It was a Victorian funeral, held in a post-Victorian world. Everyone who remembers that January day in 1965 will know that as the world said its farewell to Winston Churchill, Britain finally closed an imperial storybook. The child of the celebrated Victorian statesman, roué and cad had outlived John F. Kennedy. The young subaltern who had taken part in the cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman, and said: ‘My faith in our race and blood was much strengthened’ had lived into the era of the Beatles. The First Lord of the Admiralty, who sent so many thousands to avoidable death at Gallipoli, had lived to be the contemporary of Vietnam draft-dodgers. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who helped to crush the General Strike was destined to die during the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The man who spent the 1930s in the political wilderness because he could not persuade Baldwin and Chamberlain to rattle their sabres against the European dictatorships lived to see Germany and Japan become two of the most vibrant economies of the modern age, and the European Economic Community one of the most successful economic and political success stories. So those who watched the coffin being borne on its gun-carriage through the streets of London, and saw it drifting on its barge up the River Thames, were watching the history of the early twentieth century being laid to rest. Above all, the world watched this funeral, this hero’s funeral, because he was seen to be the man who would be remembered, above all his other achievements, his failures and his triumphs, as the person who saved his country, and the values of Western democracy from Adolf Hitler. Millions of human individuals had been engaged in that conflict which had called forth in the human race such conspicuous examples of bestial wickedness and superhuman virtue. But there was a more than emblematic truth which saw that war, at any rate, during the crucial months of the summer of 1940 after the Fall of France, as a form of single combat between two individuals, two representatives of entirely incompatible and irreconcilable viewpoints. Both were painters. The one was a boozy, brave, historically obsessed old man, half aristocrat, half American, whose history-writing was as splodged with bright patches of unrealistic colour as were his sunny amateur oil paintings. The other was a teetotalling fanatic, of lower-middle-class Austrian origin, obsessed by race, and by the idea of the Greater Germany, whose essential dullness of spirit was evinced in the postcard-sized eerily normal architectural drawings and watercolours with which he had eked out an idle existence in his Viennese young manhood. Both believed in their race and their blood. Both believed in political systems which, when the devastating war between them was over, were in ruins: on the one hand, the British Empire, spread across the globe; on the other the Third Reich, dominating Europe for a few blood-soaked, hideous years. Both were natural autocrats, though with the essential difference that Churchill gave more than lip-service to democracy, and believed he had been fighting, among other things, for individual liberty. The world of 1965, excitedly discovering freedom like a teenager, believed it owed many of its freedoms to the old man who was being conveyed down the Thames, and hymned in St Paul’s Cathedral, as best of the old world, and saviour of the new. Peace and Love, the hippy luxuries, would not have been much in evidence if Hitler had won the conflict. But nor were they in evidence in those unfortunate European countries dominated by the Soviet Union, the country upon whose alliance Churchill had ultimately relied to defeat the Nazis.
The year 1940 did, in the opinion of Isaiah Berlin, ‘turn a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatising their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour’.1 That was how it felt to a fluent and able political philosopher in 1949. His Churchill was ‘the saviour of his country, a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time’.2
To write about Churchill is to find oneself in territory highly comparable to that occupied by writers on the subjects of Shakespeare and Jesus. On the one hand, there is the body of accepted factual evidence. In Churchill’s case, this constitutes mountains of written, oral, cinematic and other material. But there is also the huge potency of the collective attitude to the hero. This encourages some sparkier, perhaps attention-seeking historians to poke fun at the myth, to be iconoclastic, to suggest that Churchill was not such a successful war leader, or that he could have done things differently; even, if revisionism wants to attract real obloquy to itself, that the whole war, the deaths of the countless millions, could have been played differently, or avoided altogether. So the revisionists have their little day, and are succeeded once more by the even more bestselling counter-revisionists, asserting that, for all the mistakes made, the cult of the Last Great Englishman is still valid.
Central to the potency of the 1940 myth, however, for the British, is the tragic knowledge that the Finest Hour was lived through at a price, and that the Saving Hero was a figure like Samson among the Philistine lords at Gaza. He could defy them, but in the world conflict which followed the Finest Hour he was obliged to pull down the pillars of the enemy on himself in a great act of self-destruction. All the phenomena in which he believed – British world-domination, through its Empire; and at home, the survival and political usefulness of the Whig aristocratic order – were left, just as surely as was the Third Reich, in a heap of rubble by the time the noise and smoke of battle had subsided.
