“The Art of the Microphone”

An excellent piece on this subject was by Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), the BBC’s first war correspondent and later its leading TV news commentator. His “Churchill the Broadcaster” is in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by his Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953). Old as it is, the book remains a comprehensive set of essays of the many specialized attributes of WSC.

Dimbleby offers four areas of discussion: the technical background, the drama of World War II, the factual material, and Churchill’s methods of delivery.

Dimbleby provides detail about how the BBC handled the wartime broadcast, which originated in vastly different places, from commodious Chequers (the PM’s official country residence) to the cramped confines of the underground Cabinet War Rooms.

“Be Quiet—Churchill’s Broadcasting”

“Churchill had a ready-made, keen, sympathetic audience,” Dimbleby wrote:

He had created enormous national confidence in himself. The great majority of the people—there were, of course, his opponents—trusted him, supported him and were avid for anything he had to say, even if his major promises were of “blood, toil tears and sweat.” Here, they felt, was a man who would say what had to be said, however unpleasant it was, and who would always hold out some hope of better things.

Of course the man himself was deeply conscious of this waiting audience, of the fact that he was speaking with authority, with a full private knowledge of the truth….

It was not only in Britain or the countries of her allies that people hung on Churchill’s words. I was told recently by a German broadcasting official who worked at Hamburg during the war that he walked into the offices one night and found normal work at a standstill. Even William Joyce, then in the full foul flood of his radio oratory as “Haw Haw,” was away from his desk. Asking what was up, the official was told to be quiet—“Churchill’s broadcasting.”

Broadcast Consistency

Churchill’s “magic of word and phrase, the forceful delivery, the mastery of language that made each of his great wartime broadcasts a pageant,” Dimbleby continued. Ironically, Churchill’s transgressions of the rules were what made him so good:

…he breaks every accepted rule of broadcasting….He drops his voice where he should raise it, he alters the recognised system of punctuation to suit himself (some of his scripts were virtually unintelligible to anyone else), he speaks much of the time with anything but clarity. Yet such is his power as an orator, and such his feeling of the public pulse, that during the war years he was sure of a silent and appreciative audience of millions, following every word and phrase with relish.

Churchill was also consistent over the years. His patterns of speech never changed. During a lecture, Dimbleby played Churchill’s very first 1909 published recording, on the Liberal Government’s budget:

There was no need for me to announce the speaker, for the first half-dozen words established his identity. The passage of nearly half a century has made virtually no difference to the voice, except to deepen and thicken it slightly. The same faint sing-song is there and the same lilting cadences, though there is never a cadence where you might expect it, at the end of a sentence. Generally the voice goes up, leaving the listener with the feeling that the sentence has not really ended at all.

These techniques were features of the special talent Churchill laid on his palimpsest of oratory. What was the real key? Dimbleby said it was “mastery of the English language.” Churchill loved words, especially in broadcasts, when he was not there to be seen to gesture or to grimace to aid his delivery. It was all based on words alone:

“Purblind Worldlings”

The historian will not fail to note that description of Mussolini as “this whipped jackal, frisking at the side of the German tiger…..” Von Ribbentrop was “that prodigious contortionist.” Those who dared to ask what Britain was fighting for were “thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings.”

The actions of Russia in October 1939, as they seemed Churchill, were “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But there was no puzzlement about the character of “Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption.” Then there were the neutral States, each one of which “hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” The crocodile was seen in another form when it turned upon Russia in June 1941…. “Now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanised armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.”

Those were fighting words, Dimbleby continued: words that made men and women in the midst of all-out war chuckle, knowing they were “exactly what they themselves would have liked to say”:

And when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, how magnificent was that sentence, “Faith is given to us, to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny.”

This was surely the art of the microphone, or the art of the orator adapted to the microphone, at a level higher than had ever been reached before or has ever been attained since.

Whatever have been Churchill’s fate in the years after the war, Dimbleby concluded—whatever public utterances he might yet make— “he will always be remembered by the people of Britain for the way in which he spoke to them in their homes when death was very near.”

Bibliography of Recordings

The first-ever bibliography of Churchill’s recordings (which include speeches and readings from his war memoirs) has been posted by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, compiled by Ronald Cohen, author of the seminal Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill.

Mr. Cohen’s new list includes the 1909 Budget speech Dimbleby alluded to, which was published in the then-new flat disc format that, in the 1920s, replaced the roller form of recording. That was, of course, a speech, not a broadcast. Broadcasting in Britain began in June 1920.

