Please send me some book recommendations on Churchill’s life for young readers. By young, I mean a boy of seven years old. My nephew asked me about the book I was reading (Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison), and after I told him a little about it, he wanted to know more. I’d appreciate any recommendations. —R.M., Mass. (Updated from 2009.)

Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero is probably the best “brief life” in print. If your nephew was into that at seven,  he was far advanced. There are several other fairly short but excellent books of Addison’s quality, but they may be a shade advanced for readers so young. Among them, for the record:

Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Photographic Portrait
Douglas Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier
Mary Soames, A Churchill Family Album—photo documentary

Number one for young readers

Fiona Reynoldson, Leading Lives: Winston Churchill. London: Heinemann Library “Leading Lives” series, 2001, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, later reprinted in paperback (currently more expensive on Amazon). Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

Targeted at the young (ages 8-15), now a quarter century old, this is still the best “juvenile” ever published anywhere, by anybody. The “Leading Lives” series mixes Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Arafat with Roosevelt, Kennedy and Gandhi. I know nothing about the other volumes, but Reynoldson’s Churchill is a masterpiece.

So much wisdom is attractively wedged into sixty-four pages! There’s a quality laminated cover; color throughout, including excellent photographs, cartoons, and posters. Sir Winston receives twenty brief chapters, including a summary, “Churchill’s Legacy.” There is an events timeline, a list of key people, good maps, a page showing how British government works, sources for further reading, a glossary and an index.

The glossary is one of this book’s fine features. Every time a word or phrase pops up that might be unfamiliar to young eyes—Nobel Prize, Boer War, Abdication, Home Secretary, VC, Bolshevik, DSO, Gold Standard, Home Rule, etc.—it is bold faced and referenced in a three-page appendix. This is not haphazard. There are over sixty entries, and every explanation is simple and accurate. It’s a wonder why more books for the young don’t offer this.

Sidebars that teach

Another special aspect is the set of sidebars that pace the story. These are carefully placed, written in precise English, and explain exactly what Churchill did and why. And Reynoldson is never wrong. Take his speech impediment, often misrepresented as a stutter. Reynoldson writes:

Churchill came home on leave in 1897 and went to see a doctor in London about his lisp. He pronounced ‘s’ as ‘sh.’ Nothing was found to be wrong, but the lisp never went away. Despite this, he made his first political speech during his leave and later became a great orator [glossary link] in the House of Commons.”

Perfect. Other sidebars offer rare insights to Churchill’s character. Take his letter to his wife in February 1945:

[M]y heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads…before the advancing armies…. The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.

How well this dispels popular slander about how Churchill instituted and even enjoyed firebombing civilians.

The author delivers unadulterated, factual information. As with any good journalist, you have no idea how she feels personally about her subject. She deals in facts: entertainingly, even eloquently.

Writing a compact book, especially for the young, on a complicated subject is hard work. You must know what to highlight, what to jettison. To choose the right subjects, to represent them deftly, is a great achievement. Fiona Reynoldson’s young readers will develop their own perceptions of Churchill—thoroughly grounded in the education she provides. We should all buy five copies of this book and get them into the hands of schools, libraries and young people of promise.

Best for ages 12-18

John Severance, Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Clarion Books, 1996, 144 pp. hardbound, illustrated, $19.95 used from Amazon. Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

This one is even older, but bears mentioning. The first we heard of it was when Lady Soames remarked that someone had finally done her father justice in a book for young people. Soldier, Statesman, Artist was, she said, “intelligently written and beautifully printed.” Certainly the public must agree, for it was in print for more than a decade. Happily, copies are still available.

The target audience is older than Reynoldson’s. Like her book, there are no new revelations. Severance sets out to explain Churchill and his times to young people who have not heard much about them in school. Like Reynoldson, he acquaints non-British readers with how Parliament works. His tidy prose covers all the “great contemporaries”—Lloyd George, Stalin, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Hitler—and what they did.

Good writing iaccompanies elegant book design: fine type, artwork and photos that are not “old chestnuts. Admirably there is an index, a bibliography and an appendix sampling of “Winston’s Wit.”

There is a small rash of errors, not engendered by malice, ignorance, or conspiracy theories. The book is too short to give much attention to episodic excitements like the charge at Omdurman, the escape from the Boers, Armistice Day or 10 May 1940. Severance has a different tactic in mind.

Myth busting

He focuses on and demolishes numerous myths. For example, he notes that Churchill sent policemen, not troops, to pacify the strikers in Tonypandy. Facts are pounded in: Churchill inspired but did not invent the tank. The Dardanelles campaign was conceptually brilliant and ruined by incompetent execution. Churchill opposed the India Act, but sent Gandhi encouragement when it passed. WSC clung to office in the Fifties only because he thought he might be able to save the peace. Not the kind of thing young people tend to hear a lot.

On the wartime “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin, over which Churchill’s detractors consistently fulminate, Severance has a point worth considering—and not just by young people: “Perhaps Churchill thought this was the only sort of plan Stalin would understand and accept.” Got it in one.

Some day we may have a Prime Minister or a President who as a youth was inspired by one of these books. Fiona Reynoldson and John Severance have done history as well as Churchill a great favor. Everyone who appreciates the great man is in their debt.

The Eagle’s cartoon biography

Clifford Makins, The Happy Warrior: The Life Story of Sir Winston Churchill as Told Through Great Britain’s Eagle Comic of the 1950s. Delray Beach, Fla.: Levenger Press, 2008, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, with commentary by RML, $29.95 new from Amazon.

Levenger, the well-known purveyor of bookman’s accessories, was for a time in the publishing business. Their excellent editor, Mim Harrison, took an interest in Churchill, publishing The Making of the Finest Hour in 2006. This book, on how Churchill wrote his most famous speech, contained contributions by WSC’s late grandson Winston and me. Ms. Harrison then asked me to write a commentary for the Happy Warrior biography, which they were republishing.

David Freeman described this as a “graphic novel, in the argot of today’s youth.” Its origins were as a serialized Churchill biography in The Eagle, a comic magazine for boys. Published separately by Hulton Press in 1958, the story line was by Clifford Makins, with lifelike illustrations by Frank Bellamy.

The Levenger Happy Warrior  was of much finer production quality. Despite its plebeian origins as a cartoon series, it is an accurate account of Churchill’s life up to his retirement as Prime Minister in 1955. Bellamy’s illustrations of people are remarkably true to life, and the dialogue (invented, most of it) is believable. Levenger’s production assured that the quality of reproduction was far superior to the original.  The Happy Warrior is still available. It first sold for $39, but Amazon now sells new copies for $29.95.

Related reading

“A Sun That Never Sets: Churchill’s Autobiography My Early Life,” 2018.

“Myths and Heresies: Firebombing the Black Forest,” 2024.

“Paul Addison 1943-2020: What Matters is the Truth,” 2020.

“Churchill’s Escape from the Boers, 1899,” 2019.

“Winston S. Churchill 1940-2010: A Remembrance,” 2010.

Q: Depression

What is the truth about Churchill suffering from depression, which he referred to as his Black Dog”? —A.L. Kansas

A: More smoke than fire

(Updated from 2009.) Churchill himself makes a few early mentions of depression, calling it his “Black Dog.” But the expression is much older than he was. It was frequently used by Victorian nannies, like Churchill’s Mrs. Everest, when their charges were in dark moods. One early reference to depression, aka Black Dog, is in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

When it comes to Churchill’s personal characteristics it is well to rely on family members who knew him best. There are many illuminating references. The best one was by his daughter Lady Soames, who I think had it right:

A lot has been made of depression in his character by psychiatrists who were never in the same room with him. He himself talks of his Black Dog, and he did have times of great depression. But in my opinion, marriage to my mother, and later his discovery of painting, which was a lifelong solace, largely kennelled the Black Dog.

Of course, if you have a Black Dog, it lurks somewhere in your nature and you never quite banish it. But I never saw him disarmed by depression. I’m not talking about the depression of his much later years, because surely that is a sad feature of old age which afflicts a great many people who have led a very active life.

Four Faces and the Man

Lady Soames was referring in particular to psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s chapter in Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, in its time a well-circulated analysis. She believed Storr made far too much of it. She told me once that anybody who was not depressed over some of the events her father went through would not be normal.

From Mary Soames, Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (1998), page 53: WSC to Clementine Churchill, Home Office, 11 July 1911….

Alice [Guest] interested me a great deal in her talk about her doctor in Germany, who completely cured her depression. I think this man might be useful to me—if my Black Dog returns. He seems quite away from me now. It is such a relief. All the colours came back into the picture. Brightest of all your dear face—my Darling.

Related reading

“Mary Soames Centenary 1922-2022: Remembrance by a Friend,” 2022.

“Lady Soames Diaries,” 2011.

“Churchill Quoting Others: ‘Command the Moment to Remain,'” 2022.

“The Alcohol Question—Again,” 2011.

“Churchill Drank 42,000 Bottles of Champagne?” 2023.

Mary Soames died at 91 eight years ago. This piece from 2014 is republished on her 100th birthday—notwithstanding that we can hear her words: “Really, you’re going way over the top. It’s silly to make a fuss.” Never mind, we are going to make a fuss.

Barbara and I knew her since 1983, when she attended our first Churchill Tour, at the Churchill Hotel in London. She soon became Patron of the old Churchill Centre, replacing Lord Mountbatten, who was killed in 1979. From that time forward, she was our constant correspondent, companion at conferences and tours, sometime house guest, friendly advisor, decisive mentor and personal friend. There is no one outside our own family whom we loved more. Her loss removed one of the things that made life worth living.

I am pleased when any Churchill writer refuses to guess what Mary’s father would do nowadays. That is what we call the Soames Commandment. “We don’t know, do we?” she would often say. Whenever someone declared what Sir Winston would about this or that modern issue, she would interrupt: ”How do you know?”

Peter Hitchens rightly wrote, after the death of The Queen: “Please forgive me if I do not join in by recounting my feelings. I grew up in a world where feelings were something you generally kept to yourself’.” I tried to follow his advice in my tribute to Her Majesty. But Mary Soames was a personal friend. You can read in depth about her life and career in her books and on Wikipedia. So please forgive the feelings. I have, however, deleted personal correspondence from the original article.

Critic and mentor

That Churchill Tour was the first of many which she would attend. She had a reputation as a determined guardian of the flame, and I wondered if she would view a community of Churchillians as frivolous. No. Lady Soames (“call me Mary”) was easily approachable, and praised our work. She was soon a familiar voice on the telephone, as interested in our small doings as any doting aunt.

On 25 September 1985, she and Lord Soames attended the second tour’s dinner for Sir Anthony Montague Browne. Introducing him, Mary said it was a priceless opportunity to declare what the whole family owed to her father’s last private secretary: “Until my father drew his last breath, Anthony was practically never absent from his side.”

It hardly seems possible for anyone so engaged, but for thirty years she was always there for me as editor of Finest Hour. She radiated understanding, advice and wisdom, often as a proofreader, spending time to “get it right”—and to deliver the occasional deserved rebuke. She was so…essential. It was quite impossible for me to imagine carrying on without her. And I didn’t.

Her rebukes diminished when I learned to avoid presuming to know things about her father that I couldn’t possibly possess. Woe betide anyone who made that mistake! In a conference at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, an entertainer impersonating Thomas Jefferson made the mistake of suggesting that WSC was too fond of alcohol. Mary rose. “My dear Mr. Jefferson,” she said, “you have no way of knowing that, and since I as his daughter never saw him the worse for drink, I think you should avoid idle speculation.”

