Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair, 1945

While Churchill remained in hospital, a former member of his Map Room staff, Lieutenant-Commander Frank de Vine Hunt, was preparing a ‘Legend’ to serve as a ready reference for Churchill when he began once more to write his memoirs. ‘He is coming home tomorrow in an ambulance,’ Clementine Churchill wrote to de Vine Hunt on June 16, ‘and will have to spend another fortnight in bed. He will find the “Legend” by his bedside.’ The operation had been ‘most successful’, she added, ‘and I believe that it will give him a new lease of life’.⁸⁸⁹

‘Papa is getting on splendidly,’ Clementine Churchill telegraphed to Sarah Churchill, who was in Brussels, on June 17, ‘and comes home this afternoon. He will be in bed another ten days.’⁸⁹⁰

On June 22, while Churchill was still recuperating, the Daily Telegraph finally agreed to allow him to extend his war memoirs from the originally envisaged length of four volumes to a total of five volumes.⁸⁹³ Churchill remained in bed, surrounded by many messages and gifts of goodwill: on June 24 he sent a telegram to Lady Anderson to thank her for ‘the delicious wild strawberries and cream which I much enjoyed’.⁸⁹⁴

I propose that the following system be instituted: a small pool of deed boxes should be maintained for your personal use in the study at Chartwell and elsewhere and these boxes should on no account be placed in either of the Muniment Rooms. They should be marked with the letter ‘P’ (standing for ‘pool’ or ‘personal’) and in them can be kept the documents which are in use. After having been perused, pruned or destroyed as the case may be, they should be put into one of the pool boxes which will be clearly marked ‘documents for return to Muniment Room’. Whoever is appointed in charge of the Muniment Rooms will then be responsible for ensuring that the document, or what is left of it, is returned to the appropriate box under which it has been catalogued and indexed.896

On July 7 Churchill learned from the King’s Private Secretary that the King had ‘given his consent to the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten’. A special announcement would be made shortly: ‘till then it is a profound secret’.⁸⁹⁷ ‘The young people have known each other for some years now,’ the King replied in answer to Churchill’s letter of congratulation, ‘& it is their happiness which we hope for in their married life.’ The King added: ‘I am so glad to hear from Mrs Churchill that you are progressing well & that you are about again.’⁸⁹⁸

From Princess Elizabeth came a handwritten letter of thanks for Churchill’s good wishes:

‘The news,’ Churchill wrote to the King, ‘has certainly given the keenest pleasure to all classes and the marriage will be an occasion of national rejoicing, standing out all the more against the sombre background of our lives.’⁹⁰⁰ Four months later, Churchill invited Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten to lunch at Hyde Park Gate. ‘He wanted him to realize how serious it was, marrying the heir to the throne,’ Miss Marston later recalled.⁹⁰¹ The idea of the meeting, Prince Philip remembered, had come from his uncle, Lord Mountbatten.⁹⁰²

While Churchill was ill, several Conservatives, among them R. A. Butler and Harry Crookshank, were working with Hugh Dalton and several other Labour parliamentarians to construct a new Coalition Government. Their plan was to make Ernest Bevin Prime Minister, by-passing Churchill altogether. ‘Mrs Rab Butler, at lunch, told me,’ Pierson Dixon noted in his diary on July 21, ‘Winston would have a rude awakening when there was a Coalition and he was not the Leader.’⁹⁰³ But neither Eden nor Macmillan would agree to any such manoeuvre.

Also that July, Butler, Crookshank, Lord Salisbury, Lord Woolton and Oliver Stanley asked the Conservative Chief Whip, James Stuart, to tell Churchill that it was in the best interests of the Party if he retired. Later Stuart recalled wrily: ‘None of the others present at our private meeting repeated to him the news which they had so kindly invited me to convey.’⁹⁰⁴

On August 10 Churchill dined with two of the Americans involved in the publication of his war memoirs, Daniel Longwell and Walter Graebner. ‘I gave Longwell a set of the proofs of Books I and II,’ Churchill told Lord Camrose, ‘and also showed him the great mass of official photographs, of which I have about twenty albums. There are also my own scrap books and many detached photographs. Would it not be best for me to send all this to you and for your people to talk it over with Longwell?’⁹⁰⁶ This considerable progress with the war memoirs arose from a rigorous work schedule and the devoted help of advisers, secretaries and, from the Muniment Room, Denis Kelly, who later recalled daily work:

The day began at seven o’clock at night. I had to go straight up to his bedroom because he could hear the taxi arrive and was impatient for the latest proofs from London. A grunted ‘Good evening, my dear’; a long silence while he pored over the white rectangular pages and then, five or fifty minutes later: ‘See you at dinner.’ This was a scramble. He had a manservant who filled his bath, laid out his siren suit, and helped him undress and dress. I had less than twenty minutes to unpack, wash, shave, get into a dinner jacket and be at his elbow for a gulp of tomato-juice or sherry. We did this standing up. No slouching in arm-chairs for cocktails and cigarettes.

We ate at opposite ends of the table each with our copy of the current text. Sherry with the soup; champagne with the main course; port with the cheese; brandy with the coffee; each with our pen and scribbling pad, then back to his study where another table flanked with small china figures of Nelson and Napoleon gave a twenty-mile view in day-time of the Weald of Kent. A woman secretary with the evening’s letters. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Regret.’ ‘Show again tomorrow.’

Then down to the real work of the evening. Silent typewriter behind us to our right; long, hesitant, brilliant dictation; corrections with red pen; re-type. ‘Envelope for the printer. Let me see it.’ Initials at the bottom left-hand corner; sealed with a damp sponge from an earthenware bowl. (‘You can get cancer by licking stamps.’) ‘Make sure he gets it by the “Davey Jones”—his nickname for the Godfrey Davis car-hire firm—tomorrow morning’ and so to bed.

The first time this happened he stuck out his right arm and said: ‘Give me a pull.’ Siren-suit in beautiful red, black or electric-blue velvet pulled off; flung himself on the bed with legs outstretched; socks and long-underwear removed; totter to the bathroom, sounds of washing. ‘Put out the light, dear boy,’ and then a twenty-minute discourse on the night’s work and the work to come, spoken with false-teeth removed. Rush back to my bedroom to scribble it down and serve it up beautifully typed at the appropriate moment, maybe three weeks later, and so, with difficulty, to sleep.

Breakfast was in one’s room. He took sixteen newspapers from The Times to the Daily Worker and every few minutes the manservant would plonk the one he had finished with on your tray so that by ten o’clock you had read all the news, commented on from every angle, and were ready for the morning’s work. This restful process took place in the bedroom adjoining his study, with the budgerigar perched on his head or pecking at the proofs—(his name was Toby and Churchill’s papers, which were always held together by metal and cord tags because he hated pins, were normally the subject of his attention. He would peck and nibble till the tag fell out and the bundle slid to the floor)—the ginger cat on his lap and Rufus the poodle asleep across his ankles at the foot of his bed.

The first task was to make a contents-table to give the new volume a structure and proportion; the next was to collect the key documents for each chapter; the third was to compose the linking narrative. Each chapter was drafted, printed, re-drafted and reprinted at least half a dozen times and circulated to a group of experts for criticism and comment. The ‘master-text’ lay side by side on a slope in the study with the documents on a flat shelf beneath them, and at the far right-hand end was the embryo of the next volume to come.

A chapter was usually between five and eight thousand words; the rule was ‘chronology is the key to narrative, but subjects break in’; the commandment:—‘Say what you have to say as clearly as you can and in as few words as possible.’ The briefs from the naval, military, air and political experts suffered great slaughter with blue pencil for deletions and red pen for additions to clarify the style and achieve the proportion demanded by the chapter and, once printed, were returned to them for further criticism lest the compression and re-shaping distorted their accuracy.

Churchill never claimed to be a great author. The most he admitted to me was ‘the discovery at school that I had this astonishing gift for writing’ but he insisted that it is not enough to collect and establish facts, it is not enough to have them checked, corrected and commented upon by experts. What is of equal and, if you are trying to influence peoples and nations, of supreme importance, is how you present them, and he took immense pains in what he called ‘dishing them up’.

