We are often asked which historical and contemporary personages most influenced Winston Churchill’s thought and statesmanship. One is right to start with Lord Randolph Churchill, Napoleon, Clemenceau and Marlborough. The classics open another avenue. Readers can find pithy remarks by Churchill on many of the following figures in Churchill by Himself.

Lord Randolph Churchill

His father was the first of young Winston’s political inspirations, and the subject of his first biography. “Like Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches,” Winston wrote. “In his speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a wealth of knowledge, which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.” Alas, Randolph died too young. His son remarked in My Early Life: “There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” See also John Plumpton, The Writing of Lord Randolph Churchill.

Seekers of Churchill’s inspirations must read his essay “The Dream”—an imaginary 1947 conversation with the ghost of his father, who died in 1895. Read also the excellent appreciation of the piece by Hillsdale College Churchill Fellow Katie Davenport. “The Dream” originated when, at the dinner table, WSC was asked what historical figure he would like to see filling an empty chair. His reply was instantaneous: “Oh, my father, of course.”

Bourke Cockran’s oratorical inspirations

There is no doubting Cockran’s significance. Churchill was quoting him to a later Democrat politician, Adlai Stevenson, in the mid-1950s. (Stevenson had to look him up!) Cockran was vital not only to Churchill’s oratory, but to his political thought:

It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations, but his conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard…. He taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ. He could play on every emotion and hold thousands of people riveted in great political rallies when he spoke…. Above all he was a Free-Trader and repeatedly declared that this was the underlying doctrine by which all the others were united. Thus he was equally opposed to socialists, inflationists and protectionists… In consequence there was in his life no lack of fighting.

Is this not the very description of Churchill himself? There is a fine book on the subject. Becoming Winston Churchill, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, is the standard work on their relationship. 

John Morley and “Mass Effects”

Like Cockran and Churchill, John Morley tried always to avoid war. Unlike Churchill, Morley was a pacifist. He resigned from the Cabinet when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Earlier that year, Churchill paid Morley a fulsome tribute: “For many a year he was an ornament of our Debates, and his learning and intellectual elevation, his brilliancy of phrasing, and the range of his experience, constitute assets and qualifications which the Government value in the highest degree.”

Morley is Churchill’s first subject in his book Great Contemporaries. In it he refers to his famous essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” which deplored the rise of the state and the homogenization of thought and politics:

Such men are not found today. Certainly they are not found in British politics. The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the war have swept the shores bare. I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch….  The world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, “Whither?” And to these few only a babel responds.

Clemenceau: faithful but unfortunate

Known as “The Tiger” for his aggressive politics, Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister, 1906–09 and 1917–20. His determination to win the war was legendary. In 1917 Churchill heard Clemenceau declare, “no more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues, neither treason nor half treason—war, nothing but war.”

One might say Clemenceau was a kind of French Churchill (or the nearest France came to one). They were alike in another respect: both were dismissed in their hour of victory. Churchill’s words about himself apply to Clemenceau, and remind us of the Churchill family motto, “Faithful but Unfortunate.” In 1940, Churchill wrote, “I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.” Thus also Clemenceau, shortly after his own world war ended.

Marlborough’s parallels

Churchill, a superb military historian, describes Marlborough’s campaigns with precision. But considering WSC’s inspirations, one might ponder the Great Duke’s geopolitical aspects. Leo Strauss, for example, called Marlborough: His Life and Times “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” His essay is in Harry Jaffa, ed., Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston Churchill (1981).

Andrew Roberts places Marlborough among WSC’s inspirations in his Churchill: Walking with Destiny:

Churchill’s strategic views, already profoundly affected by the Great War, were to develop significantly during his writing of Marlborough as he considered how his ancestor approached coalition warfare. “It was a war of the circumference against the centre,” he wrote of the War of Spanish Succession, just as it was to be for Britain after the Dunkirk evacuation…. [Churchill] admired Marlborough’s single strategy above the “intrigues, cross-purposes, and half-measures of a vast unwieldy coalition trying to make war…. Not for him the prizes of Napoleon, or in later times of cheaper types.”

Napoleon: writer and statesman

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon vies with Walking with Destiny in quality, a fine source for naming Napoleon among Churchill’s inspirations. Dr. Roberts explained that Churchill’s admiration was for the statesman and writer, not the dictator:

As an English Tory, I was expecting not to like Napoleon when I took up my pen…. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable parts of researching this book to discover that of course the Emperor had a hugely engaging personality and attractive character…. I like to think of [him] as the Enlightenment on horseback. The builder, the educator, the encourager of science and industry, the self-made man, the thinker, the writer, the giant and the genius. Instead my countrymen only see the soldier, the conqueror, the invader. They blame all the Napoleonic Wars on him—ignoring his pleas for peace and despite the fact that many more wars were declared on France than he declared against others.

