On 27 June 1954, Churchill was quoted as saying “jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” (William H. Lawrence, “Churchill urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers,” The New York Times, page 1; and Walter Trohan, “‘Vigilance and Time’ Asked by Churchill,” Chicago Daily Tribune, page 1. Did Churchill say this? —M.D.

No. From my Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, page 37:

“Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” —1954 Commonly misquoted as ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,’ an expression coined four years later by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, on a visit to Australia.

I verified this from Sir Martin Gilbert who referred to his official biography, Volume 8, Never Despair, (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), page 1004: “Churchill then told the American legislators…that conferences of this kind were vitally important, that meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”*

* footnote 1: “On 30 January 1958 Harold Macmillan, speaking in Canberra, echoed Churchill’s words with the phrase (frequently but wrongly attributed to Churchill himself), ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.’” Also page 1005 footnote 1: “’Notes on remarks by the President and the Prime Minister at the Congressional Luncheon at the White House, Saturday afternoon, June 26, 1954’: Eisenhower papers.”

Several newspaper accounts appeared at the time, quoting Churchill as saying “jaw-jaw…” etc.. Clearly, the newspapers inaccurately quoted Churchill before Macmillan used the phrase “jaw-jaw” (which may explain where Macmillan picked it up).

The Lawrence report again (2021):

The jaw-jaw business continues to resurface. Another reader writes:

William H. Lawrence was not a cub journalist, but The New York Times Senior Washington Correspondent when he wrote the subhead the day after WSC’s meeting with Congress: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” He went on, quoting congressional sources: “Turning to the Far East the Prime Minister volunteered that he was a strong supporter of ‘peaceful co-existence with China.’ ‘I know” he said, “that some think this is almost heresy. Nevertheless Eden’s two words are pretty good words—to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Other newspapers reported somewhat differently but Lawrence had the stature of reliable sources to get this quote in its richness from the “no press” meeting. It wasn’t just the front page subhead but the detailed  follow-on that lends credibility.

Now compare this detail to your recitation and acceptance of Gilbert’s contrary quotation—almost a throwaway line. Did he get it from a copy of speech notes that might have been changed— did he hear it— did someone tell him? We don’t know because he cited no source. Even Gilbert is challengeable, given a detailed quote from a respected senior journalist—versus his unattributed throwaway line. Macmillan’s use of the quote attributing it to WSC later reinforces it. He certainly had time to verify it before using it, rather than simply taking it from a newspaper headline.

Either not verbatim, nor not 1954:

This argument is unpersuasive and doesn’t challenge Martin Gilbert’s conclusions. 1) Lawrence has Churchill referring to “Eden’s two words,” but so far as we know, Anthony Eden never voiced them. 2) Sir Martin did offer a source (Official Biography VIII, 1004.): “Notes on remarks by the President and the Prime Minister at the Congressional Luncheon at the White House, Saturday afternoon, June 26, 1954, Eisenhower Papers.” 3) Stature as a journalist doesn’t preclude someone from making a mistake. 4) Even if Lawrence was reporting what he thought Churchill said, that is not dispositive. A transcript or official summary, such as the Eisenhower Papers, is not a “throwaway line.”

In 1966, the ESU Philadelphia Branch hosted an exhibit of my Churchill biographical stamp collection at the Philadelphia National Bank. It was the first public appearance of whatever limited Churchill knowledge I then had, my “awakening” as a Churchillian. I have a warm memory of the experience—but doubts about that secondhand quote.

Why secondhand?

It’s secondhand because it’s from a second party—not something we can track to Churchill’s published works. I searched Hillsdale College’s digital scans of 75 million published words by and about him. This includes his own 20 million words and over 50 million about him. It includes all his published books, articles, speeches and papers, along with biographies, memoirs and studies by others. Neither the full quote nor its components could be found.

There were no hits for “speak in this country.” There were 15 hits for “you can do anything,” and one came close. This was a speech in the House of Commons, 22 August 1916. (Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, III, 2490.) He was referring to the successful organization of war tribunals: “You can do anything in this country,” he said,  if you have the will and the intention to do it.”

Obviously that’s not good enough, I advised the ESU. So their quote seemed to be another example of secondhand invention—”Churchillian Drift.”

A Solid source

Think again! Natasha Goodfellow of UK branch of the ESU took those comments and raised me one with excellent research. Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, reported the remark in 1975, she wrote. She sent a newspaper cutting from The Observer of 11 May 1975. While the quote remains secondhand, the evidence gives it real validity—and some current interest.