The first time I drafted a page of his war memoirs was a humbling and instructive experience. He had asked me to condense an expert’s account of the German air-attacks on London in the autumn and winter of 1940—the Blitz.908 The expert’s version ran to over one hundred and fifty printed pages and after ten days’ effort I managed to reduce it to the three typewritten sheets he required. They seemed quite good till I sat beside him and he pulled out his red pen and slowly and patiently corrected what I had written. My sloppy, verbose sentences disappeared. Each paragraph was tightened and clarified, and their true meaning suddenly stood out.

It was like watching a skilful topiarist restoring a neglected and untidy garden-figure to its true shape and proportions. In the middle of this penitential process he gently turned to me and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind my doing this?’ ‘Sir,’ I answered, ‘I’m getting a free lesson in writing English.’ He was visibly moved and from then on we worked in harness. I could at least help by weeding the garden and cleaning the vegetables and the Master Chef knew I would never be offended if he told me to throw them away and start all over again.

The number of those enlisted to help with the war memoirs was considerable. As Denis Kelly later wrote:

There was Mr Wood, the proof-reader. He had spent most of his life proof-reading for Harrap, the publishers who had produced Marlborough, His Life and Times, and though long retired, had a ruthless eye for misprints and inconsistencies. He was the same age as Churchill, never smoked or drank, and was so slightly-built that on Mafeking Night the crowd had swept him from Trafalgar Square to St Paul’s Cathedral without his feet touching the ground. His presence was dictated by a printer’s error which was almost as gross as the famous newspaper account of Queen Victoria ‘pissing over Clifton Suspension Bridge to the cheers of her loyal subjects’. In an early volume of his war memoirs Churchill had written: ‘The French Army was the prop of the French nation.’ The printers and publishers produced it as: ‘The French Army was the poop of the French nation.’

I spotted it at midnight in page-proof and could hardly believe my eyes. It was too near the truth to let it go and the first copies were already coming off the presses. What to do? A very angry telephone message exploded from the author and ‘errata slips’ had to be inserted in the offending copies—which should now be bibliophiles’ treasures.

Thereafter, Mr Wood was an essential member of the team and no error escaped his eye. If Molotov was spelt with a ‘v’ at page 27 and with an ‘f’ at page 298, Mr Wood would point it out and ask which was correct. The same if a strategic place was mentioned in the text and not on the accompanying map. ‘Indefatigable, interminable, intolerable’ he might sometimes be, as the author once irritably remarked when overhearing a long telephone discussion between Mr Wood and myself about some obscure problem of punctuation, but by the time he died no fewer—(Mr Wood would have immediately corrected me if I had written ‘no less’)—than ten volumes had passed through his hands with scarcely a blemish in spelling, syntax or punctuation. He and Sir Edward Marsh had frequent disagreements on this subject—which is often a matter of taste and personal preference rather than strict grammatical rules—but these were usually resolved by Fowler’s Modern English Usage or by consulting the practices of Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle.

Then there was the General—Sir Henry Pownall—and the Royal Navy in the person of Commodore G. R. G. Allen, affectionately referred to in marginal queries as ‘Gen P’ and ‘Comm A’. Churchill was not physically present at the great naval battles and only on the fringe of the Allied advance in Italy in 1944 and the crossing of the Rhine in 1945, and although much could be gleaned from the telegrams sent and received at the time, the reader needed a clear and reliable account based on the latest post-war information.

The briefs of Pownall and Allen filled the gap. Sometimes, of course, they were couched in somewhat technical language and fuller than space allowed—‘Dear Comm A can’t bear a single one of his ships going to the bottom without it going into my book’—but this was remedied.

