Martin Gilbert Archives - Page 6 of 7

Churchill’s Common Touch (4)

20 March 2015 Comments 3 Comments

Part 4: “Being Shouted At”

“I think being shouted at was one of the worst things to get over,” said Grace Hamblin, secretary to Winston and then Clementine Churchill from 1932, typical of the common Kentish folk who loved them. “I’d come from a very quiet family and I’d never been shouted at in my life. But I had to learn it, in time.”

In the midst of dictation one day, Grace told me, Churchill commanded: “Fetch me Klop!” Klop? she thought—what could it mean?

Finally, proudly, she struggled in with Onno Klopp‘s 14 giant volumes, Der Fall des Hauses Stuart. “Jesus…

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Churchill’s Common Touch (1)

17 March 2015 Comments 4 Comments

Part 1: Mr & Mrs Donkey Jack

A recent book by a distinguished historian suggests that Winston Churchill disdained common people. It cites another Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, during World War I, providing a tow to a broken-down motorist and giving two children a lift in his car. The writer adds: “It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill behaving in such a fashion.”

It is not hard at all. In fact, Churchill did frequent kind things for ordinary people he encountered, privately and without fanfare. We know about them only through his private correspondence, thanks to the official biography, Martin Gilbert, or the testimony of observers.…

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Sir Martin Gilbert CBE, 1936-2015 (2)

4 February 2015 Comments 1 Comment

The time you won your town the race, We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down,Townsman of a stiller town. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up, The still-defended challenge-cup. —Housman

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Sir Martin Gilbert CBE, 1936-2015 (1)

4 February 2015 Comments 2 Comments

Each one of us recalls some little incident—many of us, as in my own case, a kind action, graced with the courtesy of a past generation and going far beyond the normal calls of comradeship. Each of us has his own memory, for in the tumultuous diapason of the world's tributes, all of us here at least know the epitaph he would have chosen for himself: "He was a noble historian, a kind and decent man."

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Churchill’s Funeral, 50 Years On: His Words Still Call to Us

26 January 2015 Comments 0 Comments

In the time since his funeral I learned that Churchill’s life and thought—the eerie relevancy of his challenges and experiences—still call to us across the years. There will always be scoffers, who portray him as an anachronism. “In doing so, it is they who are the losers,” Martin Gilbert concluded, “for he was a man of quality: a good guide for our troubled present, and for the generations now reaching adulthood.”

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Boris Says the Strangest Things

17 November 2014 Comments 4 Comments

Boris Johnson, whose book, The Churchill Factor, is feted widely, speaks his mind with a smile. Like Mr. Obama, he’s a chap I’d like to share a pint with at the local.

But fame and likability don’t a Churchill scholar make. And in that department, Boris Johnson needs some help.

His remarks are quoted from a November 14th speech at the Yale Club in New York City.

Boris Fact-checks

1) Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s World War II “loan” of $50 billion worth of war materiel to the Allies, “screwed” the British.

I queried Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers University, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and several books on World War II, who wrote:

The U.S.…

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Did Churchill Ever Admire Hitler? 3/3

4 December 2012 Comments 1 Comment

Part 3: Pleasing No One …continued from Part 2

Churchill was correct when he said his writings about Hitler satisfied neither Hitler’s defenders nor Hitler’s critics. One of the former was Lord Londonderry, a pro-Hitler peer who complained that Churchill’s Evening Standard piece would prevent a decent understanding with Germany. On 23 October 1937, Churchill replied to Lord Londonderry (Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 581):

You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom, though these may fade with time. On the other hand, we all wish to live on friendly terms with Germany.…

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Why Churchill Shunned Pipes and Cigarettes

10 April 2012 Comments 0 Comments

A friend sent me a Dunhill feature from the Daily Telegraph, stating that Churchill occasionally smoked a pipe as a holiday from cigars: “I can find no reference to him having ever smoked a pipe, can you?”

I think Dunhills are stretching. I can find no testimony to Churchill ever smoking a pipe. There are indications that he deplored pipe smoking (though he tolerated it from Sir Arthur Tedder). Perhaps this arose through his antipathy (which grew in the early 1930s) to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

By looking for Baldwin references, I found a key cigar-and-pipe standoff between Churchill and “SB” in 1924, when they were on better terms, in Martin Gilbert’s Winston S.…

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Gilbert and Manchester: Complementary Biographers

2 March 2012 Comments 4 Comments

There are big differences between them, but both should be read for a full appreciation of Churchill. In 1986, as Manchester was completing Volume II of The Last Lion, he received an encouraging note from Gilbert: "Our work proceeds on parallel tracks."

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The Alcohol Question (Again)

2 March 2011 Comments 1 Comment

Reference to Churchill and abuse of alcohol. When my father and I had lunch with Churchill at the House of Commons in 1952, I certainly did not see Churchill drink any more than the usual lunch time glass of wine. My father never mentioned his excessive use of alcohol in any form.—R.W.

He had an impressive capacity but you’re right. Except for a bodyguard who helped him and Eden totter home after a night of toasts with the Russians at Teheran, no one close ever saw him the worse for drink. (Well, Alanbrooke sometimes wrote in his diary that the boss was inebriated.…

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