The fineness of the Finest Hour, when it made its first appearance in 1940 in the Grand Rhetoricaster’s speech, derived from its moral purity, its courage, its rash gamble for victory, its glorious claim that even if victory was not achieved, the fight would go on and on until the heroic end. Upon becoming Prime Minister, on 13 May, he said to the Commons: ‘You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for …’
To have made this speech in May 1940, and to have ended, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength’, was to give new meaning to all the qualities and pastimes for which Churchill was famous: it was fighting talk, it was gambling talk, it was valorous to the point of heroic fantasy. The German army had marched through, and vanquished, all the countries of Northern Europe – Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. France was on the verge of falling. The British Expeditionary Force in Europe was surrounded by the German army and no one yet knew that Hitler would order his panzers to hold back from all-out victory, so that the German infantry had time to catch up with the panzers. Had General Franz Halder’s urging been accepted, the entire British army would have been surrounded and defeated in that very week that Churchill spoke his words. He made his ‘victory at all costs’ speech before the Germans made their mistake (or tactical error if you believe that Hitler deliberately spared the British army in hope of a negotiated peace).
The ‘myth’ of Churchill’s saving courage is a myth in the sense that it is a story by which a nation tells itself a story about itself. But it certainly happened, and Churchill was a hero in an almost superhuman mould during those weeks. When Stalin toasted Churchill after dinner at Yalta on 9 February 1945, he said something which everyone present believed to be true:
Without the Prime Minister’s guts – the interpreter didn’t say guts, but this is what he meant – England could not have stood up to Hitler. She was alone; the rest of Europe was grovelling before Hitler. Do you know what Stalin said? He said that he could think of no other instance in history where the future of the world depended on the courage of one man.3
By the time Stalin made that speech, nearly five years after the ‘Finest Hour’, Russia was preparing to take over Eastern Europe, America was insisting that India be given its independence, Britain was economically destroyed, and the world was in ruins. The next especially famous speech Churchill made, first in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 and then as a broadcast on the BBC, was delivered after the near-miraculous retreat from Dunkirk. By then, he claimed, 1,250,000 men were under arms in Britain. It would certainly have made life harder for any invading force than if General Halder had taken the entire BEF captive three weeks earlier. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty,’ Churchill said, ‘and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say. “This was their finest hour.”‘4
This glorious sentence contains within it the least convincing conditional since Hitler had proclaimed the one-thousand-year duration of the Third Reich. It is some if. Within twenty months, the Japanese would occupy Hong Kong and Singapore and demonstrate to the world the essential indefensibility of British colonial outposts. President Roosevelt made it clear to Churchill whenever they met that he believed India should be given its independence even before the war ended; while his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, laid down in all his economic discussions with John Maynard Keynes that as far as America was concerned, the removal of Imperial Preference, tariffs and any economic protection of the Empire was a condition of American aid. Churchill from the very beginning had known that Britain could not stand alone for very long against so formidable a force as the as yet unconquered Third Reich. It would need, as he said in another of those glorious 1940 speeches, the one of 4 June, a continued struggle in which ‘our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry out the struggle until in God’s good time the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old’. But only on the New World’s own conditions, only on condition that Britain surrendered any claim to be a world power and handed that role to the Americans. That was what Churchill, great gambler that he was, could not have fully foreseen in 1940. He saw it clearly enough by 1945, and the British, nearly sixty years later, see it more clearly than ever. The British Empire had been shaky at the time, even though it was so dear to Churchill’s heart. Within seven years of his making the speech about the Empire lasting a thousand years, India had gone; within twenty years, the Empire itself no longer existed. In terms of Britain’s Victorian economic ascendancy in the world, that was on the wane by 1929, and the Finest Hour determined that Britain would be not merely economically ruined, but also politically. This might have been in the long term an inevitability. It was not an accident, if by accident one means something which comes about by mere chance or by impersonal forces. It was quite clearly decided by the US Treasury and by the US State Department that if support was given to President Roosevelt’s desire to help Britain and France in the war, there should be a price exacted. And that price was, and should be, the effective dismantling of Britain as a first-rank world economic power.
Hitler told foreign observers, and anyone who would listen, that he had hoped and supposed that Britain would keep out of the European war and retain its Empire. Not many believed that he would allow this to happen. The Anglophile Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State 1941–45, and Secretary of State 1949–53, complained that the US Treasury during the Second World War was ‘envisaging a victory where both enemies and allies were prostrate – enemies by military action and allies by bankruptcy’. They succeeded as triumphantly in this as did the Russians in their territorial and political victory over the countries of Eastern Europe. That is the screen of events through which the British of today see the historical palimpsest of the Finest Hour; and whether they are nostalgic for their old Empire, or embarrassed by its very existence, the Finest Hour has a particular poignancy. Nothing since has matched its glory.