Next followed the briefs on specialised subjects—the ‘conventional’ war in the skies—(Air Chief Marshal Sir Guy Garrod)—and the secret Intelligence battles—(Professor R. V. Jones, Duncan Sandys, Lord Cherwell and many others)—who like all good specialists had vigorous disagreements between themselves, and it was during one of these controversies about who should get credit for doing what that I made some remark about the unfairness of life and received one of the best pieces of advice I have ever had. ‘My dear boy,’ said ‘The Prof’, i.e. Lord Cherwell, ‘never forget that the object of a Public School education is to teach you at an early age the essential injustice of life.’909

Heading Churchill’s team as it grappled with myriad past events was Bill Deakin, quiet, self-effacing, devoted to his task and to his master. ‘I work all day & night at the book with Bill D,’ Churchill wrote to Clementine Churchill, who was on holiday in France, on August 11, ‘and it is bounding ahead. I must get the decks cleared for the ensuing battle.’⁹¹⁰

There was one brief moment of unexpected relaxation, or sport, on August 7, when Churchill joined Christopher Soames for a rabbit shoot. Churchill’s detective, Ronald Golding, later recalled:

I remember during wheat harvesting, Mr Churchill’s farm manager and others were prepared for rabbit shooting. They had gone the whole morning without bagging a rabbit. About noon, I drove WSC up in a Jeep, by which Mr Churchill always used to get round the farm. We stopped at a field which was almost harvested, with just a small square of wheat in the middle.

Mr Churchill clambered slowly out of the Jeep—he was about 73 years old at the time. Just as he got his feet on the ground there was a shout from the others and a rabbit darted from the centre of the field. In a flash Mr Churchill raised his gun and fired one barrel. The rabbit keeled over dead. It was a wonderful shot, and the usual Churchill luck. The others had been waiting hours for the opportunity.911

‘In one minute I shot one rabbit with one shot—the first I have fired in nine years!’ Churchill reported to his wife four days later. Now he was off to supervise the tidying up of Bardogs Farm, commenting: ‘Never did so small a farm harbour such masses of manure.’ Churchill also told his wife of a young Labour MP, Raymond Blackburn, who had brought his 73-year-old father down to Chartwell to luncheon. ‘He amused me vy much,’ Churchill wrote. ‘His medical advice for long life is plenty of Champagne & cigars.’

Always anxious, indeed desperate, to see his wife’s health improve, Churchill ended his letter of August 11: ‘Cast care aside. What we may have to face cannot be worse than all we have crashed through together. I send you my fondest love. You are ever in my thoughts.’⁹¹²

In the autumn of 1947, the Labour Government’s intention to nationalize the steel industry seemed to Churchill to offer a focal point for combined Conservative and Liberal action. As he explained to Lord Woolton on August 11: ‘The Liberal Party are whole-heartedly with us in our defence of the liberties of the working classes from Socialist serfdom.’ That day’s News Chronicle leading article ‘shows clearly that they will oppose the nationalization of steel. In my opinion all this will come to an issue in 1948, and it is my belief that we shall all be together in one line against this vile faction. I hope therefore you will continue to do everything in your power to promote unity of action with the Liberals on the basis of an Independent Liberal Party.’ On this being achieved, Churchill added, ‘depends the future revival of Britain’. ‘Let nothing be done,’ Churchill ended, ‘to rebuff the growing association.’⁹¹³

My darling one,

We had a flare-up about the Government’s demanding a blank cheque. I send you a few cuttings in case you are not receiving the English papers. I propose to broadcast Saturday night, in a tone of which you will, I think, approve.

It is delicious here. I have just been bathing with Mary and Christopher and Julian. Six new cows have arrived which Christopher bought. They look very fine and will replace the Marnham contingent when it leaves at the end of next month.

Bennie and his new wife came down here yesterday and spent the whole afternoon going round the farm.914 She is charming and he as sunlit as ever. They were very disappointed you were not here, but he just rang up in the morning and was off to Ireland the next day.

The Marlborough medal has arrived from General Whitaker.⁹¹⁵ It was presented by Queen Anne to him and is probably the only one struck. It is a most magnificent and valuable treasure. I am wearing it at present at the other end of my watch chain.

Everything here is pretty grim and poor little Attlee is hard-pressed. I have no feelings of unfriendliness towards him. Aneurin Bevan is making the running to gain power by extreme left-wing politics. If this proves true, we must certainly expect a political crisis, in addition to the economic collapse, which is worse than ever, and for which the Government have no plan. We had vehement Liberal support against the ‘Dictator Bill’, including even Samuel, and from the Socialist side, Raymond Blackburn, who I think is going to leave them,⁹¹⁶ and Victor Gollancz.⁹¹⁷ Perhaps you saw his letter in The Times. However the House of Lords have decided to meet every three weeks and they have the power to annul any Regulation which the Government decree. Moreover Regulations are not protected, as is Legislation, by the Parliament Act. Of course these powers will not be used by us except in extreme cases, but it is a satisfaction to feel that we are not at their mercy.