Hopkinton to Hyde Park

In August 1992 she was a guest at our home in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, where she met our son and my parents. My aging father had begun withdrawing into himself, and we feared he might have nothing to say. But like the elderly Sir Winston, reviving with the stimulus of friends, he responded to Mary. The years fell away, and he astonished us with scintillating conversation and vivid memories. After she left, he lapsed back into silence.

We bundled her into the car and drove to Hyde Park to open an exhibit of her father’s paintings. As we reached the Roosevelt Library she said, “Well driven—the President was a much scarier driver.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought: “It is 49 years to the day, August 15th, 1943, that I was last here with Papa. To come back to Hyde Park and to find an exhibition of his pictures really puts a crown on it.”

Three years later she was with us at a Boston Churchill conference chaired by Barbara Langworth. Back then we had consequential speakers who knew their Churchill: William F. Buckley, William Manchester, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Lady Soames.

Afterward we drove her to New Hampshire for an extended holiday. That took us to Dartmouth, and the papers of Winston Churchill, the American novelist. There she read her father’s 1899 letter: “Mr. Winston Churchill presents his compliments to Mr. Winston Churchill, and begs to draw his attention to a matter which concerns them both….”

That visit reminds me of…cigars! To celebrate Boston, Barbara bought me a box of very special Partagas cigars. Mary and I smoked the box in five days, competing with each other, as she used to with her father, to grow the longer ash. She always won.

New England, Virginia and back

There were amusing local encounters. At a neighborhood bistro known for country cooking but no frills, Mary ordered a hamburger. Our waitress was Rosie, a stolid local who stood no nonsense. Mary was not ready for the long list of American options: “Fries?… Yes, please. Relish?… Yes, thank you. Mustard?… Sure. Ketchup, onions, pickles?… Yes. Finally Rosie  stood back, hands on hips. “Do you want this on a plate, or do you want it on the floor?” Mary roared. I quipped, “Some day, Rosie, I’ll tell you who you said that to.” “Oh dear,” she said, “was I bad?” No, not really.

Mary was in Williamsburg for the 1998 Churchill conference. She and Celia Sandys were without escorts, so we played unofficial hosts, and drove them to see Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. Her thanks “in her own paw” duly arrived from London: Thank you so much for not only the Jamestown expedition but also for cherishing both Celia and me in so many ways, wh[ich] greatly added to our ease and enjoyment.”

Six months later she was at our Maine bungalow for a rest following the much-celebrated launch of USS Winston S. Churchill at Bath Iron Works. We held a memorable dinner for her at a local inn, along with Secretary and Mrs. Weinberger and Winston and Luce Churchill.

Mary wanted to buy reading glasses for one of her daughters, so we took her to…Walmart! Instant buzz arose as she entered, wearing her USS Winston S. Churchill cap with “Lady Soames” embroidered on the back. Everyone had seen her on the news. People smiled at her shyly. Occasionally someone walked right up and told her how they loved her father. Later our roofer knocked on our door, determined to cadge an autograph. To them all, she was kindness itself.

Last visit

The years fled. We sold our houses and built a new home in Moultonborough. She was invested a Lady of the Garter by HM The Queen in 2005. She was now 83, not traveling so much, but we asked her to our Quebec Churchill conference. “Do come,” we said, “We’ll drive you down to N.H. amid the autumn colours and get you to Boston for your flight home.”

She did. Everyone wanted to shake her hand; clusters of people followed in her wake. As usual she took a rather more philosophic view than some of our conference scholars. We were seated together when one professor suggested that Second Quebec in 1944 had produced nothing of significance. She leaned over and gave me a very earthy synonym for “rubbish.”

She was the first guest in our new house, up each morning in her dressing gown, sipping coffee, sampling Barbara’s stellar breakfasts, and helping us plan every day of the 2006 Churchill Tour of England. We were an easy drive from the Mount Washington Hotel, site of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, where we booked dinner. I asked if the hotel might arrange a private tour for Sir Winston Churchill’s daughter. “When?” came the answer.

“I’m sorry, dear….”

“Now listen,” I said on the drive up. “The hotel is convinced that your father stayed there in 1906. Of course it was the ‘other’ Winston Churchill, but don’t spoil their fun.” “Certainly not,” she said primly.

Immediately upon meeting the hotel manager she said: “I understand you think my Papa was here in 1906. I’m sorry, dear, that is just not possible.” I groaned. She grinned. The staff bought us a bottle of wine for dinner and promised to change their official history to the American Churchill. Mary thought it “an amazing hotel,” and allowed that if he had got there, her father would have been “easily satisfied with the best of everything.”

She returned home anxious to see her little dog “Prune” and her dear private secretary Nonie Chapman. Quickly came the usual long handwritten letter of thanks we didn’t deserve, because it was she whom we needed to thank, for giving us such delight for so long.

Our correspondence tapered off over the next few years. She had email now, but moreover, she was working flat-out on A Daughter’s Tale, no easy job for someone nearing 90. Sadly, she was not the dynamo she had been. We knew and tried not to trouble her with our small affairs. In one conversation she sounded almost apologetic that she had not admonished me for some slip we let through that misrepresented her father.

Ave Atque Vale

I can’t emphasize this more: it was Mary Soames who taught us the most important rules any Churchill scholar must follow: never to assume what her father would do today; and strive to “keep the memory green and the record accurate.” She also taught us magnanimity—that what really matters is friendship, that there is no point to die bearing a grudge. She was our guiding light—the person we sought to please with words in print on behalf of her great father.

Like many others she touched in her life, we were honored for so long to have known such a companion. Her love of congenial surroundings and company, of fine cigars and good food and Pol Roger, gave one a feeling of empathy almost tangible, and we always wished the hour of parting would never come. It came, as it must. It was a stroke of fortune to have had our lives so enriched.

I should like to end this centenary tribute with the words of my friend Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, for 40 years a “toiler in the vineyard,” in Martin Gilbert’s phrase: “She knew how to be the daughter of a great man,” Dr. Arnn wrote. “She did this by being a good person.” To that I would only add that in doing so, she achieved greatness herself.

(Any reader bored by pedantic, picayune, obscure meanderings about nothing of importance should stop reading now. For my review of Paul’s book see: “Book of the Year.”)

“Paintatious” was artist Churchill’s word for a scene worthy of his brush. He found many such venues on the French Riviera, which Paul explores so well. But this is a tricky question because “paintatioius” not a real word. It’s a “Churchillism.” (My book, Churchill by Himself, Chapter 3, is full of them.) So the answer to how you spell is: Any way you like!

We thought we could establish his spelling if Churchill used “paintatious” in writing. So we plumbed all his 20 published million words in the Hillsdale College digital archive. Alas, like other famous invented Churchillisms, he mainly used it in conversation. Like “Admiralissimo, Bottlescape, Cantellopolus, Destrigulate, Namsosed, Non-undisinflation” and “Unsordid,” they were mainly in speech or conversation, not in print.

Version 1: “Paintatious”

This was my choice, following WSC’s daughter, Lady Soames. In Churchill by Himself I list as a “passim” this quote: “This is a most paintatious place!” (41) Reference is to Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (1979), 204 (U.S. edition 268). She writes of a holiday in 1921:  “…he continually felt drawn to “paintatious” (his own adjective) places, where the sun might be expected to shine brightly and continuously.” She uses it again on page 407 (English edition):

In the summer of 1948, Winston and Clementine stayed for several weeks in Aix-en-Provence; I had married Christopher Soames in 1947, and we were both included in this lovely holiday. We all stayed in the Roi René Hôtel at Aix, the weather was perfect, and almost every day we used to set out, equipped with a delicious picnic, to spend the day in some lovely and “paintatious” place.

Lady Soames continues the use of “paintatious” in her Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter (1990). Dr. Capet thought Churchill might have spelled it thus when writing to the British Consul in Madeira, looking for a suitable hotel in 1949. Alas not: he only asked for a “paintable” location.

Version 2: “Paintaceous”

I spelled it thus several times in old articles, but only one other author did: Barbara Leaming, in her superb account of his years after 1945, Churchill Defiant. (We rated that the “Book of the Year” in 2010. Haven’t issued another such bouquet until Rafferty’s, although there were some deserving titles.)

Ms. Leaming wrote of WSC’s Lake Como painting holiday in 1945: “They drove along the lakefront while Churchill scouted for what he liked to call a “paintaceous” scene.” (40) Of his sojourn in Miami Beach before his “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, she added: “Seated beside a bed of red poinsettias near the pink brick seaside house his wife had arranged to borrow from a friend, Churchill contentedly scanned the coconut palms overhead in search of a ‘paintaceous’ angle.” (60)

Version 3: “Paintacious”

We finally hit upon the one and only instance where Churchill actually spelled the word in print—introducing a third variation! It was in a letter to Clementine from Marrakesh—yet another painting holiday—on 19 December 1950. (Martin Gilbert, Never Despair, page 577; The Churchill Documents vol. 22, Leader of the Opposition, August 1945-September 1941, page 1976. Speaking of painting destinations he wrote:

Alas Timbuktoo is 1500 miles, so it cannot be considered. However the British Consul at Casablanca, a young man, who met me at the airfield here and came to dinner afterwards, says there is a far better trip the other way—left-handed instead of right. When you go through the mountains you come to two lovely native cities with extraordinary springs of blue water and rocky gorges, which seem by all accounts to be most paintacious.

Madelin Evans at the Churchill Archives Centre kindly answered our request to look at the letter itself (Baroness Clementine Spencer-Churchill Papers 2/38). She confirms the spelling. But this was a typed letter, and they were dictated—so a secretary did the spelling! Still, Churchill himself signed the letter. If he didn’t approve, he would likely have corrected it—as he did the odd word in typed letters. He did so in this one, Madelin says, but did not correct “paintacious.”

Which is Correct?

To be absolutely pedantic, WSC’s only written occurrence, “paintacious,” is correct. But this appeared exactly once, so I don’t think it is dispositive.

Mary Soames’s strikes me as the most melodious version. Also with her spelling, I don’t have to modify my entry in Churchill by Himself.

In April 1995 Johnson, then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, deplored the £12.5 million purchase of Churchill Papers for the nation. The lottery-supported National Heritage Memorial Fund, said Johnson, was frittering away money on pointless projects and benefiting Tory grandees. Johnson added: “…seldom in the field of human avarice was so much spent by so many on so little …”

The Memorial Fund replied the Churchill Papers were a national heirloom under threat of being sold outside the country. Johnson snorted that they had simply “run out of sporting and artistic projects to endow.” His “unsentimental approach to Churchill’s records may seem surprising given that in 2014 he published a eulogistic biography of the former Conservative premier,” wrote The Guardian. 

I remember the Great Churchill Papers Flap very well, having published articles about it back then. It is the same tempest in a teapot today that it was in 1995. Except that nowadays, Churchill and his memory are fair game to grunting mobs and virtue-signaling nannies. So the whole business is again somehow newsworthy.

A threat to Britain’s heritage

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s foremost biographer, called the Churchill Papers “the largest single private repository of recent British history.” Their acquisition, he said, was “an imaginative stroke of national policy.” Among other triumphs, the Papers inform thirty-one volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the longest biography on the planet.