Nor, it need hardly be said, has any British Prime Minister, before or since, ever matched Churchill for colour, exuberance, eccentricity, sheer strength. Alec Douglas-Home (Lord Dunglass as he was at the time of Munich, when he helped Chamberlain carry his briefcase to that sorry episode) once remarked that what he discovered, having been Foreign Secretary and then briefly in the early 1960s Prime Minister, was that prime ministers have very little to do. In peacetime this is true, which is why they have often seemed nondescript characters; none more so than those who were unprepared to admit the fact that for many weeks of the year there was nothing which needed to be done, and who therefore made themselves bustling parodies of a leader, like Chaucer’s Man of Law, who ‘seemed busier than he was’.
In wartime, things are very different, especially if, as Churchill did, the Prime Minister upon taking office pulls off a one-man coup d’état and makes himself into a virtual dictator. Without seeking parliamentary authority, he made himself Minister of Defence and took charge of directing personally all the military activities of the war. He excluded the three service ministers from the war cabinet. He was the warlord by air, sea and land.
Even if he had not been the very forceful and commanding character that he was, he would by this very act alone have been in a stronger position than any of his predecessors to leave his mark on events. Hitler, someone once said to Churchill, does not just want to plan the general policy of the war, he even plans the details. ‘Yes,’ answered Churchill with a smile, ‘that’s just what I do.’5
But of course it was his character which shaped his actions, and which made him into something which no previous prime minister, with the exception of Lloyd George, had even tried to be: that is a leader, a national leader. For all his courtly deference towards the Crown, and towards the great institutions of state, Churchill enjoyed something like absolute power for the five and more years that he held office for the first time as Prime Minister.
When it was all over in 1945, defeated in the polls and crushed in spirits, he went on a painting holiday in a borrowed villa on the shores of Lake Como. His daughter Sarah, his doctor Charles Wilson (who had become Lord Moran in 1943) and various others were of the party. Churchill’s spirits began to rise as he got into his stride once again. (He had painted only one canvas during the war, a landscape in Morocco when he was recovering from pneumonia.) On the walls of the Italian villa, or rather let into the walls, there was a dull landscape representing a lake and a wooded shore. It caught Churchill’s eye during dinner and he said there was no light in it; he could, he said, improve it. Major Ogier, a young officer of the 4th Hussars, saw the chance for the sort of jollities which might enliven a regimental mess, and rose to gouge the picture out of its place in the wall, thereby dislodging quite a bit of plaster. Churchill removed the glass and triumphantly bore off the canvas to his bedroom where, in spite of his daughter’s protests, he proceeded to add a gaudy sunset, using some new paints the young people had found for him in Milan. Later, he sheepishly undid his work with turpentine.
It is impossible to think of any other prime minister who would have played such a prank, and it seems entirely emblematic of his place in the prime ministerial gallery. Arthur Balfour and Herbert Asquith had been men of cleverness; Lloyd George had possessed qualities of greatness as a leader in war and peace. But on the whole, the prime ministers of the twentieth century constitute a procession of dullness from Campbell Bannerman to Bonar Law, from Ramsay MacDonald and Baldwin to Chamberlain. Then, the lightless canvas is roughly hacked from its place in the wall and a bright sunset is proudly splodged upon the leaden lake.
Churchill was sixty-five years old when he became Prime Minister. He was even more out of touch with the way ‘ordinary’ people lived than had been Lord Curzon, about whom the apocryphal story was told that he had ordered an omnibus driver to take him directly to his front door in Carlton House Terrace. ‘He knows nothing of the life of ordinary people,’ said his wife, ‘he’s never been in a bus, and only once on the Underground. That was during the General Strike, when I deposited him at South Kensington. He went round and round, not knowing how to get out, and had to be rescued eventually. Winston is selfish; he doesn’t mean to be; he’s just built that way. He’s an egoist, I suppose, like Napoleon. You see, he always had the ability and force to live his life exactly as he wanted.’ Thinking that he should express concern for the lives of the ordinary people, when rationing was introduced he asked for some rations to be presented to him on a tray. He was pleasantly surprised and said that he just about could imagine living on what was spread out before him. It was then pointed out that what he had believed to be enough for a day was actually intended to feed an individual for a week.
One of the many paradoxes about Churchill’s relationship with The People during the war was that this noisy, colourful man should have presided over a period of unprecedented drabness in the personal lives of British subjects; and that so self-indulgent and Falstaffian an advocate of excess in matters of food and drink should have been the national leader during a time of tightening belts and food shortages. The great Victorian Libertarian presided over the birth of the Nanny State, where politicians felt it was their business to supervise national eating-habits, and to censor jokes.
