The Burton – Churchill Kerfuffle

The airwaves and Twitterverse are full of Churchill bile following recent sad events that have nothing to do with him. Surfacing again are attacks half a century old by the famed actor Richard Burton. Film critic John Beaufort first reported these in the Christian Science Monitor in 1972:

December 9th, 1972— Richard Burton has just given two of the oddest and most contradictory performances of his career. Both involved his portrayal of Winston Churchill in film The Gathering Storm. The prologue consisted of two articles by the actor in TV Guide and The New York  Times. Mr. Burton put on a good show as Winston Churchill, a bad show as Richard Burton.

Burton had previously expressed only admiration for Churchill. Their encounters at the Old Vic, when Burton played Hamlet, were legendary. Burton called Churchill “this religion, this flag, this insignia.” Lady Williams of Elvel, a former Churchill secretary, remembered him well: “Richard came down to the front of the stage to speak the great Shakespearean words with Churchill. The audience was ecstatic. I had the impression that Richard worshipped Sir Winston.”

“To play Churchill is to hate him…”

…was now suddenly Burton’s refrain. “Churchill and all his kind…have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history,”  he wrote. He was the “son of a Welsh miner.” Meeting Churchill was “like a blow under the heart…. My class and his hate each other to the seething point.”

The actor’s words are in vogue again. They fit well. Journalism seems largely to have parted company with old stand-by rules like “have multiple sources” or “verify your quotations.” Burton’s outburst fits today’s narrative. Churchill was a war-mongering racist imperialist who despised the poor, brown and black. Here is Burton, bending quotes a half century ago:

Churchill quote, Burton version: “They [Germans] must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smouldering ruins.” Churchill’s actual words: “It is our interest to engage the enemy’s air power at as many points as possible to make him bleed and burn and waste on the widest fronts” (23 April 1942).

Burton: “That morbid creature, Hitler, of ferocious genius, that repository of human crime.”  (Burton adds: “He might have been talking about himself.”) Churchill’s actual words: “…a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast” (The Gathering Storm, 9).

Doubling down

Burton correctly quoted “We are revolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime” (broadcast, 22 June 1941). Then he interpreted it: “What he was really saying was that ‘every vestige of the Nazi regime’ included the entire German race.” Churchill wrote of his visit to Berlin in 1945: “My hate had died with their surrender” (Triumph and Tragedy, 545).

We should be glad these were the only Churchill “quotes” in Burton’s catalogue of disdain. The rest consisted of boilerplate condemnation. Everything from despising Clement Attlee to WSC’s “baby-like, hairless, effeminate right hand, slowly slamming the table, that bizarre cadence of his curious voice: ‘We were right to fight, we were right to fight,’ I went home and had a few nightmares.” Readers possessed of reason might have had a few nightmares themselves.

Reactions

In those days we felt more confidence toward our heroes, and Burton reaped the whirlwind. The BBC Drama Department banned him for life. (Today they would probably be offering him a TV special.) In Parliament, Norman Tebbit spoke of “an actor past his peak indulging in a fit of pique, jealousy and ignorant comment.” More pointedly, Neville Trotter said: “If there were more Churchills and fewer Burtons we would be in a very much better country.”

The actor received scores of protesting letters. They went unanswered, even from friends like Robert Hardy. Instead, Burton doubled down. “Churchill has fascinated me since childhood,” he retorted—“a bogeyman who hated us, the mining class, motivelessly. He ordered a few of us to be shot, you know, and the orders were carried out.” Historian John Ramsden observed: “The myth of Tonypandy was still around to haunt Churchill’s memory.”

Why did Burton do it?

Richard Burton played to his audience. In 1962 he earned $100,000 for recording Churchill’s words in Jack Le Vien’s television series The Valiant Years. Dr. Ramsden believed he was nominated for that role by Churchill himself: “‘Get that boy from the Old Vic.’ [It was] arguably one of the best things he ever did.” Like Lady Williams, Le Vien saw in Burton only an admirer. A bust of Churchill was his treasured possession. He told both Clementine Churchill and Sir Winston’s grandson how much he admired “the old man.”

To different audiences Burton revealed other opinions. On television chat shows, Dr. Ramsden wrote, he would often emphasize: “‘I’m the son of a Welsh miner.’ Here too he was playing a part, for his lifestyle was way beyond the comprehension of Welsh miners.”

Dr. Ramsden’s final judgment is apposite: “As his career and life deteriorated around him and the fog of alcohol descended, Burton was trying desperately to play the man he had been long ago, and he at least knew what young Welshmen had been expected to believe about Winston Churchill. He was not asked to play either part again.”

Further reading

“Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies”

John Ramsden quotations are from his thoughtful book Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and his Legend Since 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2002).

I found myself using an alleged Churchill witticism I have long known, but could not find in your book, Churchill’s Wit: The Definitive Collection (2009). As I have it, Churchill was preparing to meet Marshal Stalin, and a diplomatic advisor said, “He will probably expect to kiss you on both cheeks.” “Oh, that’s all right,” said Churchill, “as long as he doesn’t want to be kissed on all four.” Can you verify this one?

My own main area of scholarly research is Samuel Johnson, another subject often misattributed. Good quote collections more than just the quotation and its source. Your book with comprehensive coverage and thorough sourcing is impressive. That is the real guarantee of the ideas, wit or imagination of the quoted person, but of their ongoing presence in the cultural memory. —P.T., New Zealand

A: De Gaulle not Stalin

Your query sent me on a troll of my hard drive,  I couldn’t imagine how I left the kiss gag out! But I did. Not only in Churchill’s Wit, but in the unabridged original Churchill by Himself, from which Churchill’s Wit was derived.

However, the kiss quote above is inaccurate, and stems from something Churchill said about Charles de Gaulle, not Joseph Stalin:

“All right, all right. I’ll be good. I’ll be sweet. I ‘ll kiss him on both cheeks—or all four if you’d prefer it.”

Source

The kiss crack was related by a highly reliable source, Elizabeth Layton Nel, one of Churchill’s principal wartime secretaries. Her charming 1958 memoir, Winston Churchill by His Wartime Secretary, was recently reprinted in electronic and print editions. She was a dear lady and a faithful recounter of her experiences. She first told me the story in 1988.

October 1942: At Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, Churchill was preparing to receive the prickly Frenchman. There was a quandary over what to tell the General of “Torch,” the invasion of North Africa, scheduled to begin November 8th. Only a few months before, the Allies had been badly rebuffed in an abortive raid on the channel port of Dieppe. There was some suspicion that de Gaulle’s Free French had somehow leaked advance knowledge of the raid. The Germans had been alerted by French double agents that the British were showing interest in the area.

As Mrs. Nel recalled, Churchill opposed informing de Gaulle of “Torch” until afterward. His advisors warned him to be  diplomatic. Hence the Prime Minister’s generous offer to kiss the General on all four cheeks if necessary.

Churchill on Johnson

Researching the quotations of Samuel Johnson work must be more challenging than than Churchill, since the latter left such copious archives. Incidentally, I found this in Keith Alldritt, Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters (1992):

Writing to his wife Clementine, while off researching [Marlborough], Churchill again applied to Marlborough the word ‘sublime’, so current a word for the eighteenth-century prose stylists whom he so admired, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson.