“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.

Update for 2019

Assault and battery…

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Nearly forty years ago an equally great Churchill performance, Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years,  was received with equal acclaim by press and public. Most importantly, there was no chorus of hate, no trumped-up charges, no hint that Churchill’s overall record was in anything except positive. Alas times have changed.

Hardy at Hillsdale

I’m glad we were in time. In October 2015, we hosted him at a Hillsdale College Churchill Conference, where he wowed an audience of 600, guests, students and faculty. He told us that he strove imperfectly to play Churchill—to find, as he said, “a way in.” On another occasion he had said: “I shall never look down from that peak, but as long as I live I shall delight in gazing upwards towards those towering rocks.”

He was, of course, expressing the winning modesty that always accompanied him, gaining the affection of the world in his every role, from Shakespeare’s classics, to Siegfried Farnon, the Yorkshire vet of All Creatures Great and Small, to Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic in Harry Potter. (Of the latter role, his regretted only that he had no personal owl.)

And on to the end…

In April 2016 he was back at Hillsdale to talk to students about acting as a career. As before, he was a one-man show, launching into long quotes in Old English from Canterbury Tales.  Students and faculty alike were awestruck by his memories of Oxford, and his tutors, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

I feel his loss deeply, because on countless occasions he was there for me, appearing regularly at Churchill events, and our Churchill tours of England. On one of these he arranged a special tour of the Mary Rose restoration project at Portsmouth. A historian of the English longbow, he was the Mary Rose Trust’s archery consultant.

Everywhere he went he was always ready for an affable chat with everyone who admired him, and they were many. To those who knew what he had accomplished in his roles as Sir Winston, no actor however good could ever come close.

I will gaze forever at Robert Hardy’s towering rocks of achievement. He was the most genuine “Churchill” of them all. Far beyond that, he was a noble spirit, the most genuine human being. He is irreplaceable. I shall mourn him forever.

Addendum, 8 March 2018

His daughter Justine comments on the estate auction of Robert Hardy, a sad event, redolent of what Churchill wrote in Great Contemporaries: “I felt the tragedy which robs the world of all the wisdom and treasure gathered in a great man’s life and experience and hands the lamp to some impetuous and untutored stripling, or lets it fall shivered into fragments upon the ground.”

Churchill and the Avoidable War will cost you the price of a cup of coffee. You can read it in a couple of nights.  You may then decide if Churchill was right that the Second World War could have been prevented. Click here for your copy.

Churchill called it “The Unnecessary War…. If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages…he would have been forced to recoil, and a chance would have been given to the sane elements in German life.”

The Second World War was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable.

This book is available as a Kindle Single or an illustrated paperback via Amazon USA and Amazon UK. I would be most grateful any reader posts  a short review on the Amazon pages. Just go to the Amazon page and scroll down to “reader reviews.”

For book reviews by Manfred Weidhorn, Warren Kimball and Charles Crist, please click here.

The war problem as Churchill saw it

This book examines Churchill’s argument: his prescriptions to prevent war, not in retrospect but at the time. Here are his formulas, his actions, the degree to which he pursued them. Churchill was both right and wrong. Hitler was stoppable; yet even Churchill did not do all he could to stop him. The text covers what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years. It is thoroughly referenced with over 200 footnotes to Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries.

We must bear in mind that for ten years before war began Churchill was out of office. He had no plenary authority. But he did have stature, and the challenges were great. There was the rise of Hitler; the rearming of Germany; violations of the Versailles Treaty. There was the push for German hegemony, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria. Then came the Munich Agreement and the  seizure of Czechoslovakia. Along the way were many missed opportunities for useful relationships with Russia and America. Of course the challenges were Britain’s alone—particularly in the cases of the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia.

Churchill’s warning

It is proper to consider the lessons of the past as a guide to similar challenges now and in the future. But as Churchill wrote:

Let no one look down on those honourable, well-meaning men whose actions are chronicled in these pages, without searching his own heart, reviewing his own discharge of public duty, and applying the lessons of the past to his future conduct.

We must avoid applying the fatal decisions of the Avoidable War to today’s problems. Yet that is what we do. His words were applied from the 1948 Berlin blockade through the Cold War. More recently they were quoted over the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Suez and Cuban crises. Even more recently we heard and hear them about Palestine, North Korea, Iran, Russia, China….

Contents 

Chapter 1. Germany Arming: Encountering Hitler, 1930-34

Chapter 2. Germany Armed: “Hitler and His Choice,” 1935-36

Chapter 3. Churchill and the Rhineland: “They had only to act to win,” 1936

Chapter 4. Derelict State: The Austrian Anschluss, 1938

Chapter 5: Churchill and Munich: Lost Opportunities and Mortal Follies, October 1938

Chapter 6. “Favourable Reference to the Devil”: The Russian Enigma, 1938-39

Chapter 7. Lost Best Hope: The America Factor, 1918-41

Chapter 8. Was World War II Preventable? “Embalm, cremate and bury—take no risks!”

Summary: What Churchill Teaches Us Today

More articles on the Avoidable War

“Churchill’s Hitler Essays: He Knew the Führer from the Start,” 2024.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Simply Great Reading,” 2023.

“Hitler’s Sputtering Austrian Anschluss,” 2020.

“Munich Reflections: Peace for ‘A’ Time and the Case for Resistance,” 2020.

“The Indian Contribution to the Second World War,” 2017