Scholars have long mined these fifteen tons of documents. Many individual items have been reproduced. It was the possibility that they might be sold to an overseas buyer, Gilbert explained, that focused concern on their physical future:

The first alarm involved certain specific documents, such as Churchill’s wartime speeches, which clearly constitute part of the national heritage. Photocopies and reproductions are all very well, but the actual pieces of paper are what matters. The originals alone convey the full sense of historical drama.

The idea that Churchill’s final draft of “we will fight on the beaches” would end up in a library overlooking a beach in the Pacific, or some other distant shore, was not attractive. As a result of the decision to use National Lottery money to secure the Churchill Papers, it is not only letters written by Churchill that are to be preserved in this country and guarded, as hitherto, in the specially designed archives of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Sir Martin explained that “Churchill’s Papers” are very much more than his own notes and monographs. Of course they include handwritten or typed manuscripts of books and speeches, if not copies of his own letters. He also kept every letter that he received. “These letters, written to him, constitute the real historical value of this collection.”

A great glory saved

Churchill’s original letters reside in 500 libraries and archives around the world. The Churchill Papers, however, represent the whole range British history. Sir Martin offered examples:

Here we have letters from David Lloyd George, setting out the most radical proposals for social reform before the First World War. Here we have Lord Kitchener’s letters during the early months of the First World War, including the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition. We see here the Irish leaders on both sides struggling for a compromise to end the civil war. Here, too are Labour leaders negotiating with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to resolve the 1926 coal strike. Secretly, they visited him at a house in London to work out a compromise.

Throughout the 1930s the Churchill Papers abound in letters from civil servants, airmen and members of the intelligence community. They sent secret information, much of it from Nazi Germany, enabling Churchill to wage his campaign for greater rearmament. While his own letters consist in the main of carbon copies, it is the originals from other people that are the great glory of the papers saved for the nation.

A letter from his good friend Val Fleming (father of Ian) describes the slaughter on the Western Front. There is a letter from his brother Jack describing the first awful moments of the Dardanelles campaign. Letters from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, are full of the political gossip of 1916. There are letters from Admiral “Jackie” Fisher urging Churchill to return from the trenches and break the government. Churchill did return, but his efforts to harm the government in debate were a dismal failure.

A rich seam of historical gold

“The Papers represent every twist and turn of British political debate,” Sir Martin continued. Every file contains gems. “Having read and edited them all, I can only conclude that the Churchill archive will provide in the future, as it is already doing, a rich seam of historical gold.”  It is the richest seam outside the Government’s own National Archives, which house Churchill’s voluminous war papers, and those of his four-year peacetime premiership.

Every VE-Day, the Churchill Papers are there to prompt remembrance of heroic times. A letter on VE-Day itself was sent to WSC from Anthony Eden: “All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.”

And among the hundreds of letters from Churchill’s children is one from his daughter Mary, written when he was an old man long parted from power or influence: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does, Liberty itself.” For this reason alone, Sir Martin concluded, “the assurance that the Churchill Papers are to remain in Britain is to be welcomed.”

Controversy and rebuttal

Remarkably in view their importance, some historians and media were outraged that one-fourth of the Churchill Papers’ value inured to private parties. They should have been donated, they said. On which, a few observations:

1) In later years, Churchill considered how he could provide for his family. Almost his only property of significant value was his papers. A typical Victorian, he willed them to his male heirs. However, as his daughter Mary told me, “all his dependents were provided for, and all were appreciative of what he did for them.”

2) Appraisals of the papers were £40 and £32.5 million respectively. The government took the lower estimate, subtracted £10 million for anything official and £10 million for tax. That left £12.5 million. J. Paul Getty II generously put up £1 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund £11.5 million—a fraction of their value on the open market.

3) Taxpayers did not provide the £11.5 million. Lottery profits go to various sports, arts, charities and Heritage materials. Almost always, Heritage items are in private hands, so their acquisition often benefits private parties.

4) Comparisons to the post-1945 papers left to Churchill College are irrelevant. Lady Churchill bequeathed them late in life, knowing her children had been provided for. Had she been younger she could have sold them, and would have had every right to do so.

5) While the copyright was retained (to documents originated by WSC), this should be kept in perspective. Until Hillsdale College took them on, no publisher would underwrite the final document volumes. Academic publications, non-profit institutions, even hostile biographers, have used the material without charge.

Why the uproar?

The reason for the flap has nothing to do with the rights of ownership, and everything to do with making political hay and sowing scorn. Such activities have vastly multiplied in the last quarter century. The biographer William Manchester was well aware of this when he memorably wrote The Times in 1995:

The controversy over the sale of the Churchill Papers to the British nation, with proceeds going to members of his family, is bewildering. One British historian in a U.S. newspaper labeled the transaction “just tacky.” One wonders why it is even newsworthy.

When out of office, Churchill, a professional writer, supported his household with his pen. His literary estate was his property. He had every reason, both moral and legal, to expect that title to it would pass on to his survivors through the trust fund which he established before his death. The sum of £12.5 million, however raised, seems hardly excessive. The collection would sell for far more than that in the United States. But that would have raised a genuine storm, which would have been justifiable.

Some critics believe that the Papers should have been donated to the country. That has a familiar ring. Authors are forever being told that they should give their work to society—that to expect money in return is, well, tacky. The origin of this presumption lies in a misapprehension of the word “gifted.” Many believe that talent is literally a gift, which the writer should pass along. The fact is that writing is very hard work, and that here, as elsewhere, the laborer is worthy of his hire. Surely any working person should be able to understand that.

I’m Blanca Bueno, a journalist working in Barcelona for a cultural quiz show for Antena 3, Spanish television. (It is the equivalent of NBC’s “Who’s still Standing?“)

My work consists in writing the questions and checking if they are correct and well formulated, in order to be as precise as possible. We try not to spread wrong information to our contestants and our audience. Sometimes, to do this work, I need to contact to some experts, such as you, in this case. I need help verifying a question about Winston Churchill and lipstick.

I need to know with accuracy if Churchill was a huge lipstick fan. Is it true that he believed in the power of lippy so much he kept it off the ration in the Second World War?

A: Lipstick and the ration

Dear Ms. Bueno, sadly, I find no reference to the lipstick ration in our digital scans and files. These include his books, articles, documents, speeches, private papers, biographies and memoirs by colleagues. There is no mention in the Churchill Archives, which I checked through Hillsdale College’s Mossey Library.

However, one clue tells us that lipstick was not exempt from the ration. In 1944, Churchill’s daughter Mary (A Daughter’s Tale, 227) fell temporarily in love with a handsome American officer. “Ed brought me what was in those days a collection of very welcome presents: a tin of peanuts, pair of silk stockings, packets of hairpins, lipstick—too lovely.*”

Her asterisked note reads: “Rationing even extended to makeup: there is a mention in my diary about ‘my quota’ being in at Cyclax.” (During the war Cyclax, Britain’s second-oldest cosmetics firm, provided a lipstick for servicewomen called “Auxiliary Red.”)

We’d never know this if you hadn’t asked!

There are only seven occurrences of “lipstick” in our digital files, none of them relating to the lipstick ration. One of them is irresistible, though I’m not sure you can work this into your programme.

In his memoir, Long Sunset, Anthony Montague Browne, Sir Winston’s last private secretary, writes of a charming diplomat named Sir Berkeley Gage.

Berkeley was a great cheerer-upper. He wrote a sparkling book of extremely frank memoirs, sadly only privately printed. One of his stories relates that in China, in the stuffier days of diplomacy, the British Ambassador and his wife were leaving for Church one Sunday morning in the grand official rickshaw. They were startled to encounter, entering the British compound, another rickshaw, known to belong to a celebrated house of ill-fame. Inside, still clad in a dinner jacket, lay the snoring figure of one of their diplomatic staff. His address had been written in lipstick on his stiff shirt front.

Clearly, here was one British diplomat who was not still standing.

Sir Berkeley’s “extremely frank” memoirs

There are many available copies of It’s Been a Marvellous Party! The Personal and Diplomatic Reminiscences of Berkeley Gage. It was a limited edition of 300, most all of them inscribed by the author. Prices range as low as $65. On the strength of Sir Anthony’s recommendation, I’m reading my copy now.

“I’ve been using microphones before you were born”

Commander Larry Kryske USN was our toastmaster for the 1988 Mount Washington Churchill dinners. I remember particularly his naval declaration after dinner: “The smoking lamp is lighted.” (How odd that sounds now! In my experience, group smoking stopped almost dead around 1990.) Larry sends this amusing memory of that night, 27 August:

During his address, Sir Alistair appeared to be having trouble with the mic. As toastmaster, I was sitting next to him at the head table and noticed the volume knob was turned way too low. As I reached over to adjust it, he said, “Don’t touch that. I’ve been using microphones before you were born.”

In those days, as you notice from the old photo, we had snooty head tables. The record audience of 400 stood as we very important poohbahs marched in. My friend Bill Ives was following the late John Edison, a distinguished Canadian—whose braces broke. So Bill had to walk close behind him holding his trousers up until we sat down. (To both their credits, nobody noticed, and the word didn’t escape until John embarrassingly confessed while seeking a new pair of braces, i.e., suspenders.)

Alistair and “The Scream”

I loved and admired Alistair Cooke. Politically (though it wasn’t too apparent) he was a liberal Democrat until late in life, when he grew more conservative. But on our last visit in December 2003, another election was looming, and he was keen about Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Alistair thought he was a sure-thing nominee against President Bush the Younger. Almost exactly a month later, Dean committed political harakiri by giving the famous “scream” after the Iowa Caucuses. Alas, Alistair died in March, so I never found out if he changed his mind about Governor Dean.

Not the President….

That Churchill conference was a two-night affair, so the question arose: Whom would we get for the other night? Thanks to former Ambassador to Canada Paul Robinson, we almost got the President. Ronald Reagan was a great admirer of Alistair Cooke, and it never occurred to us to wonder: He wouldn’t spare us two nights, so then what? Would AC have introduced him? But we didn’t worry about those things. If you get the President of the United States, you work around it.

The White House appointments staff tried hard to arrange it. I still have President Reagan’s letter sending his regrets. As we later learned, it was lucky for us. The Secret Service cased the Mount Washington ballroom. They said they’d need a finished partition for RR to walk to his seat unobserved. Its construction, along with travel and accommodation for agents, would be on us. We had about $300 in the bank, so we breathed a sigh of relief.

…but the Governor

Our speaker was then-New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, who gave a nice address, under the gun by having to follow Alistair Cooke. He was proud that New Hampshire had made Churchill an honorary citizen before the USA. I asked him what it’s like running a state with (still) no income or sales tax. “You can’t take your eyes off he ledger for a day,” he said. “If you do, you’ll lose your shirt.”

Governor Sununu has a Churchill-like, ecumenical sense of political humor.  He was thanked by Ambassador Robinson, a stalwart Republican. The 1988 presidential election was on, so Paul blithely proceeded to endorse Vice-President George H.W. Bush. Canada’s federal election was coming up too, and our audience included many from north of the border. Paul peered out at them. “As for Canadians present, I don’t have to say I hope you’ll all vote Conservative on behalf of my dear friend Brian Mulroney.”

The Governor remarked, not quite sotto voce: “There goes the 5000-mile undefended border.”

It was all in good fun though I’m sure I heard from every Democrat, Liberal and NDP supporter at the Mount Washington that night.

Mary at the Mount

Our last and best Mount Washington memory involves Sir Winston’s daughter, Lady Soames. By 2005 we knew that at 83, the Quebec Churchill Conference might be her last abroad. “Do come,” we said. “We’ll drive you down to New Hampshire amid the autumn colo(u)rs and get you to Boston for your flight home.”

She came. In Quebec, everyone wanted to shake her hand. Clusters of people trailed in her wake. As usual she took a rather more detached view than some of our conference speakers. We were seated together when Professor Warren Kimball suggested that the Second Quebec Conference in 1944 produced “nothing of significance.” She leaned over and gave me a very earthy synonym for “rubbish.” I told Warren later, and he has dined out on it ever since.

Here in New Hampshire she was one of our first houseguests, up early in her dressing gown, sipping coffee. Over Barbara’s stellar breakfasts, she helped plan every day of the 2006 Churchill Tour of England, our next-to-last. We are an easy drive from the Mount Washington, so we booked dinner there. I asked the hotel if they might arrange a private tour for Winston Churchill’s daughter. “How soon?” they replied.

* * *

On the way up I suggested diplomatic strategy: “The Mount Washington believes your father stayed there in 1906. Of course it was the ‘other’ Winston Churchill, the American novelist. But don’t spoil their fun.” “Certainly not,” she said primly.

Immediately upon meeting the Mount Washington’s manager, Lady Soames spoke up. “I understand you think my Papa was here in 1906. I’m sorry, dear, that is just not possible. That was, you know, the American Churchill. I’m told he was running for Congress at the time. I believe he lost.”

I groaned. She grinned.

The Mount Washington bought us a bottle of wine but made me pay for dinner, which I thought a bit chintzy. They did promise to change their official history to name the American Churchill as a visitor. (I wonder if they ever did?) Mary Soames thought it “an amazing hotel.” If her father actually had visited, she said, he’d have liked it fine. She returned home anxious to see her dog Prune and her dear private secretary Nonie Chapman. Quickly came the usual long letter in her “own paw,” expressing thanks we didn’t deserve. It was she whom we needed to thank, for giving us such delight for so many years.

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'”

David Riddle, a National Trust volunteer at Chartwell, gave me the background of the “Butterfly House” Churchill established to propagate the insects on the grounds of his home:

The Butterfly House was first used as a game larder between 1869 and 1889 by the Colquhoun family, who owned Chartwell between 1830 and 1922, when Churchill bought the estate. Two years later Philip Tilden, his architect, converted the larder to a summer house by removing the east wall. In 1946 it was converted to a Butterfly House. Churchill used it for raising caterpillars and chrysalises. He received advice from butterflies expert L. Hugh Newman, who owned a “butterfly farm” in nearby Sidcup. Lady Churchill planted buddleia, lavender and other nectar-rich flowers in order to encourage the butterflies. Sir Winston changed the walk from gravel to turf and stepping stones in 1950.

Butterflies: A Lifetime Interest

Churchill became fascinated with butterflies as a young officer stationed in India, where they were colorful and prolific. Years later, in 1939, and again after the war, he determined to propagate them at Chartwell. L. Hugh Newman, as David Riddle states, was his chief supplier.

Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective during 1946-47, told me an amusing episode involving Newman’s first visit to Churchill:

He took the breeder for a walk round the grounds and gave a general idea of his plans. The expert then gave advice and went into technical details. Mr. Churchill said very little. Rather like a penny dropping in the butterfly man’s mind, you could almost hear him thinking: “Ah, I’ve got the old boy. He’s not nearly as clever as I thought. This is one sphere in which I know a lot more than he does.”

Mr. Newman became just the slightest bit patronizing and boomf! Mr. Churchill came back at him with very lucid comments showing that he was fully acquainted with everything being said. Visibly shaken, the expert never tried to “talk down” again. It was a pattern of conversation I’d noticed with other experts. I can’t help feeling that Mr. Churchill pretended ignorance to a certain extent, then came down like a ton of bricks if there was any attempt to patronize him.

A very successful scheme was put in hand and some of the rarest butterflies and moths of the greatest beauty were hatched out. By careful provision of the right flowers and bushes, the butterflies were kept well fed.

“In Durance Vile”

Churchill’s daughter Lady Soames was not sure when he stopped raising butterflies, but it might have been after an event described by longtime Chartwell secretary and administrator Grace Hamblin, at a 1987 Churchill Conference:

He had a little hut in the garden, which is still there. In those days he had the front covered with gauze, with a gauze door opening into it. A nearby butterfly farm sent him chrysalises. which he liked to see develop. One morning, I was with him spreading out the chrysalises. Upon leaving the little hut, he left the door open. I said, “Did you want to leave the door open, or should I close it?” He said, “I can’t bear this captivity any longer!” Thus we no longer kept butterflies, but they are supposed to remain in the garden once you start. It’s a lovely occupation. When he knew that Chartwell would eventually go to the National Trust and be open to the public he said, “I hope the National Trust will grow plenty of buddleia for my butterflies.”

This charming story reminds us of Churchill’s hatred of imprisonment. In his autobiography, he writes of being jailed by the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, in a chapter entitled, “In Durance Vile.” Ten years later as Home Secretary, he strove to avoid imprisoning people for trivial offenses and was ahead of his time in his ideas about rehabilitating inmates.

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. —Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1936

Brexit Bedlam

For me the most adroit analysis of Britain’s Brexit Bedlam we can read to date was by Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph. You can register for free to read the article.

Will this be the year May ends before April? If Prime Minister Theresa May lasts through 5/31, Roberts says she will beat Gordon Brown (two years, 319 days) and the Duke of Wellington (two years, 320 days). Big whoopee.

Dr. Roberts goes on to opine what the right course would have been from the outset:

The cautious, bishop-like approach when she became prime minister would have been to have prepared business, the civil service and the country for a managed, World Trade Organisation-based, no-deal Brexit, without giving Brussels any guarantees on security, future domicile status for EU citizens, a divorce pay-out or indeed anything else until a negotiating timetable was agreed that was fair to both sides. Any fifth columnists in the Civil Service who were actively undermining the strategy should have been demoted; it would not have taken long for the rest to have got the message. The squealing of the Remainers would have been loud and long—especially of course on the BBC—but nothing like as bad as it has been.

Many colleagues reply to this by saying, “Sure, but hindsight is cheap.” Au contraire. Mrs. May, who is an admirable PM in many respects, had those options from the get-go. She knew she had them. She rejected them. Brexit still offers them. It is not likely that she will opt for them.

Churchill and Europe: Then

It almost seemed that every speaker at the recent Hillsdale College Churchill Conference was asked about Brexit in one way or another. We convened to study Churchill and the movies, one of them “Henry V.” Another kerfuffle with the French, but 600 years ago. The best insight into Churchill’s thinking is his own words. So when asked about Brexit I offered two Churchill quotations:

We are not seeking in the European movement … to usurp the functions of Government. I have tried to make this plain again and again to the heads of the Government. We ask for a European assembly without executive power.” —House of Commons, 10 December 1948

* * *

At Zürich in 1946 I appealed to France to take the lead in Europe by making friends with the Germans, “burying the thousand-year quarrel.” … As year by year the project advanced, the Federal Movement in many European countries who participated became prominent. It has in the last two years lost much of its original force. The American mind jumps much too lightly over its many difficulties. I am not opposed to a European Federation including (eventually) the countries behind the Iron Curtain, provided that this comes about naturally and gradually.

But I never thought that Britain or the British Commonwealths should, either individually or collectively, become an integral part of a European Federation, and have never given the slightest support to the idea. We should not, however, obstruct but rather favour the movement to closer European unity and try to get the United States’ support in this work. —Memorandum to the Cabinet, 29 November 1951

Churchill and Europe: Now?

That answer was incomplete, so a second question arose. “You gave us two Churchill quotes in which he opposed Britain joining a federal Europe. Does that mean you think he would be in favor of Brexit?”

Answer: No. To so conclude would violate his daughter’s First Commandment. Lady Soames always said, “Thou shalt not declare what Papa would say about any modern issue. After all, how do YOU know?”

I offered those quotes only to refute the opposite argument we hear all the time. Because Churchill wanted Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, he would now favor the creation of a European super-state.

Theresa May has much to answer for before the bar of history. But it is unfair to blame her alone for the current shambles of irresolution. The mistakes began long ago, under governments both Labour and Tory. They led to de Gaulle‘s rejection of British membership in the European Economic Community in the 1960s. After he’d left, Britain applied to join again. Even then, Britain joined a free trade association, not a federal union regulated by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

“If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election”

In 1930, Churchill wrote a marvelous essay, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” It is presented as if written by someone in an alternate world where Lee DID win the battle of Gettysburg. This precipitated (implausibly from our viewpoint) a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, a fraternal association of English-Speaking Peoples, the prevention of World War I, and with it German fascism and Russian Bolshevism. By 1930 there is the prospect of a Council of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have written, but not yet published, a parallel essay entitled “If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election.” Using some of his phrases, it explains how Churchill DID win, resulting (also implausibly from our viewpoint), in a prosperous, reinvigorated British Commonwealth, a rollback of Soviet expansion, a free Poland, an Arab-Israeli settlement, a democratic China, the evolution of Iran to a constitutional monarchy. It ends with the prospect of a Latin American free trade association led by Che Guevara. Che, an educated, practical man, has pronounced communism a failure and deposed Castro.

Safely reelected in 1945, Churchill renounces the Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods agreements, in which the United States demanded an end to Imperial Preference. Britain then organizes SAFTA, the Sterling Area Free Trade Association. The first of its kind, SAFTA spans the British Commonwealth, including India and Pakistan. They both get independence, but only after the border questions are settled and millions of lives saved by avoiding strife. SAFTA gets along fine with the U.S. and Europe. Free trade blossoms in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Back to Reality

The mistakes leading to the present Brexit debacle began with abandoning Imperial Preference. Churchill himself had supported that from 1932. Failing to render the Commonwealth a free-trade association of independent states hammered home the error.

So on Brexit, we must NOT proclaim what Churchill would say about a situation he never contemplated.

As for the present Brexit shambles, a Norwegian friend of mine offered an answer. “The best thing to do would be to go back to 1945 and start all over again.”

Churchill and the Perspective of History 144 Years On

Continued from Part 1…. Do you want the good news or the bad news on Churchill today? The bad news is the high level of ignorance, as measured by that electronic Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, the Internet.

Churchill’s name elicits 100 million Google hits, a colleague says, “Some are questions, many of which simply require the answer ‘No’—such as: ‘Was Churchill anti-Semitic?’ ‘Did Churchill hate Indians?’ ‘Was he bipolar?’ ‘Was he born in a ladies’ loo?’ ‘Did he have an affair with Lady Castlerosse?’ ‘Did Alexander Fleming save him from drowning?’” Of course, this was going on long before the worldwide web. Churchill wrote in 1938:

It is astonishing to me, looking back…how many different kinds of people—Suffragettes, Sinn Feiners, Communists, Egyptians, and the usual percentage of ordinary lunatics—have from time to time shown a very great want of appreciation of my public work. To be guarded and shadowed day and night…is only rendered tolerable…by the extraordinary tact, courtesy and skill of those entrusted with the duty of watching over public persons, who, at particular times, are thought to be worthy of powder and shot.