The harvest is proceeding with tremendous vigour and in perfect weather. Most of the fields are already cut and stooked and some have been put up on tripods. Christopher is very good and at it all day long. The lettuces in the walled garden were sold for £200 though they cost only £50 to grow. Thus it may be that the garden will pay its expenses and even be a contributor to the farm. The Smiths seem very pleased.918 The hot-houses are dripping with long cucumbers. The grapes are turning black and a continuous stream of peaches and nectarines go to London. I have one a day myself—‘le droit du seigneur’.

The book advances rapidly and I do not doubt I shall be free of the first portion, namely till December 31, 1940, by the end of October. It is very necessary to clear the decks as I am sure considerable events impend.

The Mule has promised to come and stay with me for a day or two. I expect her Hollywood film plans will have come to an end through the Government tax on American films. It seems to have been done in the worst possible way—so as to cause the utmost irritation in America and procure a minimum dollar relief for the British nation. They really are awful fools.

Juliet is coming to luncheon on Saturday.⁹¹⁹ Christopher has heard from Lord de L’Isle,—very civil but in a negative sense. He has been philosophical about it. After all one cannot expect plums to drop absolutely ripe into one’s mouth and I dare say there are half a dozen people with long, local attachments, in this highly developed constituency.

‘Darling,’ Churchill added later by hand, ‘I have just heard that you are returning 17th instead of 25th. How lovely! I send this to Reims on the chance of catching you. You will find everything bright & happy here. Always yr devoted, W.’⁹²⁰

On August 16 Churchill made the Party Political Broadcast of which he was so sure his wife would approve. He began by speaking of his ‘grief at the plight into which our country is falling’. The choice which lay before Britain was ‘between a system of competitive selection and a system of compulsion’:

There is no easy or pleasant road. It will be uphill all the way. But I am sure that it is only by personal effort, free enterprise and ingenuity, with all its risks and failures, with all its unequal prizes and rewards, that anything like forty-seven millions of people can keep themselves alive in this small island, dependent as it is for half its food on selling high-quality goods and rendering necessary services to the rest of mankind.

I am sure that industrial compulsion and all that follows from it adopted as a peace-time system will result in an ever-diminishing standard of production, standard of living and respect for law; and in an ever-increasing army of officials fastened on the top of us all.

The only path to safety is to liberate the energies and genius of the nation, and let them have their full fruition.

It is forty-one years since, as a young Liberal Minister in Mr Asquith’s Government, arguing against this same Socialist fallacy, I said: ‘The existing organisation of society is driven by one mainspring—competitive selection. It may be a very imperfect organisation of society, but it is all that we have got between us and barbarism.’ I should now have to add, totalitarianism, which indeed is only state-organised barbarism.

‘It is all we have been able to create,’ I said in days before most of you were born, ‘through un-numbered centuries of effort and sacrifice. It is a whole treasure which past generations have been able to secure and to bequeath. Moreover, this system is one which offers an almost indefinite capacity for improvement. We may progressively eliminate the evils—we may progressively augment the good which it contains. I do not want to see impaired the vigour of competition, but we can do much to mitigate the consequences of failure. We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards—we decline to allow free competition to run downwards.’

That was my faith as I expressed it more than forty years ago in the same words, and it is my faith to-night. And if there were any country in the world to which these truths apply, it would be to our British Island.

I warn you solemnly, if you submit yourselves to the totalitarian compulsion and regimentation of our national life and labour, there lies before you an almost measureless prospect of misery and tribulation of which a lower standard of living will be the first result, hunger the second, and a dispersal or death of a large proportion of our population the third.