Classical philosophers

Churchill’s inspirations extend to several classical authors or philosophers, like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and of course Thucydides. Paul Rahe, in “Why Read The River War?”, compares Churchill’s book with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War: “Nowhere can one find a subtler depiction of the moral and practical dilemmas faced by the statesman in a world torn by conflict. Moreover, Thucydides’ environment was bipolar—as was ours in the great epoch of struggles on the European continent that stretched from 1914 to 1989….”

See also Justin Lyons’ “On War: Churchill, Thucydides and the Teachable Moment”: “Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach. To convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done is the essence of political leadership.”

The works of William Shakespeare figured high with Churchill, who knew many plays by heart. He alluded to Shakespeare more often than any source other than the King James Bible. Shakespeare probably doesn’t’ qualify among Churchill’s inspirations. Rather, he was a rich source of the deathless phrases that punctuated Churchill’s expression.

Churchill read many more classics in his self-education as a young man. (For the full list, see his autobiography, My Early Life, Chapter IX, “Education at Bangalore.”)

…we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon‘s Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books, but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilisation than these brave old days of the past. —Winston S. Churchill on a certain threat to liberties, 11 September 1940

Here at home…

Which begs a question…

We cannot afford to confide the safety of our country to the passions or to the panic of any foreign nation which may be facing some desperate crisis. We must be independent [and free to] preserve our full latitude and discretion of choice. In the past we have always had this freedom and independence. I have heard reproaches about the Liberal Government before the War, that they did not make enough preparations or look far enough ahead. But we were in a position where, at any rate, we had a complete freedom of choice; much might be lost by delay. But, as far as the safety of this country was concerned, we were not in any danger. We could hold our own here and take what time we chose to make up our minds, and what time we required. —Churchill, House of Commons, 8 March 1934

What’s next?

Recessional

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

—Rudyard Kipling, 1897

Years ago the Columbia historian reviewed, for The New Republic, Martin Gilbert‘s official biography Volume VI, Finest Hour 1939-1941. It was, incidentally a fine tribute to Sir Martin, whose epic biography Professor Schama christened “The Churchilliad.”

What we should consider right now, though, are Schama’s evergreen words about Churchill. Martin Gilbert’s volume VI reaches its apogee in May 1940—the very time commemorated by the movie Darkest Hour. The success of Darkest Hour is, ironically, the occasion of today’s outburst of lies and calumny.

Schama on Churchill’s Leadership

Schama identifies three components of Churchill’s leadership. The first is “staggeringly and indefatigably hard work. Churchill was sixty-five when he became prime minister, but his hours and his devotion to detail left his bright young assistants dropping in their tracks.”

The second component is Churchill’s impressive grasp of military strategy. Schama wrote: “More than any of the other war leaders, and certainly more than either Stalin or the warlords in Berlin and Rome, Churchill was in his own right a great commander. This is not to say that he did not commit blunders. …. But he had an unerring nose for fine commanders, and he stuck by them even when they were drawing flack from their staff.”

The third component, Schama continued, is the most remembered:  “the passion and the dignity of his rhetoric.” Churchill’s speeches, he wrote, “broke the crust of the British class system and brought together those divided by accent, manners, education and fortune….

He played on his oratory like some mighty brass instrument, muting and swelling as occasion demanded. When he addressed the French, “Francais, c’est moi, Churchill qui vous parle,” he conscripted the ghost of Napoleon exhorting his troops against the Prussians, but was tactful enough not to mention that the occasion was Waterloo. At least one of his listeners thought, “every word was like a transfusion of drops of blood.”

Moral clarity

Professor Schama notes that those speeches were not just the product of “technical facility.” Churchill made his listeners brave because “his own moral clarity led him to attribute the best possible motives to his compatriots. Thus he associated them with his own resoluteness.” And thus Churchill’s words to his outer cabinet on 28 May 1940: “If this island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Churchill’s rhetorical quality was the one, Schama wrote, upon which all the rest depended:

He was not wartless—but his warts were just that, imperfections on the face of virtue. Winston Churchill emerges as a generous man, even to a fault. He despised vindictiveness and stood loyally by some who did not always deserve his kindness. He showed exceptional tenderness to Neville Chamberlain, and through the long period of his cancer never neglected to brief Chamberlain on every piece of business. When Chamberlain died in November 1940, Churchill cried at his bier, and reserved one of his most moving speeches for the memorial service. All this was transparently sincere and deeply felt.