On 5 June 1975, Britain held a referendum on membership in the European Union. Its successor, the European Union, is what Britain has now just left. The 1975 vote was 2:1 in favor of what was then, of course, a Free Trade association. The more objectional developments came later, with the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent loss of sovereignty. Hailsham was a judge for the 17th John Smith Memorial Mace Award for the Schools Debating Association. The winner defeated the motion, “That this House disapproves of the Referendum.”

In criticizing the debaters, Lord Hailsham said most students spoke too quickly. “Even if the speaker thought his audience was incompetent, it was not wise to make that clear.” Hailsham had further advice: Avoid Latin quips (Churchill certainly did that). Avoid clichés (like “Ship of State”). Imitate nobody (Churchill imitated his father). Above all, he added, “remember what Churchill told him” after “a magnificent speech at the Oxford Union: ‘If you can speak in this country, you can do anything.’” (The italics are Hailsham’s.)

When secondhand is valid

Given Ms. Goodfellow’s evidence, I at once advised the ESU to consider this quote genuine—provided they include the italics, which add authority by sounding exactly like Churchillian phraseology. What clinches it, however, is the reliability of the source.

Lord Hailsham (1907-2001) was a distinguished Parliamentarian. His first role in Whitehall was as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Air in the 1945 Churchill government. He later served as First Lord of the Admiralty, Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council. He was a a candidate to succeed Harold Macmillan as prime minister in 1963, and renounced his hereditary peerage to be eligible. But he was passed over in favor of the Earl of Home. He was created a life peer in 1970 and served as Lord Chancellor, the office formerly held by his father, until 1987.

The validity of secondhand quotes depends on the reliability of the quoter. Lord Moran and Lord Boothby, for example, tended to exaggerate and elaborate. Their reported diaries contained much that was not contemporary, written long after the fact. Churchill colleagues and confidants like Lord Soames or Sir Anthony Montague Browne were more fastidious, almost invariably reliable. Lord Hailsham belongs in the latter category.

I will gladly add this second but reliable quip to the 500 new quotations in the next edition of my book, Churchill by Himself, “if there is one.” (As Churchill reportedly said, but didn’t, to George Bernard Shaw about the next performance of a new play.)

A remaining question…

It would be nice to know which Oxford Union speech this was. Perhaps a kind reader will care to speculate? Clearly, Churchill said this after swimming against the tide—as he almost always did at the Union.

“It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we ourselves cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities.” This quote is a red herring —not Churchill.

Hoist on my own petard! Alan Ingram, a kind reader, has helped me correct several attributions (four of them mine) of this quote to Churchill. The remark, excluding Britain from a federal Europe, belongs to his then-foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. I plead…

Guilty with an explanation:

My error and others’ occurred by misreading successive quotes in John Charmley’s Churchill’s Grand Alliance (1995). This is a critique of the one-sided postwar “special relationship.” On page 250, Charmley quotes Churchill’s telling cabinet note of 29 November 1951:

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. (National Archives, CAB129/48C [51] 32)

Dr. Charmley follows this with ellipses and Eden’s words about Britain not taking part in a federal Europe. He correctly provides a separate footnote, citing Eden’s memorandum to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, 6 December 1951.

Of course, Eden was reflecting Churchill’s own opinion on the Europe Unite movement. A week later Churchill himself wrote: “the Americans would like us to fall into the general line of European pensioners which we have no intention of doing.”

On  11 May 1953, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons: “We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a federal European system. We feel we have a special relationship to both.” Clearly, at that time, Churchill and Eden were as one on the issue.

For a fuller account of Churchill’s statements on united Europe, please see “EU and Churchill’s Views.” (That post is revised with the correct attribution, and other quotations.)

“Keep England White”

Here is another supposed quote with current connotations. The Hillsdale College Churchill Project was asked to confirm Churchill’s alleged proposal of “Keep England White” as a Conservative slogan in the 1955 election. Is this misunderstood or misattributed? Both.

This was neither a public nor a confirmed private statement. It is not in official minutes, or The Churchill Documents, Volume 23 (2019). Its origin is a diary entry by Harold Macmillan. After a 20 January 1955 Cabinet meeting, Macmillan wrote: “The P.M. thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good campaign slogan!”

I found the Macmillan reference on a website called Traditional Britain. You will quickly grasp their political stance, but in fairness, they do link two negative references to this remark. The first is from The Guardian, to cite Churchill’s “true views” on immigration.” The second is a 1993 uproar involving Sir Winston’s grandson, Winston Churchill (1940-2010). He called immigration “the no-go area of British politics.” He stated: “If we are to curb the scourge of racism we must first and foremost stop adding to the problem.”

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

Out of context, the three words seem pretty stark. In context, Churchill was supporting limits on Caribbean immigration. He did not discuss other black or brown people at that meeting. Of course, it is well established that Churchill in the 1950s resisted unlimited immigration. Is this racist? We report, you decide.