* * *

He’s still worthy today—although the powder and shot of history is digital not literal. Let’s face it: the web is where people GO. So much of it warps reality. A recent survey revealed that most British schoolchildren think Churchill was a mythical figure and that Sherlock Holmes was a real person in history.

Professor John Charmley said: “After holding our heads in our hands and deciding that the world has indeed gone to the dogs, we might care to reflect that there may be an irony in this. Churchill did set out to make himself a mythical figure; so it may be only just….that he seems to have become one.”

Surviving the Internet

But here’s the good news. Churchill has defied this mother load of ignorance. His social media critics don’t go unanswered anymore. Sometimes the answers are from people we’ve never heard of, who take the trouble to learn the truth. Last month a former U.S. astronaut, who said something nice about him, cravenly apologized when dunned by Tweets claiming Churchill was a racist who starved the Bengalis in 1943. He was greeted with a cacophony of digital guffaws, referring to a dozen different websites that disprove such nonsense. As a writer I have to be glad for all this calumny. After all, it furnished me with enough material for a book, Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality, which Ron and I will be happy to sell you tonight. Alas it’s already out of date, because new charges are constantly invented.

My website recently listed all the false claims of 2018 along with links to the best rebuttals. The defenders range from Toronto’s Terry Reardon, a Mackenzie King historian, on who was really to blame for the disastrous 1942 Dieppe raid—to Zareer Masani, an Indian scholar, on what really caused the Bengal Famine. One of us posted a quotation you won’t find among the attacks: “The old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go….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.” (Churchill said that in the War Council in 1943.)

I think we should be encouraged and heartened by such defenses. We didn’t have nearly as many allies five or ten years ago. We owe thanks to diligent efforts of Churchillians like yourselves. Which brings me to the many societies like this one.

National societies…

…like the one I founded fifty years ago, are increasingly creaky—like me. People just don’t join clubs the way they used to. The exchange of information and opinion they offer is freely accessible with a gadget you hold in your hand. Yet local societies, like this one, are going strong. What past political figure can you think of, besides perhaps Lincoln, who engenders such enthusiasm? The more advanced Churchill societies, like this one and Vancouver’s, welcome speakers on current events—not necessarily about Churchill, but keeping Churchill firmly in mind. It’s a remarkable credit to a man who realized the value of encouraging informal discussion by all shades of political opinion when he founded his own club for that purpose 107 years ago. In Wisconsin they named theirs after it. They call it the Other Other Club.

In print media…

…his reputation stands. Critics arose soon after the war. In 1957 Lord Alanbrooke published his frustrated, late night harangues with Churchill—and then apologized to him for leaking those private diaries. Brooke’s fuming is often used to show Churchill’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them.

But lately we’ve seen another side of Brooke—as when the PM arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible,” Brooke wrote. “I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [often said that] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” I think that little aside, by a frequently cited critic, captures a key aspect of Churchill.

Books about him keep piling up. At Hillsdale we’ve reviewed 100 since 2014, twenty per year. Yes, a few dwell in muddy byways, half-baked history. Some are pretty grim. To paraphrase Sir Winston, in war you can only be killed once—but by writers, many times. And yet, 144 years on, his reputation survives.

Ten Great Books in the Space of a Year

Think of all the really good books we’ve had just this year. Lewis Lehrman’s Churchill and Lincoln, a scholarly comparison of two dominant statesmen. Antoine Capet’s exhaustive encyclopedia, Dictionnaire Churchill. David Lough’s My Darling Winston, the insightful letters between WSC and his mother. Brough Scott on his life with horses, Churchill at the Gallop. Jill Rose’s Nursing Churchill on his health in wartime. Larry Kryske’s Churchill without Blood Sweat and Tears applied his leadership principles to modern living. Leslie Hossack’s Charting Churchill is a beautiful photo documentary of Churchill’s London. Piers Brendon’s Churchill’s Bestiary is a scholarly account of his relations with and allusions to animals. Hillsdale College’s The Churchill Documents offer massive new primary source material from D-Day through 1945. All these books are reviewed, with ordering links, on Hillsdale’s Churchill website.

The crowning achievement is Andrew Roberts’ Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Full disclosure: I was one of Andrew’s readers and kibitzers. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we exchanged a thousand emails. We ran down facts and factoids, from the Royal Library to gossip columns, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked even the unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges”: documents, clippings and diaries covering almost every day of Churchill’s life. We didn’t agree about everything, but the average isn’t too bad.

* * *

This was the first biography I’d proofread since William 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,” as Manchester did. Andrew is however far more insightful, accurate, up to date, and critical where he needs to be. Walking with Destiny is I think the best single volume life of Churchill you can read.

Right now Andrew is on book tours. He’ll be here in Ottawa on May 27th. “Where are you now?” I just asked him. “New York en route to Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison,” he said—“just like Churchill in 1901. And guess what—I don’t even have to pay the crooked major.” He was referring to Major Pond, Churchill’s 1901 lecture agent, whom WSC called “a vulgar yankee impresario.”

Here’s what matters: these books have again brought Churchill to the forefront of history. Andrew writes: “There’s an explosion of love for him among ordinary people that would make you very happy. It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. Big audiences. We sell out constantly. They ask good questions. No questions about firebombing Dresden, Iraqi gassings or the Bengal Famine. Sometimes one can feel down over the Twitter eruptions and statue smearings. But out in the real world, he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

Scholarly Institutions…

…are a third part of his stature. The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has become the Center for Churchill Studies Ron and I used to dream about. It began in 2006, when Hillsdale President Larry Arnn declared he would finish the Official Biography. Oddly, this reminded me of what Churchill said when Japan declared war on the United States, the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies. “They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking.”

Considerable? It seemed impossible. The great history had stalled after the 1941 document volume. Undaunted, Dr. Arnn reprinted all twenty-four previous volumes, most of them out of print. Since then, helped by the Churchill Fellows, our dedicated student researchers, Hillsdale has published five more, taking the documents through 1945—seven volumes in all on World War II. In June, the 31st and final volume completes the job Randolph Churchill began fifty-six years ago. We celebrate with a cruise around Britain and a London banquet. But this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end….

The Churchill Project’s endowment finances an array of activity: seminars, online courses, conferences, tours and publications. We are building the largest Churchill archive in North America, housed in a new purpose-built Archives building. It includes the Martin Gilbert Papers—all of them, on 20th century and Jewish history as well as Churchill. My own library and papers are in trust for it. We are 2/3rds of the way to a $9 million endowment. Hillsdale maintains a Canadian link through its recognition by your CRA. So your support too is tax-deductible.

* * *

My first surprise when I joined Hillsdale in 2014 was to find so many young people with a keen interest in the great man. They have varied opinions and questing minds. My second surprise was the events. There is no registration charge. They’re free, whether online, on campus, at the Kirby Center in Washington, or elsewhere. We even provide lunches and dinners. You just have to get there. The secret is owning most of the necessary real estate and pre-financing expenses.

With the Official Bio behind us, the Churchill Project will turn to events, online education, and new publications. The work is something great and lasting, to “keep the memory green and the record accurate,” as Lady Soames charged us to do. And all of it is financed and set in stone to continue long after we are gone. This is the only way, in the long run, to assure that Churchill’s statesmanship will be recognized and studied forever.

Concluded in Part 3…

“Churchill, Suffrage and Black Friday”: excerpted from my article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full text, including Churchill’s letters to the head of the Metropolitan Police (22 November 1910) and to Prime Minister Asquith (21 December 1911), click here.

A London University student writes for help with his dissertation. Its topic is the relationship between Home Secretary Winston Churchill, the Metropolitan Police, and their handling of women’s suffrage demonstrators in November 1910. His questions illustrate Churchill’s domestic statesmanship. Our answers refute the belief that Churchill stridently opposed women’s suffrage except on isolated occasions in political tactics.

The suffrage argument was simply: give women the vote. Today it sounds perfectly straightforward. The issue was more complicated a century ago. The vote was restricted to “heads of household” (male). If extended to women, it would cover only the small number of female householders. A possible compromise was to enable married women to vote with their husbands as co-householders. Conservatives opposed this, along with some of Churchill’s fellow-Liberals. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, for example, feared that a “householder” franchise would increase the Conservative vote at Liberal expense. “The long-term solution, no doubt, was universal suffrage,” wrote Paul Addison in Churchill on the Home Front. “but this was sure to be rejected by the House of Lords, and could not be enacted until their lordships’ powers were reduced.” In 1910-11, Churchill and other Liberals were working to do that.

On to the questions…

“Edge of the wedge”

Churchill is alleged to have said: “The women’s suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.” In your bookWinston Churchill, Myth and Reality, you maintain on page 25 that Churchill never said these words. Another source suggests that Churchill did say them, in a letter to Asquith on 21 December 1911. Would you be able to shed light on why you dismissed the quoted statement?

Actually my book provides the answer on the same page:

[Churchill] did write something similar in 1897, when he was twenty-three: a note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register, where he was reviewing political issues to decide which side he would take. Parliament in had drafted a women’s suffrage bill…. [Young Winston dissented] “on the grounds that it is contrary to natural law and the practice of civilized states[;] that no necessity is shown[;] that only the most undesirable class of women are eager for the right[;] that those women who discharge their duty to the state viz marrying and giving birth to children are adequately represented by their husbands[;] that those who are unmarried can only claim a vote on the ground of property, which claim on democratic principles is inadmissible…” (WSC, “Comments on [1874] Annual Register, 1897,” in The Churchill Documents, vol. 2, Young Soldier 1896-1901. Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2006, 765.)

* * *

Churchill’s 1897 opinion was not only those of most Britons then, but most British women, including his mother. It seems incredible by today’s standards, but in the 19th century many women considered politics a rowdy, alcoholic pastime for menfolk and had no wish to participate. With the turn of the century, and the increase of State involvement in people’s lives, their views changed. Churchill changed with them—influenced by his wife Clementine, a pro-suffrage Liberal. Myth and Reality continues:

“From his entry into Parliament, Churchill never wavered from his view that the sex disqualification was unwarranted in principle…. Churchill voted for suffrage as early as 1904. His hesitations in 1905-12 arose when militants tried to break up his speeches. He was against certain measures at certain times, for tactical reasons—unlike, say, Asquith, who opposed the very principle.”

Churchill on Suffrage 

Churchill’s alleged words to Asquith on 21 December 1911 are a manufactured quotation, made up to suit some writer’s preconceived notions. (I will not quote the source, since it deserves no publicity.)

For Churchill to have said that female suffrage was a “wedge” for “every liberal cause under the sun” is questionable on its face, since he was himself a Liberal (and quite a radical one). “Women represented by male relatives” is from his 1897 notes in the Annual Register, inaccurately transcribed. None of these words appear in his 1911 letter to Asquith.

Churchill actually wrote Asquith to advise on political tactics by the government, not to debate the merits of women’s suffrage. Asquith’s response, suggesting that he might attend an anti-suffrage rally, incidentally shows that on that issue he was far more a diehard than Churchill was. (This is also reproduced on the Hillsdale site.)

Fictitious quotes twisted or made up to suit people’s preconceived prejudices pervade much of today’s Churchill discourse. Worse, in my opinion, are incorrect website abstracts of historical documents.

Back to our student queries….

“Black Friday,” 1910

My second question involves Churchill’s instructions for handling demonstrators on 16, 18 and 22 November. Churchill issued them to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Have you come across these instructions?