The paradox is markedly brought home in Churchill’s correspondence with his Minister of Food, the retailer Lord Woolton. This Northerneducated, socially conscious figure was hardly Churchill’s type of man. He had spent his young manhood as an assistant to a Congregationalist minister, helping out at youth clubs while teaching mathematics at Burnley Grammar School. Later he went into the retail trade, eventually joining forces with David Lewis in his department stores in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool (no connection with the John Lewis shops in and around London).
When meat supplies ran low in the first years of the war, it was Woolton’s task to try to persuade a largely carnivorous people to enjoy a tasteless pasty of root vegetables that came to be known as the Woolton Pie. Churchill airily assumed that there would always be plenty of meat, and nagged Woolton to make sure that no one ran short of bread or tea.
I am glad you do not set too much store by the reports of the Scientific Committee. Almost all the food faddists I have ever known have died young after a long period of senile decay. The British soldier is far more likely to be right than the scientists. All he cares about is beef. I do not understand why there should be these serious difficulties about food, considering the tonnages … we are importing. 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.6
While the bureaucrats and puritans dreamed up their bossy wartime slogans – ‘Wage War on Waste’, ‘Start a Rag Bag!’, ‘Dr Carrot Guards Your Health’7 – Churchill’s brandy-sodden rhetoric and high colour gave different messages to the public. Hitler could dismiss him as ‘a superannuated drunkard supported by Jewish gold’;8 Roosevelt’s first question to his Republican rival Wendell Wilkie, when he returned from a visit to England in February 1941, was to ask (about Churchill): ‘Is he a drunk?’ (Amusingly, when they met, Churchill himself was a little taken aback by the President’s method of making a Martini with sweet and dry vermouth added to lashings of gin.)
It was Hitler’s sobriety, in the circumstances, which seemed so eerie and Churchill’s drunkenness which was natural in the heightened terror of the times. The London pubs were full during the war. Even so high-minded a foreign visitor as the philosopher Simone Weil, working for the Free French, commented upon the comradely boozy atmosphere of the pubs, and kept a bottle of vodka in her bed-sit. The front page of the Evening Standard for 30 December 1940 had the headline SEVEN LONDON CHURCHES HIT IN FIERCEST LONDON RAID, while a box in the upper right-hand corner of the same page proclaimed ‘NICHOLSON’S GIN It’s Clear, It’s Good’.9
Robert Bruce Lockhart, civil servant, records: ‘I am drinking far too much – like most people in Whitehall these days. The Ministers are no better; Dalton [Minister of Economic Warfare] has a strong head, drinks hard and has a particular liking for brandy. Brendan [Bracken, Minister of Information] is rarely completely sober after 11 pm, and even Eden takes a man’s full share in the evening. War’s effects on the nerves, I suppose.’10 Churchill, who drank very weak whisky and water throughout the day, on top of the drinks he consumed during and after meals, was an apt figurehead for this gruesome period when the gods of war borrowed the attributes of Bacchus, and the grapes of wrath made mortals drunk.
In his dress-sense as in much else, Churchill was sui generis, or one could say pre-First World War Bohemian. The Canadian newspapers seemed surprised in 1943 when he arrived in Quebec wearing an unbleached linen suit. Domestically, especially when working late, he wore his self-invented crimson boiler suits, which emphasized that baby appearance on which all remarked. He loved uniforms, and could appear, apparently at whim, in naval caps, or wearing the uniform of any of the armed forces. At Teheran, where Stalin appeared wearing a brand-new and clearly newly designed mustard-coloured uniform with huge epaulettes, Churchill dressed as an Air Commodore. At Potsdam, Churchill was arrayed as a colonel. (In Hansard 1916–18 he is always referred to as ‘Colonel Churchill’.) The scornful remark of Chips Channon, that they might as well have made Caruso the Prime Minister, had a back-firing truth in it; for an operatic, colourful, and inspiring figurehead was precisely what the hour required, rather than a grey career-politician.