You have not always listened to my warnings. Before the war, you did not. Please pay good attention to this now.921

‘It sounded to us out here,’ Colonel A. R. Wise wrote from the British Army of Occupation on the Rhine, ‘that it was an announcement of the turning point in the battle against Socialism—that the Party had at last reorganised and was ready to take the offensive once more.’⁹²⁴

‘Congratulations on your speeches and your broadcast,’ Sir Edward Marsh wrote from Norfolk, and he added, of the war memoir drafts: ‘These admirable chapters have been a delightful occupation on my visit….’⁹²⁵

In the last weeks of August, Randolph Churchill prepared to leave on a journey to Australia, New Zealand and Japan. On August 23 Churchill wrote a letter of introduction for his son to General MacArthur. After stating that Randolph had his ‘entire confidence’, Churchill went on to tell MacArthur with what ‘interest and sympathy’ he had followed MacArthur’s policy and administration in post-war Japan. His letter continued:

In spite of what happened in the war, I have a regard for the Japanese nation and have pondered upon their long, romantic history. To visit Japan is one of my remaining ambitions; but I can hardly hope it will be fulfilled. I am so glad you have been able to raise them up from the pit into which they had been thrown by the military castes, who only had a part of the facts before them. They ought to be our friends in the future, and I feel this wish has been a key to many of your important decisions.

‘It would have been very easy to prevent the last war,’ Churchill reflected, ‘but it is not so easy to cope with the future. The peace and freedom-loving nations must not make exactly the same mistake again. That would be too hard.’⁹²⁶

Throughout September, Churchill worked on his memoirs, but he took the opportunity of Lew Douglas’s return to America on leave to send a handwritten message to Truman, in which he referred to the Marshall Plan which was already, under the guidance of General Marshall, bringing much-needed aid to still war-damaged Europe:

My dear Harry,

As our friend Lew Douglas is going home for a spell, I cannot resist sending by his hand a few lines to tell you how much I admire the policy into wh you have guided yr gt country; and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from Famine and War. I wish indeed I cd come over & see you & many other friends in the Great Republic. The political situation here requires constant presence. I think there is no doubt that if there were a General Election, the Conservatives wd be returned by a majority. That is however the reason why an Election is unlikely.

You have my warmest good wishes in yr memorable discharge of yr tremendous office, and you can be sure that all the strongest forces in Britain are & will be at yr side if trouble comes.⁹²⁸

The world is facing serious problems and it has been my lot to have to make decisions on a great many of them. Our Russian ‘friends’ seem most ungrateful for the contribution which your great country and mine made to save them. I sometimes think perhaps we made a mistake—and then I remember Hitler. He had no heart at all. I believe that Joe Stalin has one but the Polit Bureau won’t let him use it.

Vyshinsky has assured my re-election I think,⁹²⁹ although the voters would do me a very great favor if they retired me. No one man can carry the burden of the Presidency and do it right. But I have a good team now.

Your Fulton speech becomes more nearly a prophecy every day. I hope conditions will warrant your paying us another visit. I certainly enjoyed your stay here immensely.

You are very kind to me, and I think give me too much credit. But I like it—particularly from you.

May you continue to enjoy health and happiness and a long life—the world needs you now as badly as ever.930

The Fulton speech was also on Churchill’s mind. In a speech which he recorded in London, to be broadcast at a public dinner in New York in memory of Governor Al Smith, Churchill declared:

We have travelled a long way in opinion since I spoke at Fulton under the auspices of the President eighteen months ago, and many things which were startling or disputable then have now become the foundation of dominant Anglo-American thought.

During all this time the Soviet Government have poured out, through their radio in twenty-six languages, and in all the speeches made on their behalf, an unceasing stream of abuse upon the Western World, and they have accompanied this virulent propaganda by every action which could prevent the world settling down into a durable peace or the United Nations Organization playing its part as a great world instrument to prevent war. Indeed the Conferences at Lake Success—perhaps prematurely named—have become a forum in which reproaches and insults are hurled at each other by the greatest States, hurled at each other for all mankind to hear if they care to listen. But some of them are getting tired.