 On the 16th and 18th Churchill’s instructions were not in writing. On the 22nd they were, and are quite clear. But first consider the context.

In January 1910, Women’s Social and Political Union leader Sylvia Pankhurst declared a halt to militant protests, hoping the Liberal government would introduce a suffrage bill. Henry Noel Brailsford, of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, asked for Churchill’s support. Paul Addison in Churchill on the Home Front writes that Churchill “gave his blessing to the formula, while carefully reserving his position on the detail.” Parliament reassembled on 18 November 1910, having failed to act on the promised bill. Dr. Addison writes:

[On that day] a deputation of three hundred women set out for the House of Commons. As on previous occasions, they tried to break through police cordons. In the past this had led to scuffles with the police, but this time the police adopted more aggressive tactics: “Reluctant to make arrests, the police used a variety of means to force the women back: women were kicked, their arms were twisted, their noses were punched, their breasts were gripped, and knees thrust between their legs. After six hours of struggle, 115 women and four men had been arrested.” These events, with their disturbing overtones of mass sexual assault, were to pass into the folk memory of the women’s movement as “Black Friday.” Churchill, who recognised at once that something discreditable had occurred, intervened to order the release of most of the women arrested. 

* * *

Four days later came a confrontation at Downing Street. The Prime Minister hastily scuttled as demonstrators threw stones and broke windows. Addison continues: “We cannot resist the conclusion that the police as a whole were under the impression that their duty was not merely to frustrate the attempts of the women to reach the House, but also to terrorise them in the process…. once more Churchill intervened to withdraw charges against most of those arrested.”

The Churchill Archives contain no written instructions for handling protestors on 16-18 November 1910. They do contain Churchill’s 22 November letter to Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Churchill refers to his earlier (verbal) instructions, and objects to the way police had acted:

I am hearing from every quarter that my strongly expressed wishes conveyed to you on Wednesday evening and repeated on Friday morning that the suffragettes were not to be allowed to exhaust themselves but were to be arrested forthwith upon any defiance of the law, were not observed by the police on Friday last, with the result that very regrettable scenes occurred. It was my desire to avoid this even at some risk; to arrest large numbers and then subsequently to prosecute only where serious grounds were shown and I am sorry that, no doubt through a misunderstanding, another course has been adopted. In future I must ask for a strict adherence to the policy outlined herein. (WSC to Henry, 22 November 1910, The Churchill Documents, vol. 5, 1456.)

The truth

Black Friday “was not a Churchillian atrocity,” Paul Addison concluded. Churchill tried to prevent the situation. “The nub of the matter was the reluctance of the police to make arrests in the early stages of the demonstration.” It is true that Churchill later resisted a public inquiry over the atrocities. With militants launching bombing campaigns, beating up cabinet ministers and slashing paintings at the National Portrait Gallery, an inquiry would have demoralized the police who had to cope with those evil things. Death or serious injuries would be a stronger case for an inquiry.

Churchill was not philosophically hostile to the principle of women’s suffrage at any time in the 20th century. He voted for it as early as 1904. His hesitations in 1905-12 arose when militants tried to break up his speeches. He resisted certain measures at certain times for tactical reasons—unlike, say, Asquith, who in 1910-12 opposed the very principle.

Churchill did express doubts over a universal franchise. In the 1920s he opposed extending the franchise to women 21-30, fearing it would increase the Labour vote. In the 1930s, with dictatorship on the rise through democratic elections, he again expressed doubts about universal suffrage. On these Churchill is open to valid criticism, though the issues are hardly antique. We hear similar arguments about other groups of new voters today.

* * *

Churchill’s notes from 1897 (inaccurately bowdlerized) do not apply to 1910-11. To place what he wrote in 1897 in the context of the Edwardian era is to ignore his political evolution from Tory to Liberal, from youthful imaginings to political maturity.

Churchill’s support for women’s votes increased after he observed the crucial role women had played in the First World War. Before then, he was less assertive than his wife, though she was an influence. His worries about expanding suffrage carry a certain irony. In the 1945 election that rejected him as prime minister, the Labour margin of victory was 19% among males but just 2% among females. “Papa supported votes for women,” smiled his daughter Mary, “when he realized how many women would vote for him.”

See also “Churchill and Women’s Rights“

Q: Did Winston Churchill ever use public transport while PM, particularly the tube?

On Courage

Q: We accept that the screenplay is a dramatisation of events. But is it likely that Churchill would have left a government car for a no-security ride on the tube? Would he stop to talk to the people before such an important speech? If not, why not?

Among the more pernicious distortions of Churchill’s record is that he was a lifetime opponent of rights for women, including their right to vote. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 2….

In 1999 Time magazine explained that Churchill could not be “Person of the Century” because he “bulldoggedly opposed women’s rights.” In 2012 London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: “Churchill believed that women shouldn’t vote, telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.’”

As I show in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Churchill never said those words, in or out of Parliament. He did write something similar in 1897, a private note when he was 23. Yet as a politician (from 1901 on), he never campaigned against women’s suffrage, and changed his youthful attitude. Today, we would say he “evolved.”

Remember that in 1897, more British women were opposed to suffrage than for it. Neither of Churchill’s parents supported it. His wife Clementine did, and as a young MP, Winston agreed with her. But his support cooled during the 1906 election campaign. Here he encountered the formidable suffrage leaders Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst.

“Henpecked”

At one rally, Christabel interrupted so frequently that she was hauled into court and fined. Churchill offered to pay her fine; she heatedly refused and spent a week in jail. Young Winston was not amused. “I am certainly not going to be henpecked,” he said. Any more of this, he added, and he would not vote for suffrage in the new Parliament.

He did oppose a 1910 bill extending the vote to female heads of household, but his reason was tactical. As a Liberal, he feared that most of these would be propertied women who voted Conservative. This was quite less than his Prime Minister, Asquith, who opposed votes for women seriatim. In 1928, when Parliament extended the vote to all women over 21, Churchill expressed fear in cabinet that it would increase the Labour vote at the expense of Conservatives. While these may be considered petty objections, a century later some politicians resist immigration reforms they think will increase another party’s vote. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Women in War

With the advent of World War I in 1914 domestic arguments, including women’s suffrage and Irish Home Rule, were set aside. In 1918, with Churchill’s support, Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, enfranchising women over thirty who met minimum property qualifications. Churchill supported this reform, in part because of his observations of the role women had played in the war.

In Churchill’s view, women had been the moral backbone of the country; their work had been vital. They might not have fought in the trenches, but they drove vehicles almost to the front lines, served in field hospitals, took men’s places in war industries. A few served as spies and paid with their lives. That, Churchill wrote, enshrined for them “the vote which for so many years they had vainly sought to wrest from successive Governments by methods too often suggesting that they had not the civic sense to use the privilege rightly.”

Again in World War II, Churchill was deeply moved by the efforts of British women. To his former private secretary, John Colville, he said: “When I think what women did in the war I feel sure they deserve to be treated equally.” Colville recalled the “astonishment” when Churchill said he hoped that Churchill College, founded as a national memorial to him, would admit women on equal terms with men. “No college at Oxford or Cambridge had ever done any such thing,” Colville wrote. “I asked him afterwards if this had been Clementine’s idea. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and I support it.’” He had, indeed, evolved from 1897. 

In Sum

When Churchill entered politics in 1900, seven million men had the vote; when he died, thirty-six million men and women had it. In 1945, Churchill cited “the will of the people expressed by free and fair election on the basis of universal suffrage.”

Contrary, then, to the imprecations of Time and others who have not done their homework, Churchill was not against rights of women at any time in the 20th century. His hesitations in 1905-12 arose when militant women tried to break up his speeches. He was against certain measures at certain times, for tactical reasons—unlike, say, Asquith, who opposed the very principle.

Churchill’s support for women’s rights was less ideological than his wife’s, though she was certainly an influence. In part, too, it stemmed from political common sense. In 1945, for example, the Labour margin of victory was 19% among males but just 2% among females. “Papa supported votes for women,” said his daughter, Lady Soames, “when he realized how many women would vote for him.”

World War I…

is another rich source of Churchill mythology. We are told that he bungled the defense of Antwerp in 1914; caused the deaths of thousands in the Dardanelles campaign; steered the Lusitania into the path of a German submarine; wanted America to keep out of the war; and supported the use of poison gas. Every one of these accusations is utter fantasy—including the outrageous allegation that Churchill was hell-bent for war in 1914. Continued in Part 4…

Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

“Mama is part red Indian…”

No exception to the family belief (until she saw contrary evidence) was Churchill’s daughter Mary. “I remember my daughter Emma, playing with her friends,” Lady Soames recalled. “Suddenly she warned them not to misbehave. ‘Mama, you know, is part red Indian, and if we are naughty she will go on the warpath.’” The Churchills had adopted an old legend that Indian blood ran in their veins.

In 1963 the National Congress of American Indians named Sir Winston Churchill “Chief Ba-ja-bar-son-dey,” which means “Great Leader of Men.” They sent him the battle costume and headdress of a Sioux warrior, “Chief White Man” suitably enough, from South Dakota.

The tunic is of buffalo hide. It bears the remains of enemies killed in battle. Carefully preserved at Chartwell, it has strands of attached black hair, most likely from scalps, but only a few drops of dried blood: Chief White Man was evidently a dexterous scalper. (Chartwell’s devoted staff provided these photos for my book. The artifacts are too fragile for open display and are carefully stored.)

The family held a firm belief. Their Iroquois blood came from Sir Winston’s mother Jennie’s maternal grandmother, Clarissa Willcox, who (like Jennie) had a dark complexion. Exactly how this transpired no one ever precisely defined, but there was no doubt that they broadly accepted the idea. The rumor had a life of its own—perhaps because it was fun for the Churchills to believe.

“Damned cheek!…”

Randolph Churchill, who began the great biography Hillsdale College is now finishing, loved the story, and even embroidered it. Flying once into Johannesburg, Randolph was incensed by an immigration form asking him to state his race—an important matter in Apartheid South Africa. “Damned cheek!,” he shouted, and began writing furiously:

Race: human. But if your object 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.

Churchill genealogist Elizabeth Snell cut through all this joyful humbug when she revealed that Clarissa Willcox’s mother, Anna Baker, was the daughter of Joseph Baker and Experience Martin, children of English settlers, who married in Massachusetts in 1760. Logically, Mrs. Snell asked, do we accept family legend? Or do we accept “the simple, forthright facts as recorded by Anna’s colonial family in their probate records”?

Randolph’s insistence extended to his son Winston. In the 1990s after he’d published a book of his grandfather’s speeches, my wife and I drove Winston to see Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts. There we encountered an Indian (or a staffer dressed like one). Winston popped out of the car and introduced himself. “You know,” he said, “we might be related!”

Back in the car I said, “Winston, you’re as Indian as my cat.”

“Never mind,” he retorted. “It’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

Tall Tales continue…

…when Churchill enters Parliament. As President of the Board of Trade, he seals the fate of the Titanic. As Home Secretary he interferes with police battling anarchists in Sidney Street, sends troops to smash striking Welsh coalminers, and fights against Irish independence.

And then there’s the silly canard that Churchill was a lifetime opponent of votes for women. Continued in Part 3…

Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality is now available in paperback, with a lower price for the Kindle edition.  Click here.