It was also an essential part of Churchill’s character that he was a Victorian. At Bristol University, of which he was Chancellor, he wore the robes which his father Lord Randolph had worn as Queen Victoria’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. On all formal occasions, he wore not a cutaway morning coat but a full frock-coat and tall silk hat, and looked every inch the contemporary of Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. His eating and drinking habits – grouse for breakfast, champagne to drink with dinner, followed by lashings of port and brandy – had little to do with the austere twentieth century. ‘I have always tried to understand the point of austerity’ – a broad grin appeared – ‘though I cannot claim to have seriously practised it’ was his remark upon visiting the shattered monastery of Monte Cassino in 1944. Victorian too were his religious unbelief and his views of the East. ‘He spoke of himself as a link with Queen Victoria,’ his doctor remembered.11 And Isaiah Berlin, who neither unpatronizingly nor inaccurately saw Churchill’s vision of history as ‘vivid historical images – something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace’,12 was precisely right when he saw Churchill as a nineteenth-century figure. He saw Roosevelt as a figure whose whole political career, and whose vision of his country and its destiny were based upon a confidence about the future; Churchill, by contrast, in Berlin’s view, was still inhabiting the brightly coloured illustrations of his child’s history book. Both men, Roosevelt and Churchill, had an ‘uncommon love of life’. The difference between them is best summarized in terms of era. ‘Mr Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Mr Churchill for all his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow – despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.’13 More than half a century after Berlin wrote those words, you could go further and change the ‘despites’ to ‘withs’
In point of fact, Churchill was the nineteenth century’s revenge on the scoffing generation which produced Bertrand Russell’s sceptical philosophy, Lytton Strachey’s anti-heroic essays on Victorian icons, and E. M. Forster’s sub-Wildean belief that it was better to betray your country than your friend. Churchill was not a Christian, and certainly not a believer in a personal deity, but he believed in a sort of Destiny, which was highly comparable to Carlyle’s views of history, rescuing decadent societies by the arrival of a great man – an Odin, a Cromwell, a Mahomet. Churchill saw himself as such a figure in 1940, and most others in Europe shared his view: that was his triumph. He made others share the vision. He meant it when he said, ‘we entered the war for honour’,14 and honour was what he not merely maintained, but summoned up in others.
In his book The World Crisis, he wrote up his impressions of Clemenceau. The words were penned in 1920, when he was forty-six, but he could have been describing himself as he took office as Prime Minister and steered Britain through the dramas of 1940. ‘Clemenceau embodied and expressed France; as much as any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was France … he left me with the impression of a terrible engine of mental and physical power, burning and throbbing in that aged frame.’15
Churchill’s was not merely going to be the political comeback of a failed Edwardian politician who had made a mess of most of his previous jobs and wanted one last stab at the top job. Nor was it even to be the resistance of one small Northern European power to the advances of a large one. It was the return of the Victorians. He brought back into British life a rhetoric of optimism, a haughtiness of temper, and a humour which had not truly been known since the days of Palmerston and Disraeli. His very language about Hitler – ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ – was that of a Victorian aristocrat whose temper has been tried too far and who now reaches for his riding-crop to deal with the upstart.
But it was also a moral stand, and that was Victorian too. He combined the colourful speech and eccentric clothes of Disraeli with the fervour of that Gladstone who had hated the Bulgarian atrocities and called for the British people to defend the Christian civilization which had been violated.
Of the King and Queen, Churchill said: ‘They have the rare talent of being able to make a mass of people realize, in a flash, that they are good.’16 From the beginning, Churchill’s grounds for opposing National Socialism transcended politics or strategy. His speeches enabled people to see the fundamental contrast between the decent values of Christian civilization, as embodied in the King and Queen, and the sheer brutality of Nazism, with its contempt for the human individual and its lack of concern for freedom. So the old Victorian, with his old Victorian values, returned to fight the Last Battle. The revisionist historians are no doubt right to say that, at various points during 1940 or 1941, the British could have made peace with Germany For all that we know, had they done so, Hitler might have lived out his days like some Teutonic General Franco, and his successor might have handed over Germany to a more liberalizing or democratic regime some time in the 1950s or 1960s.
Such a fantasy is impossible, however, because it is not what happened. There is such a thing as the mood of an hour. Churchill both awakened it and rode it like a surfer on the ultimate ocean roller. He enlisted the British Commonwealth and Empire for a struggle which would wound it mortally Far from surviving a thousand years, it lasted barely a hundred weeks after Hitler’s death.* The victory was achieved at the cost of alliances with Soviet communism and modern America, which would be the everlasting undoing of the Victorian world. Yet the battle was one of honour. However incapacitating it is today for the British to live with the mythology of 1940, however much it holds them in the past, it is understandable why they cling to it. There was a genuine glory and a dignity to the story of the old hero returning to slay some dragons before, bloodied and weakened, he and his Victorian world sank into the regions of twilight.
* India anyway. The African Empire lasted until the 1960s.