Randolph Churchill Postwar

Out of the Army and Parliament in 1945, and divorced from Pamela in 1946, Randolph Churchill led a “rampaging existence,” his sister Mary wrote. “He always had lances to break, and hares to start.” He was loyal and affectionate, but he “would pick an argument with a chair.”

In 1948 he married June Osborne and fathered his second child, Arabella. The long-suffering June left  him in 1961.

He combined generous devotion to those he loved with an acid tongue and pen for those he didn’t. Many of the latter, I think, richly deserved what they got. But his public persona was based on the acid.

In the mid-1950s, surgery revealed that a tumor on his lung was benign. His lifelong friend, Evelyn Waugh, burst into the bar at White’s Club: “Have you heard the news? They’ve cut out the only part of Randolph that is not malignant!” Randolph responded by sending the devout Catholic Waugh an Easter card, wishing him a “Happy Resurrection.” They remained devoted to each other.

Character and Quality

His political career fizzled in part because he was unwilling to put up with local committee humbug. Thus he never gained the longed-for safe seat, where he could fight at his father’s side. In truth the Conservatives resented him. Before the war he’d battled their official candidates, splitting the vote and costing seats. Tory resentment at Winston’s rebellions was tempered by his wartime leadership, though it never really vanished. With Randolph they had no reason to hide their dislike, and after war they never forgot. It was a great loss, because his debating skills were formidable.

Randolph despised injustice. Landing in Johannesburg in the Apartheid days, he was handed an immigration form asking him to state his race. “Damned cheek!” he exclaimed, and began writing furiously, embellishing the myth of Indian blood in Churchill veins:

Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case, the object of this enquiry is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocahontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe.

Then he gaily burned his press card, while a little girl watched fascinated.

Someone said that Randolph’s main feature was “generosity rather than honesty.” I feel sure he was both. Writing the biography, Sir Martin recalled, Randolph would constantly tell his staff, “I am interested only in the truth.” Bluntness brought him constant disputes with others less truthful. But no one can say that honesty wasn’t one of his great qualities.

At Stour: The Beast of Bergholt

In 1955 Randolph purchased Stour House in East Bergholt, Suffolk, in the heart of Constable Country. On the terrace wall, Randolph affixed a plaque quoting Constable: “I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor give up any time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt.” Martin Gilbert wondered:

Were we, Randolph’s researchers, “ghosts” and “paid hacks,” among the “commonplace people” when storms raged? We certainly felt as much. In September 1964 all four researchers (Michael Wolff, Andrew Kerr, George Thayer and myself ) and the four secretaries on the payroll at the time, received a collective exhortation, one of Randolph’s (and his father’s) favourite verses:

The heights of great men reached and kept,

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upwards in the night.

History was for him a feast, full of delicious morsels. And so … it became for me. Randolph’s personality, with its exhortations and eccentricities, kept the team on its toes.

Once a telegram arrived in which the address was given not as East Bergholt but Beast Bergholt. Randolph immediately announced with a broad grin that he was now “the Beast of Bergholt.” On another occasion he said, “I am an explosion that leaves the house still standing.” Sadly, the beast was the side of him most people saw.

Randolph Exploding

He honored and copied his father but nursed uneasy grievances that surfaced when he was drunk. In the late Fifties, at dinner on the Onassis yacht in the Aegean, he suddenly turned on his aged father with a stream of invective that sent Sir Winston to his cabin, pale and shaking. Onassis got rid of Randolph the next day by arranging for him to interview the King of Greece. He left the ship smiling, but in the launch, Churchill’s private secretary Anthony Montague Browne found him weeping. “You didn’t think I was taken in by that plan, do you?” he said. “I do so very much love that man, but something always goes wrong between us.”

Alas, his son wrote, “Randolph had no idea how unpleasant and offensive he could be when he was drunk. By the time he was sober he had largely forgotten or become oblivious to what had passed.”

* * *

At Stour one evening the guest was the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Donald McLachlan. Randolph was excited because the Telegraph would be serializing the biography. But in the 1930s, McLachlan had been a sub-editor of The Times. It was “an act of faith” at Stour to denounce The Times for hiding the truth about Nazi Germany. Randolph was carving the roast when McLachlan revealed inadvertently that it was he who had cut the Times’s Berlin despatches. Alarmed, Martin Gilbert glanced at Randolph:

Suddenly he turned towards the table, brandishing the carving knife, shaking and trembling, and exploded with a bellow of fury: “Shits like you should have been shot by my father in 1940.” The stress on “shits” and “shot” was fearsome to hear. Then he lunged towards the editor, who had to dodge round the table, until Randolph hurled the carving knife on to the floor and strode out of the room. We never saw him again that night. In the morning McLachlan left the house. [He stayed the night?]