…a kind and decent man, died aged 92 on August 29th, surrounded by his family. Neville had served most recently as a parish and district councillor for Billinge and Seneley Green. Described as a “great bloke” by his friends, he will be deeply missed by all who knew him. Among these are Churchill historians, who had the benefit of his remembrances. Bullock was probably the only man alive whose encounters with the great bridged Churchill in 1945 with Rudy Giuliani in 1996.

Trained as a Royal Marine, aged only 19, Neville Bullock suddenly found himself a bodyguard to the Prime Minister. It was July 1945: the last wartime summit conference, with Stalin and Truman. The venue was Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. He was stationed at the Villa Urbig in Babelsberg, requisitioned by the occupying Red Army for the British delegation. Here he joined “an impressive array of dignitaries”: Churchill, Eden, Lindemann, generals and admirals, regimental colonels and adjutants, senior officers and interpreters, journalists and security guards. His remembrance of Churchill is worth recalling:

“Anchor Man of Freedom”

The Prime Minister, now into his 71st year, was still the anchor man of freedom. His health seemed remarkably good for his age. He was buoyant, walked with a cheeky swing, and did not give two hoots for any possible danger. We had no difficulties securing his safety in the villa, but our job was more hazardous when he wanted to look round.

Twice he went on walkabouts in Berlin, plainly unworried at being what I saw as an open target. He enjoyed being Winston Churchill, and demanded all the consideration that went with his job. But he also believed he could look after himself. It was a relief when we returned to Babelsberg and the comparative safety of Villa Urbig.

The Prime Minister never showed any signs of fatigue, and always wanted to “get on with it.” His spirit carried our entire delegation. I did see him depressed once, when he looked totally fed up. That involved the fate of Poland. Even in my lowly rank, I had picked up the word. Polish freedom was being extinguished, and Churchill was devastated and angry.

Although there were journalists from all three allied nations, I found the Americans aggressive in their attempts to find news—as did Mr. Churchill. Once an American reporter tried to ask him something I could not catch. The old man snarled, “Get him out.” He and his comrade were ejected. They did not appear again whilst I was on duty.

This was another instance of Mr. Churchill’s moods. He could change very quickly but was able to compensate just as fast. Here, I thought, is a man who does not suffer fools gladly, who radiates concentration. Even his chief of staff, General Ismay, was very careful not to speak unless spoken to first.

On drink…

Mr. Churchill would sometimes joke with Lindemann about the Prof’s abstinence, which reminds me of a particularly annoying myth. It was started during the war by the German propaganda minister Goebbels, but some historians still repeat the notion that Winston Churchill was a drunk.

I was there and the historians were not. Mr. Churchill was no more a drunk than anyone who likes a drink. He did have his favourite tipples, brandy or whisky, topped up with champagne, and he pleased himself when he fancied a glass, which helped him work. Incidentally, our own foreign minister, Anthony Eden, always kept a bottle of gin or whisky handy, and he never appeared to suffer from scurrilous remarks.

Merseyside, England, 1996

Flash forward to 1996. Neville Bullock, now 71, was elected councillor on the St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council, Merseyside. Here he would serve for eight years. At the time Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York City, who was cracking down on New York’s crime and street violence. When he asked the Mayor if he would discuss his “Zero Tolerance“ policy of community safety, Giuliani responded, and the author learned the strategies by which the Mayor and his team had cleaned up New York. The two have remained friends ever since.

A final tribute

The last I heard from Neville Bullock was following the death in 2014 of Lady Soames. Then 89, he sent me a tribute to Churchill’s great daughter for a memorial issue of Finest Hour. It was my own penultimate issue—a most suitable occasion, I thought, for saying good-bye:

My first reaction on hearing the sad news of the passing of Mary Churchill was to recall a smart, young  Army Lieutenant who was the official Aide-de-Camp to her father Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference between Churchill, Truman and Stalin in July 1945. I was part of a small group of Royal Marines responsible for the security and protection of the British Cabinet, more specifically WSC and Prof Lindermann (Lord Cherwell).  Now that Mary has rejoined her family I would like to add my greatest respects to that young, smart, efficient Lieutenant I remember from 1945.

I pay now my own great respect to that old, smart, efficient Royal Marine, Neville Bullock. His career took him to close encounters with history. He was kind to share those experiences with the rest of us.

“Neville always wanted to help others without making a fuss,” his friend Jim Stevenson told Wigan Today. “He couldn’t have put any more into his life.”

Churchill on Smoking

The journalist and broadcaster Collin Brooks wrote a sprightly essay, “Churchill the Conversationalist,” in Charles Eade‘s collection of articles, Churchill by His Contemporaries. (This 1953 book is inexpensive and well worth owning. It’s an evergreen collection of perceptive pieces on aspects of Churchill’s life and character.)

Churchill’s defense of smoking is classic, Brooks wrote. And, like much of his conversation, this too has passed from the spoken to the printed word. “Some people say that I have smoked too much,” Churchill once exclaimed. “I don’t know. If I had not smoked so much, I might have been bad-tempered at the wrong time.”

“A Second Choice”

That’s cute, but not as good as Churchill’s remarks in his 1931 article, “A Second Choice.” This was reprinted as the first essay in his book Thoughts and Adventures. Here Churchill considers whether he would make the same choices were he able to live his life again:

I remember my father in his most sparkling mood, his eye gleaming through the haze of his cigarette, saying, “Why begin? If you want to have an eye that is true, and a hand that does not quiver, if you want never to ask yourself a question as you ride at a fence, don’t smoke.”

But consider! How can I tell that the soothing influence of tobacco upon my nervous system may not have enabled me to comport myself with calm and with courtesy in some awkward personal encounter or negotiation, or carried me serenely through some critical hours of anxious waiting? How can I tell that my temper would have been as sweet or my companionship as agreeable if I had abjured from my youth the goddess Nicotine? Now that I think of it, if I had not turned back to get that matchbox which I left behind in my dug-out in Flanders, might I not just have walked into the shell which pitched so harmlessly a hundred yards ahead? [Stationed in the trenches in 1916, where he had several miraculous escapes, just managing to be missed by German shells, one of which demolished said dug-out moments after he’d left.]

Libertarian Preferences

Churchill was a libertarian on personal preferences. He abjured vegetarians, teetotalers, dieters and non-smokers, but didn’t attempt to interfere with them. In Dundee, Edwin Scrymgeour, a Scottish prohibitionist, teetotaler and non-smoker, ran against Churchill six times. He finally beat him in 1922. Churchill is alleged to have said, though I can’t confirm it, that Scrymgeour had “all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

In certain respects Churchill quite admired the socialist Stafford Cripps, a member of his wartime coalition. But he didn’t approve of Cripps’s diet: “…there is a man who habitually takes his meal off a handful of peas, and, when he gets a handful of beans, counts that his Christmas feast.”

To his Minister of Food Lord Woolton in July 1940, concerned about too severely imposing wartime rationing, Churchill wrote:

Almost all the food faddists I have ever known, nut-eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay.…The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc., washed down on gala occasions with a little lime-juice.

So would Churchill legalize the growing and smoking of pot? Of course we have no idea. But on the whole, given what we know about his attitudes toward life, it’s more likely than not.

Fateful Questions, September 1943-April 1944, nineteenth of a projected twenty-three document volumes in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, is reviewed by historian Andrew Roberts in Commentary. 

These volumes comprise “every important document of any kind that concerns Churchill.” The present volume sets the size record. Fateful Questions is 2,752 pages long, representing an average of more than eleven pages per day. Yet at $60, it is a tremendous bargain. Order your copy from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.

Here is an excerpt from my account, “Fresh History,” which can be read in its entirety at the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Questions: Science

A criticism frequently leveled at Churchill is that he was so fixed on defeating Hitler that he never looked ahead—to the problems of the peace as well as the likelihood of a powerful, proselytizing Soviet Union. Proof that Churchill recognized the Soviet danger is well documented in this book; he also looked toward the years of peace, and the potential of science for good or ill. (Professor A.V. Hill, who married a sister of John Maynard Keynes, was Independent MP for Cambridge University, 1940-45.)

30 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Professor A. V. Hill. (Churchill papers, 20/94).

Dear Professor Hill, I am very glad to have the opportunity to send through you my greetings and good wishes to Indian men of science and especially to the six Indian Fellows of the Royal Society, of which I am honoured to be myself a Fellow.

It is the great tragedy of our time that the fruits of science should by a monstrous perversion have been turned on so vast a scale to evil ends. But that is no fault of science. Science has given to this generation the means of unlimited disaster or of unlimited progress. When this war is won we shall have averted disaster. There will remain the greater task of directing knowledge lastingly towards the purposes of peace and human good. In this task the scientists of the world, united by the bond of a single purpose which overrides all bounds of race and language, can play a leading and inspiring part.

Questions: Recrimination vs. Magnanimity

Churchill famously deplored blaming British and French leaders for mistakes in the years leading up to the Second World War: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,” he declared after France fell in June 1940,“we shall find that we have lost the future.” He made good that magnanimous philosophy on many occasions—as these excerpts suggest, concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain and French General Georges. (Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information.)

4 October 1945. Winston S. Churchill to Brendan Bracken: Prime Minister’s Personal Minute M.638/3  (Churchill papers, 20/104)

In the film “The Nazis Strike” I must ask that the section showing Mr. Chamberlain’s arrival at Heston Airfield after Munich, and also the shot of his going fishing with a reference to the “tired old man of Munich” should be cut out, otherwise I could not be associated with the series. The story would run quite well from the signature at Munich to the meeting in Birmingham where Mr. Chamberlain made his declaration that we would support Poland, &c.

*****

19 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper: excerpt.  (Churchill papers, 20/94)

Personal and Secret: With regard to General Georges. In my opinion he is a very fine, honourable Frenchman. For him I feel a sentiment of friendship which started to grow when we made our tour of the Rhine front together a month before the War. I do not think he was to blame for the catastrophe, except that he ought to have been very much stronger in demanding the retirement of Gamelin at the outbreak of war. Much of his strength and energy was expended in opposing Gamelin, but the inherent rottenness of the French fighting machine and Government would have denied victory to any General.

Moreover, Georges is crippled from wounds received both in the late War and the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. I do not forget, though this is a point which should not be mentioned to the French, that when Petain and Weygand at Briand in May 1940 were clamouring for our last reserves and resources, including the last Fighter Squadrons, well knowing that the battle was lost and that they meant to give in, it was Georges who informed our Military Liaison Officer that the French Government would ask for an armistice and that we should take our steps accordingly.

Questions: The Second Front

The greatest Anglo-American-Soviet strategy questions were over how much to throttle back the campaign in Italy (which had begun in September 1943) in support of “Operation Overlord,” the invasion of France, which all three allies agreed was the most direct route to Berlin and must go forward in 1944. Though this subject dominates our volume, these documents frame the debate. Among other things, they  illustrate that Churchill was not the only British leader who fumed over lost opportunities in Italy.

25 October 1943. General Sir Alan Brooke: diary. (“War Diaries, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,” page 56)

It is becoming more and more evident that our operations in Italy are coming to a standstill and that owing to lack of resources we shall not only come to a standstill, but also find ourselves in a very dangerous position unless the Russians go on from one success to another. Our build up in Italy is much slower than the German, and far slower than I had expected. We shall have an almighty row with the Americans who have put us in this position with their insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross Channel operations. We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.

