Mr. Paul Bonowicz staged a one-man protest against Churchill in South Ruislip, Middlesex. He denounced “the lies in British books about Winston Churchill. I am Polish and we know he betrayed Polish people.” He added: Churchill “knew about the Holocaust. He knew Jewish people were dying, but he didn’t help. After the war there was a deal between Churchill and Stalin, and the price was Poland. Part of my country went to the Soviets. It was Churchill who decided which part, not the Poles.” —Uxbridge Gazette.

Churchill did know about the Holocaust, and alone among allied leaders, he tried to do something about it. As to the alleged Polish betrayal…

Virtues and mistakes

In 1938, the Teschen District of Czechoslovakia was absorbed by the Poles, who happily took it, as a result of the Munich Agreement. In 1939 Polish parts not taken by Hitler went to the Soviets. Toward war’s end Churchill first protested, then acquiesced, and ultimately agonized over the shifting of Poland to the west. An eastern slice went to Russia and the Poles received part of Germany. In August 1945 Churchill told Parliament: “I think a mistake has been made, in which the Provisional (Communist) Government of Poland have been an ardent partner, by going far beyond what necessity or equity required.” (Churchill By Himself, 179). “There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess—and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.”

The matter has ben raised more recently in the modern round of Churchill criticism. It is difficult to comprehend what Churchill, and Roosevelt for that matter, could have done abut the land shift. By 1945 the Red Army occupied all Polish territory. The Anglo-Americans hoped (forlornly) that Stalin would make good his promise of free elections. Some Poles have never forgiven them, although Churchill was first to predict Communism’s fall, thanks to patriots such as Lech Walesa.

“Churchill: The Wilderness Years”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has just republished “Scaling Everest,” Robert Hardy’s recollections of playing the Wilderness Years Churchill. They are from 1987, his speech to one of our Churchill Tours, at the Reform Club, London. We are grateful to his executors, Justine Hardy and Neil Nisbet-Robertson for permission to reprint. For Part 1, click here.

I thought the occasion appropriate to republish my original review of the “Wilderness Years” from 1981, some years before we met. I thought at the time I had “laid an egg”—in Churchill’s phraseology, not RH’s. (In his business, as he explains, laying an egg means something different.) Now I am not so sure. I hope, to use Robert’s terms, that it was not a noxious egg.

Boston, 1981

Well, it was a great show, folks. And, inasmuch as any good material about Churchill is a plus, we welcomed and enjoyed it. We are beholden to WGBH in Boston, which most kindly mentioned Martin Gilbert’s accompanying Wilderness Years book.

Let us dismiss Lord Boothby’s complaint that this Winston is “a grumpy, vindictive old man [who] shouts all the way through.” Robert Hardy captures the Churchill of the Thirties. He was politically frustrated, ineffective as a father, worried about Germany. Simultaneously, he enjoyed of his most productive decades as a writer and historian. Perhaps it would be remarkable of anyone else. Churchill was engaged in multiple literary projects, any one of which would fully occupy a normal person. Simultaneously he turned Chartwell into a paradise and was a force, however spurned, in politics. His only wilderness was the one observers assigned to him.

And this may be the weakness of the production. It is hard to provide much TV action around the writing of Marlborough, though we’d have enjoyed seeing the great Duke’s battlefields. There is no drama to painting a canvas or building a brick wall.

We are given instead what plays well: politics, love, scandal, hate. Here enter several exaggerations. Adolf Hitler (Gunter Meisner), on the eve of power, glares through a restaurant window at the Churchill he refuses to meet. Of course the real Hitler did no such thing. Neville Chamberlain (Eric Porter), and his toady Sir Horace Wilson (Clive Swift, “Richard Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”) still think well of Hitler after March 1939. That is unfair to Chamberlain, who knew by then what he was up against. The desert scene with William Randolph Hearst (Stephen Elliott) and Marion Davies (Merrie Lynn Ross) never happened.