Schama then reflects on the “historical miracle” that brought the western democracies two leaders—Roosevelt the other—”who inspired not only respect but love….

None of this adds up to a definitive answer as to why Britain survived. There are more impersonal reasons to be found in this book, and in others. … There are inimitable stiff upper lips all over the place, the stiffest of all belonging to the butler of the Reform Club who answered the phone the night that Pall Mall was put to the torch and responded to a request for information with a Jeevesian “The Club is burning, sir.”

“Like a great granite cliff…”

Nothing, however, stood out more clearly than Churchill’s own part and role. Yes, he did wonder—at times—if it all would be too late. Would Britain survive at all against the “monstrous tyranny”? But in the end Churchill personified, and taught his countrymen to personify, courage. In a note intended for his war memoirs, unpublished until Martin Gilbert’s Volume VI, Churchill wrote: “Everyone realised how near death and ruin we stood. Not only individual death which is the universal experience, but incomparably more commanding the life of Britain, her message and her glory.”

Professor Schama concluded:

The terror of imminent extinction flickers intermittently through Martin Gilbert’s crowded narrative. But whenever it begins to rise with the tempo of accumulating disasters, Churchill’s presence, too, rises above the panic, like a great granite cliff. I suppose that is what our parents felt and what sustained them in the nightmare of 1940. This is a rare thing then. The subject of a vast biography is enhanced rather than diminished with every page and every document. The only somber reflection on putting it down is the certainty that we shall not look upon his like again.

* * *

I’m asked occasionally why I spend so much time defending Churchill’s good name. Why bother with  perfervid seat-of-the-pants falsehoods from people who simply haven’t done their homework? There are many legitimate historian-critics—Robert Rhodes James, Paul Addison, John Charmley, W.H. Thompson, David Reynolds—who accompanied their texts with solid research. Their arguments are worth the attention of thoughtful people. But there is a difference between honest critics and dishonest bushwhackers. That’s why.

Attlee was the first prime minister of a socialist government with an outright majority (1945-51). In 1940-45, he had served Churchill’s wartime coalition government, chiefly as deputy prime minister. Attlee presided over the cabinet whenever Churchill was abroad (which was a lot). In early 1945, it was he who gave the fateful order, later much regretted, for firebombing Dresden. In May 1945, on behalf of his party, Attlee told Churchill that Labour was withdrawing from the coalition. Churchill, who wanted it to last until the Japanese surrender and end of World War II, was deeply distressed. In the ensuing election of July 1945, Churchill’s Conservatives were routed, and Attlee took over as the head of British government.

Churchill regarded his wartime Labour associates with gratitude and admiration. In the dark days of 1940, when he thought it might come to some grim last stand against the onrushing Germans, he said he had thought to fight it out with a triumvirate of Lord Beaverbrook and another Labour colleague, Ernest Bevin.

Domestically, Attlee and Churchill agreed on nothing significant. But both had fought as soldiers in the deadliest war in history. And both had governed together in the worst war in history. The respect and collegiality they shared is a model for our time. Or any time.

The supposed Attlee gags—”an empty cab drew up and Mr. Attlee got out”; “He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing”—do not track to Churchill. He did say, when President Truman said that Attlee seemed a modest man, “he has much to be modest about.” But that was a private remark, which someone on Truman’s staff overheard and repeated. When confronted with the other Attlee barbs, Churchill would vehemently deny them. Sometimes he would say, “Mr. Attlee is a gallant and faithful servant of the Crown and I would never say such a thing about him”—or words to that effect.

No wonder, then, that Mr. Cohen and I appreciate what Attlee said. He was truly, in the words of the old song, one of the Giants of Old. It why so many, Churchill friends and opponents alike, found Attlee’s speech deeply moving.

The Rt. Hon. The Lord Attlee

My Lords, as an old opponent and a colleague, but always a friend, of Sir Winston Churchill, I should like to say a few words in addition to what has already been so eloquently said.

My mind goes back to many years ago. I recall Sir Winston as a rising hope of the Conservative Party at the end of the 19th century. I looked upon him and Lord Hugh Cecil as the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party. Then, with courage, he crossed the House—not easy for any man. You might say of Sir Winston that to whatever Party he belonged, he did not really change his ideas. He was always Winston.

The first time I saw him was at the siege of Sidney Street, when he took over command there, and I happened to be a local resident. I did not meet him again until he came into the House of Commons in 1924. The extraordinary thing, when one thinks of it, is that by that time he had done more than the average Member of Parliament, and more than the average minister, in the way of a Parliamentary career. We thought at that time that he was finished.

