Darlan (and the subsequent British destruction of the French Fleet) are sore subjects among Frenchmen. While Randolph Churchill was editing Europe Unite, Churchill’s second volume of war memoirs, L’heure Tragique, was causing controversy in France over his account of France’s fall, including Darlan’s behavior. Randolph, or his father, may have judged it unnecessary to fan more flames.

Churchill by Himself: Maxims

Starting with “Maxims,” here are the new entries from Churchill’s 12 May 1948 Oslo dinner speech, arranged by subject and referenced by title and page number.

Kindness and Humility: “The more kindness I receive, the more humble I become.” —Europe Unite, 329. Churchill continued: “I know very well how vain it is for individuals to try to gather to themselves all the credit which really belongs to the great countries and the great nations whose virtues have had the opportunity of crediting to themselves in world history.”

Right and Wrong: “The problem of life is not presented to us as a simple calculation of what is wise and what is foolish…because judgments are falsified by events.” —Cappelens, 33. Churchill continued: “…if you will obey the promptings of your spirit or nature, when your conscience gives you such lights as may be granted, you will find that there is a way which is far safer in the long run than all the calculations of the most astute and clever politicians that have ever been made.” (This passage is not in Europe Unite or the Complete Speeches.)

World War II

Political Options, May 1940: “I have often been praised for things I said at the beginning of the War, when England was fighting alone. That was only expressions of my people [because] it was their courage and great qualities I put into words. And it was what my colleagues wanted me to say. If I had not, they would have pulled me to pieces, as I certainly would have pulled them to pieces the other way round.” —Europe Unite, 329.

People

Galeazzo Ciano: “Take for instance Count Ciano who started the attack on France and England in the moment when France was beaten. “France will not come again in five thousand years,” he said. But in two years the situation was changed. That does show how even seemingly clever calculations very often do not come off at all.” —Europe Unite, 330. Gian Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944), Second Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari, Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy 1936-42. Executed by firing squad, 11 January 1944, at the behest of his father-in-law, Mussolini, under pressure from Germany.

François Darlan: “There was a man who had the French navy in the hollow of his hand; he had only to give the word to sail away to America, or to the French colonies, and he would have gone there, carrying with him the title-deeds of the France of the future, of Free France….But he cast it all away by calculation. He thought that to become Minister of Marine would give him more power at the time; and so he lost all that he cared most about, and his life was cast away in shame, where it might have been long preserved in honour, through calculation.” —Cappelens, 32. (This passage is not in Europe Unite or the Complete Speeches.ˆ)

Oslo University Ring

“I thank you most cordially for your kindness and for all you have done for me. I wear the ring of the Oslo University on my finger and will consider it as a kind of marriage ring.I must confess that I have quite a selection of University Degrees and their insignias at home, but I have never received a ring with any degree before. “—Europe, 331. “What happened to the ring?” was the reader question that set off this trawl for Churchill’s Oslo remarks. The only University ring ever presented to him, it is unknown to his family, and its present whereabouts are uncertain.

Conjecture

Omissions from speeches pose a question for nitpickers and fussbudgets like me. Why? Cappelens probably translated the text from Norwegian news reports, That would explain part of it—but not the huge passages about Darlan and “the problem of life,” missing in the speech volumes.

Were the Cappelens people editorializing? It seems unlikely. The Darlan text sounds like genuine Churchill prose. More likely Randolph Churchill, the editor of Europe Unite, did a little culling. Perhaps he desired not to ruffle French feathers over Darlan. His father always felt Darlan lost his chance at glory by refusing to safeguard the French fleet after the Fall of France in June 1940. This caused Churchill and the Royal Navy to attack a good part of it at Mers el-Kebir, a sad chapter in wartime history.

The omission of Churchill’s musings over “the problem of life” is harder to explain. Nevertheless, this was an interesting exercise in the establishment of texts. It serves as a warning which Churchill himself often quoted: “Verify your quotations.”