*****

26 October 1943. Lord Moran: diary. (“Winston Churchill, the Struggle for Survival,” pages 130–31)

The PM is already beginning to have his own doubts and hesitations….His face was glum, his jaw set, misgivings filled his mind. “Stalin seems obsessed by this bloody Second Front,” he muttered angrily. “I can be obstinate too.” He jumped out of bed and began pacing up and down. “Damn the fellow,” he said under his breath. And then he rang for a secretary. When he began dictating a telegram to the Foreign Secretary I got up to leave the room. “No, Charles, don’t go. This,” grumbled the PM, “is what comes of a lawyer’s agreement to attack on a fixed date without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war.”

Alex’s [Field Marshal Alexander] fears had upset the PM. His mind was now made up. He turned to the secretary, who held her pencil ready. “I will not allow the great and fruitful campaign in Italy to be cast away and end in a frightful disaster, for the sake of crossing the Channel in May. The battle must be nourished and fought out until it is won. Molotov must be warned,” the PM continued striding to the door and back, “that the assurances I gave to Stalin about ‘Overlord’ in May are subject to the exigencies of the battle in Italy. Eisenhower and Alex must have what they need to win the battle, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations. Stalin ought to be told bluntly that ‘Overlord’ might have to be postponed.”

*****

29 October 1943. Winston S. Churchill to Anthony Eden. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1764/3 (Churchill papers, 20/122)

Most Immediate. Most Secret and Personal. There is of course no question of abandoning “Overlord” which will remain our principal operation for 1944. The retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay, perhaps till July, as the smaller class of landing-craft cannot cross the Bay of Biscay in the winter months and would have to make the passage in the Spring. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces, and also that the full bombing effort on Germany would not be damped down so soon. We are also ready at any time to push across and profit by a German collapse. These arguments may be of use to you in discussion.

 *****

30 November 1943. Winston S. Churchill and Josef Stalin: notes of a conversation, Soviet Embassy, Teheran (Cabinet papers, 120/113)

Most Secret. The Prime Minister said that he was half American and he had a great affection for the American people. What he was going to say was not to be understood as anything disparaging of the Americans and he would be perfectly loyal towards them, but there were things which it was better to say between two persons.

We had a preponderance of troops over the Americans in the Mediterranean. There were three to four times more British troops than American there. That is why he was anxious that the troops in the Mediterranean should not be hamstrung if it could be avoided, and he wanted to use them all the time. In Italy there were some 13 to 14 divisions of which 9 or 10 were British. There were two armies, the 5th Anglo-American Army, and the 8th Army, which was entirely British. The choice had been represented as keeping to the date of “Overlord” or pressing on with the operations in the Mediterranean. But that was not the whole story.

*

The Americans wanted him to attack, to undertake an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal against the Japanese in March. He was not keen about it. If we had in the Mediterranean the landing craft needed for the Bay of Bengal, we would have enough to do all we wanted in the Mediterranean and still be able to keep to an early date for “Overlord.”

It was not a choice between the Mediterranean and the date of “Overlord,” but between the Bay of Bengal and the date of “Overlord.” He thought we would have all we wanted in the way of landing craft. However, the Americans had pinned us down to a date for “Overlord” and operations in the Mediterranean had suffered in the last two months. Our army was somewhat disheartened by the removal of the 7 divisions. We had sent home our 3 divisions and the Americans were sending theirs, all in preparation for “Overlord.” That was the reason for not taking full advantage with the Italian collapse. But it also proved the earnestness of our preparations for “Overlord.”

 

Questions: Bombing Civilians

Churchill’s questioning of Allied “carpet bombing” is well established in this volume. Churchill was concerned over bombing civilians in the forthcoming invasion of France. Here he voices his worries to the Supreme Commander; in the event, Eisenhower convinced him that certain French casualties would have to be expected.

3 April 1944. Winston S. Churchill to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Churchill papers, 20/137)

Top Secret. Personal and Private. My dear General, The Cabinet today took rather a grave and on the whole an adverse view of the proposal to bomb so many French railway centres, in view of the fact that scores of thousands of French civilians, men, women, and children, would lose their lives or be injured. Considering that they are all our friends, this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces. It was decided that the Defence Committee should consider the matter during this week, and that thereafter the Foreign Office should address the State Department and I should myself send a personal telegram to the President.

The argument for concentration on these particular targets is very nicely balanced on military grounds. I myself have not heard the arguments which have led to the present proposal. The advantage to enemy propaganda seem to me to be very great, especially as this would not be in the heat of battle but a long time before. Would it not also be necessary to consult General de Gaulle and the French National Committee of Liberation? There were many other arguments that were mentioned, and I thought I ought to let you know at this stage how the proposal was viewed.

Questions in the House

Despite his burdens, Churchill routinely faced Questions in the House of Commons. He did so with relish and skill. From many questions and answers, this exchange on “Basic English” provides an example.

Willie Gallacher, a frequent critic, was Communist MP for West Fife, Scotland. Henry Wedderburn, Conservative MP for Renfrew, was jibing Churchill over one of his invented words, “triphibian,” referring to British prowess on land, on sea and in the air. The Prime Minister responded with one of his favorite archaic words, “purblind”….

4 November 1943. House of Commons: Questions

Sir Leonard Lyle asked the Prime Minister when the Committee of Ministers set up to study and report upon Basic English are expected to reach their conclusion?

The Prime Minister: I hope to receive the recommendations of this Committee before very long.

Sir Lonard Lyle: When we do get this Report will the BBC be asked to adopt it, or will they still continue to use Basic BBC?

The Prime Minister: Basic English is not intended for use among English-speaking people but to enable a much larger body of people who do not have the good fortune to know the English language to participate more easily in our society.

Mr. Gallacher: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider introducing Basic Scottish?

Mr. Wedderburn: Does Basic English include the word “triphibious”?

The Prime Minister: I have tried to explain that people are quite purblind who discuss this matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English language.

 

Questions: Will he die when it’s over?

Little escaped the wide net of Sir Martin Gilbert, who assembled a virtual day-by-day record of Churchill’s life. From here the Hillsdale team has assembled them in readable form, attaching a host of footnotes and cross references. Occasionally we include published recollections. Here is one by Lady Diana Cooper: a startling and grim prediction she heard from Clementine Churchill. Fortuitously, in this case, Clementine was wrong.

 12 January 1944. Mary Soames: recollection. (‘Clementine Churchill’, page 350)

Diana Cooper recounted a “curious calm and sad conversation” with Clementine, after a dinner in Marrakesh:

“I was talking about postwar days and proposed that instead of a grateful country building Winston another Blenheim, they should give him an endowed manor house with acres for a farm and gardens to build and paint in. Clemmie very calmly said: “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.”

She said this so objectively that I could not bring myself to say the usual “What nonsense!” but tried something about it was no use relying on death; people lived to ninety or might easily, in our lives, die that day…. But she seemed quite certain and quite resigned to his not surviving long into peace. “You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”  It was touching and noble.

Q: TheQuestion tries to provide our readers with the most reliable knowledge from experts in various fields. As we celebrate National Churchill Day, April 9th, we would appreciate your thoughts on three questions. These are currently posted without responses on our website: Was Winston Churchill really that good an artist? What made him a great leader? What was his greatest achievement?

 

TheQuestion: Churchill as Artist

​Please take a virtual tour of Hillsdale College’s recent exhibition of Churchill paintings and artifacts. Here your readers can decide for themselves. The consensus among experts, however, is that Churchill was a gifted amateur. He had genuine talent, but he also had good tutors: Sir John and Lady Lavery, Paul Maze, Walter Sickert. Several professionals—Picasso was one—said that if painting had been his profession, he would have done very well. (Picasso rarely shared his politics, and is reputed to have wished that happened…)

Churchill himself never pretended to be more than an amateur, referring to his 600 oils as “my daubs.” Until very late he resisted exhibiting, and was sensitive to his works being patronized because of his fame. In 1944, General Eisenhower’s chauffeur, an amateur painter, asked if he might show one of his oils to the Prime Minister. “Very good,” Churchill said, “but you, unlike myself, will be judged on talent alone”

TheQuestion: Leadership

To answer TheQuestion’s second query would require many words. ​Whole books have been written on the subject, notably Churchill on Leadership by Steven Hayward. Churchill’s Trial, by Dr. Larry Arnn, College, considers how Churchill resolved the nature and needs of the citizenry with constitutional democracy and ordered liberty​.

In my opinion two qualities of his leadership stand out: his ability to pursue the paramount goal to the exclusion of all rivals, however worthy; and his ability to communicate that goal to a baffled or frightened world. In May and June 1940, he was the only possible choice for premier, because for almost a decade he had warned of Nazi Germany as the primary threat. “I thought I knew a good deal about it all,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and was sure I should not fail.” A year later, when Hitler invaded Russia, he pledged immediate aid to the Soviet Union, which he had long excoriated: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

As a communicator he was unique in his time, and perhaps any time. I remember a Belgian lady at a Churchill conference, gripping Lady Soames’s arm to tell her what her father’s wartime speeches had meant to Belgians gathered around surreptitious radios, listening to crackling broadcasts over the forbidden BBC. Ronald Golding, a former RAF pilot who was briefly Churchill’s detective after the war, said: “After one of those speeches, we wanted the Germans to come.”

TheQuestion: Achievement

Churchill himself said “nothing surpasses 1940,” and we must look there for his greatest accomplishment—there, and not the glorious victory years later. Churchill didn’t win the Second World War. Winning took the combined resources of the Empire/Commonwealth, Russia and America. His biggest achievement was not losing it.

And it was, as the old Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, “a damn close-run thing.” By June 1940, many thought the wisest course was coming to terms with Germany. Churchill resisted, and won them over. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” His colleagues rose and cheered, thumping him on the back. All possibility of making peace with Germany vanished. Promotion for the upcoming film “Darkest Hour” says the movie will for the first time disclose why Churchill fought on. The reasons have been plain since 1940.

A 19th Century Man…

The journalist Charles Krauthammer contemplated events had Churchill not been there,. Hitler, he said, “would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.” And Krauthammer eloquently describes the singularity of Churchill’s achievement:

The great movements that underlie history—the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures—are undeniably powerful, almost determinant. Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different….Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary—he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against Nazism’s sister barbarism, Soviet communism.

Churchill is now disparaged for not sharing our multicultural sensibilities. His disrespect for the suffrage movement, his disdain for Gandhi, his resistance to decolonization are undeniable. But that kind of criticism is akin to dethroning Lincoln as the greatest of 19th century Americans because he shared many of his era’s appalling prejudices. In essence, the rap on Churchill is that he was a 19th century man parachuted into the 20th. But is that not precisely to the point? It took a 19th century man—traditional in habit, rational in thought, conservative in temper—to save the 20th century from itself.

…in a Thoroughly Modern Century

The story of the 20th century is a story of revolution wrought by thoroughly modern men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and above all Lenin, who invented totalitarianism out of Marx’s cryptic and inchoate communism. And it is the story of the modern intellectual, from Ezra Pound to Jean-Paul Sartre, seduced by these modern men of politics and, grotesquely, serving them.

The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. The 20th century was no more scientifically gifted than the 19th, with its Gauss, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell and Mendel—all plowing, by the way, less-broken scientific ground than the 20th. No. The originality of the 20th surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity. And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century.

Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of 75 years. That is our story. And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. It was America and its allies. And it was the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

See also 

National Winston Churchill Day 2016