Not a bit of it. He started again another career, and then, after some years, it seemed again that he had faded. He became a lone wolf, outside any party; and yet, somehow or other, the time was coming which would be for him his supreme moment, and for the country its supreme moment. It seems as if everything led up to that time in 1940, when he became prime minister of this country at the time of its greatest peril.

* * *

Throughout all that period he might make opponents, he might make friends; but no one could ever disregard him. Here was a man of genius, a man of action, a man who could also speak and write superbly. I recall through all those years many occasions when his characteristics stood out most forcibly.

Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.

Then I recall the long days through the war—the long days and long nights—in which his spirit never failed; and how often he lightened our labours by that vivid humour, those wonderful remarks he would make which absolutely dissolved us all in laughter, however tired we were. I recall his eternal friendship for France and for America; and I recall, too, as the most reverend Primate has said already, that when once the enemy were beaten he had full sympathy for them. He showed that after the Boer War, and he showed it again after the First World War. He had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world.

* * *

I think of him also as supremely conscious of history. His mind went back not only to his great ancestor Marlborough but through the years of English history. He saw himself and he saw our nation at that time playing a part not unworthy of our ancestors, not unworthy of the men who defeated the Armada, and not unworthy of the men who defeated Napoleon.

He saw himself there as an instrument. As an instrument for what? For freedom, for human life against tyranny. None of us can ever forget how, through all those long years, he now and again spoke exactly the phrase that crystallised the feelings of the nation.

My Lords, we have lost the greatest Englishman of our time—I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time. In the course of a long, long life, he has played many parts. We may all be proud to have lived with him and, above all, to have worked with him; and we shall all send to his widow and family our sympathy in their great loss.

Judging Hitler

It is important to understand just how right Churchill was about Hitler. In May 1935 the Führer wrote a revealing letter to the British newspaper magnate Esmond Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, one of his promoters. Hitler declared he was for Anglo-German understanding. He’d worked for it for fifteen years. Their mutual enemy was Bolshevism.

An Anglo-German alliance, Hitler wrote, would combine “the unique colonial ability and sea-power of England” with “one of the greatest soldier-races of the world.” Together, Britain and Germany could ensure generations of peace—a brotherhood of man. Except for references to Aryan supremacy, the Pope might have been writing this screed.

Rothermere enthusiastically forwarded the Hitler note to Churchill—whose reply was definitive. If Hitler was suggesting Britain agree to Germany dominating the continent, Churchill replied, it would be counter to history. Britain had always been on the side of Europe’s second strongest power: “Thus Elizabeth resisted Philip II of Spain. Thus William III and Marlborough resisted Louis XIV. Thus Pitt resisted Napoleon, and thus we all resisted William II of Germany.”

* * *

In 1935, Churchill published an article on Hitler, later reprinted in part in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries. Out of courtesy to the government (courtesy existed among politicians in those days), Churchill submitted his draft to the Foreign Office. They thought it too harsh. Churchill toned it down. They still didn’t like it. (“Don’t Let’s be Beastly to the Germans,” as Noël Coward later sang.)

In his 1935 article, WSC wrote: “…history will pronounce Hitler either a monster or a hero…whether he will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.”

These words were removed from his Great Contemporaries essay, though they reappeared shortly after the book was published in “This Age of Government by Great Dictators (News of the World, 10 October 1937. None of his words materially alters Churchill’s view of the Führer.

“A Champion as Indomitable…”

Ah, replied Pat Buchanan, but what about this: “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

Without context, “a champion as indomitable” almost seems like a testimonial. But Churchill had preceded that by saying: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” And Buchanan leaves out the rest:

I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. Everyone would rejoice to see in Hitler acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor….let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.

Churchill insisted he was no enemy of Germany. But he said what he thought the people should hear. So he declared that Britain would reject the “brutal intolerances of Nazidom” and “the paganism on which they are based.”

As a politician, Churchill obviously appreciated Hitler’s skill and nerve. With his innate optimism, he hoped briefly that Hitler might mellow. But in his fundamental understanding, Churchill never wavered. He was right all along. Dead right.

World War II: Firebombing Dresden

Next: World War II is the largest source of myths. An actor delivered his broadcasts. Churchill opposed the Second Front in France. He exacerbated the Bengal famine and destroyed Monte Cassino abbey. He refused to bomb Auschwitz or to feed the oppressed in occupied Europe. Well, no. But no World War II canard is more persistent than the story that Churchill firebombed Dresden in hatred and revenge for the bombing of Coventry. Continued in Part 6…