On the money historically

On the other hand, “The Wilderness Years” brings out important aspects of the story. Randolph (Nigel Havers) couldn’t be more like Randolph. The risks run by Ralph Wigram (Paul Freeman), Desmond Morton (Moray Watson) and Wing Commander Tor Anderson (David Quilter), in bringing Churchill news of German rearmament, are rightly emphasized. How often Stanley Baldwin (Peter Barkworth) played Churchill foul in the 1930s! (And how often WSC forgave him.) “The Wilderness Years” relays all this well.

In general the casting was superb. British television draws on an army of brilliant actors, and can always find a near-clone of anybody. I thought Baldwin was too pixieish, Ramsay MacDonald (Robert James) too mousy, Hitler a caricature. But Frederick Lindemann, “The Prof” (David Swift), Brendan Bracken (Tim Pigott-Smith), and Beaverbrook (Stratford Johns) were perfect. So was Lord Derby (Frank Middlemass, transformed from the kindly head master in “To Serve Them All My Days”). Neville Chamberlain couldn’t have been closer to life. Samuel Hoare (Edward Woodward) comes across as the evil force he really was.

Most of the women—WSC’s vivacious sister-in-law “Goonie” (Jennifer Hilary), noisy Nancy Astor (Marcella Markham) and Sarah Churchill (Chloe Salaman)— were well played. But there was one exception. Clementine Churchill (Sian Phillips) was simply awful. A friend who remembers Phillips for her role in the Roman drama “I Claudius” says: “I keep seeing her sipping wine and wearing a toga.” Was she typecast? Viewers must be the judge.

Flaws and edits

Phillips was not the “Clemmie” we know through Martin Gilbert’s and Mary Soames’s biographies. Instead we see a pretentious, unhappy aristocrat. Less a pillar of strength than a flitting mayfly, she is always ready to run off with some handsome adventurer. All the more curious (for Phillips said she researched the role), Clemmie is at sea literally and figuratively. The scene in which she returns from a South Seas voyage with an unnamed swashbuckler (in life, Terence Phillip) would thrill the National Enquirer, however unsubstantial its implications. Phillips could have saved the scene by reciting Clementine’s own words. “Do not be vexed with your vagabond cat. She has gone off toward the jungle with her tail in the air, but she will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably.”

We could have done without the bowdlerization of Churchill’s great speeches. Robert Hardy had his part down perfectly. (One soon forgets the lovable vet Siegfried Farnon in “All Creatures Great and Small.”) But almost every great speech, though beautifully delivered, was mercilessly cut to ribbons by the editors. The hatchet job on Churchill’s greatest prewar speech (“I have watched this famous Island…”) is unforgivable.

Still it is a great yarn. What historical character other than Churchill could excite a latter-day audience by reprising his life’s lowest ebb? As ever, Winston Churchill stands alone. I hope that the fine reception of “The Wilderness Years” has been sufficient to encourage further dramatizations of equally important periods—particularly the Admiralty sojourn of 1911-15, and of course, 1940. We’ll be waiting for it.

“War and Shame”

There are two quotations. The first was Churchill in a letter to Lloyd George on 13 August 1938, just before the Munich Conference, which led to World War II a year later.

I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.

Reference is Churchill by Himself, page 256, quoting Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 13, The Coming of War 1936-1939 (Hillsdale College Press, 2009), page 1117.

“We shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in”

A month later, Churchill wrote to his friend Lord Moyne, explaining why a proposed visit to Moyne in Antigua might be problematic. From Churchill by Himself, page 257, Gilbert page 1155:

We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.

Coincidentally, the date on WSC’s letter to Lord Moyne was was September 11th.

Misquotes

It is often believed that Churchill addressed a similar remark to Neville Chamberlain directly after Munich. The venue usually cited is the House of Commons. But Churchill never so addressed anyone, in or out of Parliament.  William Manchester’s The Last Lion, vol. 2, which quotes the Moyne remark on page 334, goes on to state (364):

In almost any gathering [after Munich] it would have been indiscreet to remark… “Churchill says the government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war too.”