Churchill’s first broadcast, his hilarious speech about “St. George and the Dragon,” for St. George’s Day 1933, may be the earliest speech to be broadcast and recorded. Part of his remarks can be heard online: click here. I can’t help reflecting how relevant they seem, with relation to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

“The Untold Story of Mussolini’s Fake Diaries” (Daily Beast, 12 April 2015) evaluates Mussolini’s supposed diaries, letters or documents peddled over the years, while raising some incriminating charges, or suppositions, about Winston Churchill:

Before the war, Churchill offered Il Duce a deal. After the war, British intelligence tried to destroy their correspondence…. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he tried, in a series of letters, to dissuade Mussolini from joining the Axis powers. He was ignored. Three weeks later Italy joined Nazi Germany and declared war on Great Britain. Although there would have been copies in London of the Churchill-Mussolini exchanges, none has ever turned up and in April 1945, somebody in London was very anxious that Mussolini’s copies should never see the light of day.

There was no “series of letters.” Churchill himself published his only letter to Mussolini (16 May 1940), trying to persuade the Duce to stay out of the war—and Mussolini’s negative response (18 May) in 1949.¹ (Incidentally, Italy joined the Axis in 1936, not 1940.)

Of course there were at least three faked letters, published in the past, and referred to by conspiracy books. One of the more recent, Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini alla luce del processo Guareschi (2010), was exploded by reviewer Patrizio Giangreco, who illustrated the alleged Churchill letters. Complete with inauthentic letterheads and fake signatures, they are almost laughable in their amateurishness.²

The Daily Beast states that Churchill, en route to Lake Como for a painting holiday in September 1945, stopped in Milan to stand bareheaded at Mussolini’s unmarked grave. No evidence is offered, nor does it seem likely: Churchill flew from London September 2nd and arrived at Como the same day³—but I’m sure the conspiracists would claim that his vigil at Il Duce’s grave was “covered up.”

Churchill is said to have flown to Milan under the cover name “Colonel Warden,” which the Daily Beast suggests was his pilot’s name. In fact, Churchill had used “Warden” as a codename for himself and his family (“Mary Warden”) since early in the war. It likely stemmed from his 1941 appointment as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.⁴

Churchill, we are then told, arrives at his villa on Lake Como, “owned by none other than Guido Donegani…an industrialist and Fascist collaborator,” who was “interrogated by British intelligence and later released.” Churchill meets with Donegani, who apparently hands him the incriminating letters, papers or diaries—they are variously described.

The author adds that he enlisted official biographer Martin Gilbert to authenticate the diaries, letters, or whatever they were: “Gilbert, the historian, concluded that the correspondence had been retrieved and handed over to Churchill but it never turned up in the Churchill archives and was never seen again.”

This is passing strange, since Sir Martin Gilbert dismissed the idea of secret Mussolini correspondence, and nothing in his writings suggests Donegani met with Churchill. Writing to his wife the day after he arrived at Como, Churchill says the villa belonged to “one of Mussolini’s rich commercants who had fled, whither is not known.”⁵ (Again, the conspiracists would probably say this was a smokescreen.)

The so-called Mussolini Diaries are labeled “Fake” in the article’s title, so one must suppose there is no argument. There are a confusing number of references to various people who tried to peddle them, including one who ran away when hailed at an airport. An Interpol agent who investigated the story is quoted as saying Italians “needed people to believe that the diaries were forged” because otherwise “they would encourage a revival of the Mussolini cult and Fascism.”

How those faked 1940 letters, or other documents from 1945, would, if genuine, have revived Fascism is difficult to understand. Perhaps the best rejoinder is that of the historian Andrew Roberts:

Leaving aside the fact that Churchill would not by that stage have wanted or needed peace with Mussolini, one charge goes that the relevant documents are in a waterproof bag at the bottom of Lake Como. So, when one takes issue with them, the conspiracy theorists say, “go and look.” Of course, if you don’t find anything, they just say, “you haven’t looked hard enough.”⁶

Endnotes

1. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 107-08.

2. Patrizio Giangreco, “Leading Churchill Myths: ‘Churchill Offered Peace and Security to Mussolini,’” Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11, pp 52-53/57. (The letters were first published in Candido in 1954.)

3. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7 Road to Victory 1941-1945 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 134.

4. Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1984), II 344. Lady Soames to this writer, 2005.

5. Gilbert, Road to Victory, 344, and conversations with this writer, 2010.

6. Andrew Roberts, “Churchill’s Reputation,” remarks at the Cabinet War Rooms, London, 16 November 2005.