Randolph Defending

When in good form, Randolph’s son continued,  “he could be the best of companions, a brilliant conversationalist, bubbling with wit and panache. A dinner hostess could be assured that whatever else might happen, the evening would not be dull if Randolph was among her guests, and in a crisis, there was no friend more loyal.”

In 1961 Harold Macmillan’s Minister of War, John Profumo, resigned amidst a sex scandal. Britain’s tabloids pounced and the Profumos were besieged by paparazzi. In strictest secrecy, Randolph offered Stour as a refuge.

Martin Gilbert showed me Randolph’s written instructions, headed OPERATION SANCTUARY and marked SECRET. Randolph would vacate the premises and the Profumos would arrive unobserved. He did not identify them, referring only to “OGs” (Our Guests).

If any reporters followed, “admission to the house or garden will be denied.” If they refused to leave the police would be called, “during which time OGs will retire upstairs. We will not stand any rot.”

Sir Martin considered Randolph’s gesture “one of real affection and goodness.” He knew that, “as a young MP, Profumo had been one of the Conservative Members who voted against Neville Chamberlain on 8 May 1940, making possible Churchill’s premiership two days later.”

Concluded in Part 3: “Randolph Churchill and the ‘Great Work'”

The Hudson Institute  economist Irwin Stelzer penned an interesting article on trade: “Trump girds for War with EU.” I sent it around to colleagues, praising it for properly attributing an alleged Churchill quote:

No one doubts that Trump is gearing up to launch a tariff battle with the European Union. For one thing, he is set to sign a deal ending the trade battle with China, and would not be fighting a two-front war should he take on Europe which, he tweeted last week, “has taken advantage of the U.S. on trade for many years. It will soon stop”…. If the EU negotiators think they can use jaw jaw to prevent or delay war war (to borrow Harold Macmillan’s take-off on Churchill’s “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”), they are misreading the President…. Trump demonstrates his ignorance of the economics of trade by focusing on bilateral trade deficits. But he demonstrates his New York street smarts by selecting opponents who are relatively weak, as China was when he launched a battle to end its predatory trade practices. Now it’s Europe’s turn.

It’s not too often that Churchill is so carefully referenced. Dr. Stelzer also highlighted my book of quotations, Churchill by Himself, as his recommended reading in that column. So I sent his column to colleagues, saying, “It sweetens his kind gesture by the fact that I agree with him.”

Challenge and riposte

This cost a remonstrance over my Churchillian credentials. A friend wrote:

Tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers, not foreign exporters. It’s crony capitalism for those domestic industries being “protected.” Churchill’s early mentor, Bourke Cockran, understood that; so did his protégé. So sad that someone otherwise so knowledgeable about WSC as you still doesn’t get it! Perhaps a re-read of For Free Trade might help you regain our hero’s wisdom? “Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time.” I saw that in a movie somewhere. [He refers to Young Winston.]

Uh-oh. My day in the barrel? But “never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense”:

Churchill wrote For Free Trade…

As Conservatives we are convinced that an effective measure of protection for British industry and British agriculture must hold a leading place in any scheme of national self-regeneration.… Only by walking in company together can the races and states of the British Empire preserve their glory and their livelihood.

On to the End

Irwin Stelzer comments

In asking permission to quote him, I showed Dr. Stelzer my words above and asked what he thought. He replied:

You’ve got it right. After all, Trump did not initiate trade wars; they were in place for years. It’s just that America was a non-combatant victim, eschewing Adam Smith’s advice.* If Trump is telling the truth—that his tariffs are a means of getting those in violation of world trading rules to the table so that trade will end up freer and fairer—they are unobjectionable. His insistence that other countries are paying the tariffs is either stupidity or a lie. I prefer to believe it is the latter.

There is an additional problem you might consider. Free traders concentrate on efficiency and maximizing growth. They ignore the distributional consequences: there are winners and losers. The little old lady sewing sneakers in a southern factory is the loser—collateral damage. The American consumer is the winner, at least until forced to pay taxes to support the losers. Since the average unskilled worker subject to competition from cheap labor is probably poorer than the average consumer, free trade involves an income transfer from poorer to richer. Tariffs are a crude way of preventing that regressive transfer. Better to allow it to occur and spend tax money retraining and/or supporting the innocent losers.

*Adam Smith’s advice

…It may sometimes be a matter of deliberation how far it is proper to continue the free importation of certain foreign goods … when some foreign nation restrains  by high duties or prohibitions the importation of some of our manufactures into their country. Revenge in this case naturally dictates retaliation … when there is a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high duties or prohibitions complained of. —The Wealth of Nations IV, ii.

“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

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.”

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”