To end with a red herring, Churchill is sometimes credited in this context with: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This is tracked to Benjamin Franklin. According to Bartlett’s, it was a common statement before the American Revolution, made as early as 1755. If Churchill ever used it (I cannot track that he did), he was quoting Franklin.

I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why  did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans? That is his crime and the recognition of it will come. —H.W. via email.

The choice before Churchill and Britain in 1939-40 was anything but clear-cut. There were good reasons, however, supporting the choice they made.

While considering the fate of Eastern Europe it is reasonable also to consider that of Western Europe, and what Europe would have looked like had Hitler triumphed, and moved on into the nuclear age.

Before assuming that Churchill didn’t care about Bolshevism, it is necessary to read a little. Read about 1919-20, when he supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks, earning no love from his practical, wise and eminent colleagues, who didn’t see what he did.

Read on into the 1930s. Who occupied the Rhineland in violation of treaties? What was the March 1938 Anschluss about? What happened at Munich? What about March 1939, and the absorption of all those Bohemians, Moravians and Slovakians into the Reich? Which country first allied herself with Russia—Britain or Germany? Cities like Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam were all hit before the RAF had dropped a single bomb on the Reich. Indeed, for many months after the war started in 1939, the most the British would drop were pamphlets. Bombing, some in the government believed, would amount to destruction of private property.

Why side with Stalin in 1941? If your back is to the wall you tend to welcome allies without being too choosy about them. It is a legitimate criticism that Churchill was too trusting of Stalin; those arguments are not coming out, they’ve been out for thirty years. But if he hated Germans, his postwar declaration that the only way to salvage Europe was through rapprochement between France and Germany was an odd way to express it. “My hate,” he wrote later, “died with their surrender.”

In 1931 Churchill wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life”: words that still ring today:

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

“Implicit in those words,” says Dr. Larry Arnn, “are the speeches of 1940. Churchill told the British people we must fight to the death—better to die than to give this thing up. The sin of Hitler, almost superhuman in its scale but not, is that he tried too form a polity that would eliminate the very heart of humanity. No one saw that more clearly than Winston Churchill.”

Churchill films seldom engender unanimity. But everyone who watched the preview, by kind invitation of the British Consul in Boston, had the same reaction. “The Gathering Storm” is really good. Even in a cynical and anti-hero age, filmmakers still can avoid reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or a godlike caricature. Except for huge gap in the story line, “The Gathering Storm” is outstanding.

Best performances

The two greatest supporting roles are female. Clementine Churchill was misplayed by Sian Phillips in the “Wilderness Years” documentary. But here Clemmie gets justice at the hands of Vanessa Redgrave.

Redgrave not only looks the part—grandson Winston Churchill, who should know, told me the resemblance is uncanny. But scriptwriter Hugh Whitemore has also provided her with exactly the right lines as she cajoles, scolds, wheedles and encourages her husband. “I often put myself in Clemmie’s shoes,” wrote Lady Diana Cooper. “And often felt how they pinched and rubbed till I kicked them off, heroic soles and all, and begged my husband to rest and be careful. Fortunately, Clemmie was a mortal of another clay.”

Ava Wigram

Equally compelling is Ava (Lena Headey), the beautiful wife of Ralph Wigram (Linus Roache). As Martin Gilbert revealed in the official biography, Wigram risked his career to bring Churchill secrets on German rearmament. Devotedly, Ava bears her husband’s strain, their deep concern for their young, autistic son. And the worst that politics can throw at her.

Angered by Wigram’s aid to Churchill, the government reacts. A toady named Pettifer (actually Board of Trade President Walter Runciman) visits Ava with a threat. If her husband doesn’t stop helping Churchill he will be transferred abroad, leaving Ava and the boy alone in London. She tells him to do his worst and throws him out.

This is an overdue tribute to a little-known heroine. Ava Bodley married Ralph Wigram in 1925. After Ralph’s premature death in 1936 she wrote to Churchill… “He adored you so & always said you were the greatest Englishman alive.” In 1941 she married John Anderson, Viscount Waverly, Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was he for whom the Anderson Shelter was named. Churchill was devoted to Ava all his life. When Anderson died in 1958, Churchill telephoned her from Chartwell. “After commiserating with her on Lord Waverly’s death he was silent for a while,” writes Martin Gilbert. Then he said “with what sounded like tears in his voice, ‘For Ralph Wigram grieve.'”