Churchill then reiterated his view that he did not think the Soviet Union’s ‘violently aggressive’ line was a prelude to war. ‘If their minds were set on war,’ he said, ‘I cannot believe that they would not lull the easy-going democracies into a false sense of security.’ Hitler had been a ‘master’ of this, ‘and always, before or during some act of aggression, he uttered soothing words or made non-aggression pacts’. The reason for the violent Soviet language was, he believed, internal, deriving from ‘the fourteen men in the Kremlin who rule with despotic power’:

If there are only fourteen men, all eyeing one another and deeply conscious of the enormous populations they hold in chains of mind and spirit enforced by terror, it may well be that they think it pays them and helps them to perpetuate their rule by representing to the otherwise blind-folded masses of the brave and good-hearted Russian people, that the Soviet Government stands between them and a repetition of the horror of invasion which they withstood when it came so manfully.

There is no doubt whatever that the Government and the overwhelming mass of the British people, at home and throughout our Commonwealth, if any great issue should arise affecting human freedom, would act with the United States in the same solidarity and fraternal intimacy which has, so lately, given us victory against the combined dictatorships of Germany, Italy and Japan.

I believe that Britain will rise again with even higher influence in the world than she now exercises. I work for the revival of a United Europe. I am sure that the English-speaking world can weather all the storms that blow, and that above all these a world instrument, in Al Smith’s words ‘to weld the democracies together’, can be erected, which will be all-powerful, so long as it is founded on freedom, justice and mercy—and is well armed.931

In the last week of September 1947, Churchill began work on the speech which he was to deliver at the Annual Conference of the Conservative Party, to be held in Brighton at the beginning of October. Notes for some of his points, particularly those concerning the Labour Party’s economic policy, and the Conservative proposals, were provided for him by Reginald Maudling, a member of the Conservative Party Secretariat.

Churchill had been warned, not only that the speech would be televised, but that the lights would be particularly bright. ‘Mr Maudling is finding out for me if the things are as beastly as they sound,’ he noted nine days before his speech.⁹³² That day, Maudling wrote to put his mind at rest: no light would shine into Churchill’s face, and there would be no flashes of any kind. ‘It might perhaps be wise,’ Maudling added, ‘to have your notes typed on paper that is matt, as you might get a reflection from the lights from a very smooth surface.’⁹³³

Before going to Brighton for the Conservative Party Conference, Churchill spoke in his constituency, referring bitterly to the civil war which was then raging in India, where hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims had been killed in savage fighting between the two communities. After reminding his constituents of the warnings which he had given between 1931 and 1935, he added:

We are of course only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another, men, women and children, with the ferocity of cannibals, by races gifted with capacities for the highest culture and who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament. I cannot doubt but that the future will witness a vast abridgement of the population throughout what has, for 60 or 70 years, been the most peaceful part of the world, and that, at the same time, there will come a retrogression of civilization throughout these enormous regions, constituting one of the most melancholy tragedies Asia has ever known.934

From Sir James Grigg came a letter of praise, and a question of ‘how we can ever recover morally from what we have done in India’.⁹³⁵

‘I am too grieved with what is happening in India to write more,’ Churchill explained to Lord Mountbatten a month later. ‘But you always have my good wishes & my admiration for your achievements.’⁹³⁶

On October 4 Churchill spoke at Brighton. ‘In the present circumstances,’ he told his fellow Party members, ‘when the consequences of Socialist spite, folly and blundering are about to fall upon every home and business in ever-sharper forms, we can safely say that time is on our side. It does not rest with us when a General Election will take place; but it is quite certain that we should be most imprudent not to be ready for one at any time this year or next.’

Referring again to India, where the civil war continued from day to day with undiminished fury, he spoke of how ‘the Socialist Government on gaining power threw themselves into the task of destroying our long-built-up and splendid structure in the East with zeal and gusto, and they certainly have brought widespread ruin, misery and bloodshed upon the Indian masses to an extent no man can measure, by the methods with which they have handled the problem’.

Turning to domestic politics, Churchill castigated the Labour Government. The nationalization of industries, he warned, ‘will not make them profitable to the country or satisfactory to the workers’. Speaking of Attlee and Morrison, he declared:

18Britain, ‘The vital link between them all’

18
Britain, ‘The vital link between them all’