Finney and supporting cast

Albert Finney as Churchill is ten or fifteen years too old and looks more like WSC’s nephew Peregrine. But his mannerisms and pale blue eyes are right, and he grows on you, despite unnecessary toilet scenes and red velvet siren suits worn round the clock. Finney overplays the role—every Churchill impersonator does, except the inimitable Robert Hardy. But he is all right. Again Whitemore’s script comes through. Here and there is a snatch of words Churchill spoke in later or different contexts. (A 1939 broadcast to America is recast as a Commons speech in 1936.) But the flow is so seamless that only the determined critic will notice.

The rest of the casting is good—not as physically exact as in “The Wilderness Years,” but convincing and finely directed by Richard Loncraine. Sarah Churchill should have had a flame red wig to hide that mousy hair, and Brendan Bracken also starts too dark-haired, though his mop reddens as the crisis mounts! Randolph Churchill is too young and silly. Nigel Havers was a better Randolph in the 1982 version. Derek Jacobi makes a lifelike Stanley Baldwin. Sir Robert Vansittart (Tom Wilkinson) is the uneasy Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, balancing loyalty to his government with fear for his country, saying of Churchill, “he demands total loyalty,” and implying that it’s worth it.

Fine scenes with a major gap

The opening scenes at Chartwell in 1934 play like William Manchester’s prologue to his second volume of The Last Lion, providing a penetrating look at the household down to “Mr. Accountant Woods,” who on cue pronounces Winston’s finances a shambles. Winston’s hobbies—painting, bricklaying, feeding his fish, watching his pigs (the famous pig line is de rigueur)—are nicely done, though the fishpond is not the one at Chartwell. Mary Churchill (now Lady Soames) looks more like a young Chelsea Clinton than the beautiful Mary. Ronnie Barker is almost ideal as Inches, the long-suffering and devoted butler, but Barker is too English; as his grandson advises me (see comments), Inches was a Scot.

If this film were not so good, the gap in the story line would be unforgivable: After 1936 and Baldwin’s retirement as Prime Minister, we skip ahead to the war and Churchill’s arrival at the Admiralty. How can a film entitled “The Gathering Storm” ignore the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and Munich?

Granted, there are only ninety minutes, and one can understand the omission of, say, the Abdication Crisis. But without Munich the story falls short of its dramatic potential. Sadly too, Churchill in Commons mainly utters only banal statistics about aircraft production (too often to an empty House—most times he packed the place). By devoting fewer minutes to India and aircraft, they could have allowed Finney to tackle that most famous prewar oration, after Munich: “I have watched this famous island descending the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.”

Final thoughts

A minor flaw is the failure to identify all the characters. Modern audiences would benefit from seeing the credits before the film, the actors portrayed alongside a few lines identifying the characters they represent. But there’s little else to criticize, and what’s missing in 1937-39 is balanced by what’s included in 1934-36. Perhaps they’ve left room for a sequel?

The essence of this film is not so much the urgency of the hour, the naiveté of Britain’s leaders, their refusal to act “until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong,” Churchill’s defiant warnings when nobody would listen (his true finest hour, many think)—and the relevance of Britain’s inertia to our growing lethargy today, in the face of equally perilous threats. All that is there—but primarily this is a love story.

The intensity of Winston and Clementine’s devotion to one another permeates the tale. From their spats over money to their rapid reconciliations; from Winston’s chagrin at Clemmie’s four-month sojourn in the South Seas (“If it weren’t for Mary I’d be awfully miserable”), to his impromptu romp through his fishpond upon her return; to his touching tribute as he heads for the Admiralty (“thank you for loving me”), the film exudes the emotional ties that all marriages should have, and theirs did. Churchill once described his marriage: “Here firm, though all be drifting.” Fortunately for him, it really was. Give BBC and HBO a tip of the hat.