Churchill (16 page)

Mrs. Churchill’s comment was: “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.” To which Churchill replied: “It appears to be very effectively disguised.”

Glorious Twilight

C
lementine Churchill’s belief that the 1945 defeat might prove a blessing was abundantly justified, in many different ways. First, it spared her husband the agony of presiding over a dramatic but inevitable contraction of Britain’s global power. The country emerged from six years of total war exhausted, impoverished, and emotionally numb. Clement Attlee’s Labour government had no inhibitions about giving India its independence. As Churchill had predicted, the vast country split into Hindu and Moslem halves, accompanied by terrible slaughter. But the disintegration he feared did not take place. Indeed, the emergence of India as a great modern economic power, which he believed would take place under British tutelage, eventually began under Indian leadership a generation after his death. An India becoming rich, which Gandhi was sure would destroy her culture and soul, was to Churchill a welcome prospect, a final justification of British rule. So in this respect he was ultimately proved right, and Gandhi wrong. But he was glad he was spared the duty of setting India free. As usual, however, having fought the legislation through all its stages, he accepted the verdict of Parliament. As he said to Nehru, the new Indian prime minister, “It is now your task to lead to prosperity the India I loved and served.”

He was also spared the pain of presiding over Israel’s birth. A fervent Zionist he remained. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, the founding fathers, were friends. But he could not bear the savage terrorist campaign waged by Irgun and the Stern Gang and against British troops, which preceded Israel’s formation. “I try to put everything concerning Palestine out of my mind,” he said sadly.

As he saw it, his main global task during his period of opposition was twofold. First to arouse the world, and especially the United States, to the dangers presented by the power of Stalin’s Soviet Union. In America he was universally popular. On March 6, 1946, invited by President Truman, who became a firm friend and a warm admirer, to make a major speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, his home state, Churchill responded with a call to vigilance in response to the Soviet peril. “An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he said. Whether he invented the term “iron curtain” is a matter of dispute. He certainly popularized it, as well as “cold war”—“A cold war against Russia has replaced the hot war against Germany,” as he put it. But Churchill equally saw his second task was to promote dialogue across the cold war iron curtain. He wanted summits, as always. A favorite saying of his was “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” He much resented the accusation that he was a man of war, still more a warmonger. In 1941 he allowed himself to be photographed holding a Thompson sub-machine gun, part of a shipment from America. It was often used against him to illustrate the image of “Gangster Churchill” harped on by Hitler and occasionally by his Labour enemies. But it was a splendid photo, and Churchill loved it. When he made his wartime voyages across the Atlantic by liner, he insisted the lifeboat to which he was assigned be provided with “tommy guns.” “I dread capture more than death,” he said, “and I will go down fighting.”

All the same, he was anxious to lose his reputation for bellicosity. That was why he welcomed the emergence of Ernest Bevin as a tough, resolute, and, if necessary, fierce foreign secretary in 1945, one quite capable of standing up to the Russians and giving them, to use his terminology, “what for.” He also applauded Attlee for his firm handling of Soviet forward moves, especially during the Berlin blockade. He disliked belittling remarks about Attlee (except when he made them himself ). Once, at Chartwell, Sir John Rodgers referred to Attlee as “silly old Attlee.” Churchill exploded:

Churchill considered it fortunate that the war in Korea came while Attlee and Labour were still in power. He told a group of Tory MPs early in 1951, “We had no alternative but to fight, but if I had been Prime Minister, they would have called me a warmonger. As it is, I have not been called upon to take so invidious a step as to send our young men to fight on the other side of the globe. The Old Man has been good to me.” Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, MP, was puzzled. “What old man, sir?” Churchill chuckled. “Why, Sir Reginald. Almighty God, the Ruler of the Universe!”

It is likely that the 1945 election result was also a blessing simply in relieving Churchill’s workload. If he had carried on as prime minister without a break, he might not have lived long. That was the medical view. As it was, while attending the House of Commons often and making some memorable speeches, he was able to hand over the main business of the Opposition to younger men: Eden, R. A. Butler, Oliver Lyttelton, and Harold Macmillan. He enjoyed many breaks. He took his painting more and more seriously. After his defeat, Field Marshal Alexander placed at his disposal a superb villa his army had commanded overlooking Lake Como, and Churchill set to, to paint the glorious scenery there. The news of his skill as a landscape painter was spreading. The rich began to collect his work. His canvases fetched high prices in the auction rooms. His excellent book
Painting as a Pastime
circulated widely and won the approval of the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings, who wanted anyone of talent to take up painting and thought Churchill a shining example of how high an amateur could rise with proper encouragement and enthusiasm. He contrived to get Churchill elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy Extraordinary. Nothing in Churchill’s life gave him greater pleasure. He sent his pictures to the summer exhibition and always, if he could, attended the annual banquet, often speaking there. He and Munnings had a lot in common, especially love of life and color and detestation of “modern art.” Munnings related: “Mr. Churchill said to me, ‘Alf, if you were walking down Piccadilly, and you saw Picasso walking in front of you, what would you do? ’ ‘Kick his arse, Mr. Churchill.’ ‘Quite right, Alf.’ ”

In addition, Churchill took up racing. Clemmie disapproved: “A rich man’s sport,” she said. “Before he bought the horse (I can’t think why) he had hardly been on a racecourse in his life.” Actually, the idea came from his son-in-law Christopher Soames, who had married his daughter Mary and who loved racehorses. The old idol ization of his father stirred in Churchill’s veins: “I can revive my father’s racing colours.” He did, and set up a small stud near New-chapel Green, convenient for Lingfield races and not far from Chartwell. He acquired (among others) a gray colt called Colonist II, which won thirteen races for him, including some big ones, and proved a popular bet among working-class punters before going out to stud. Churchill was elected to the Jockey Club in 1950 and loved that, too. Moreover, owning racehorses, far from ruining him, actually made him quite a bit of money.

But the chief activity of the postwar Churchill was writing. This is the main reason Clementine was right to say the 1945 defeat was a blessing in disguise. He had always believed—he said so explicitly in May 1938—“Words are the only things that last for ever.” Between 1941 and 1945 he had performed great deeds. Now he needed to write the words to ensure that the deeds were correctly described and so made immortal. After the 1945 landslide, he buckled down to the immense and daunting task of writing his war memoirs immediately. The work was pressed forward with all deliberate speed and with all the resources of intellect and energy. Despite its immense length—over 2 million words—the great majority of the book was done by the time he returned to power at the end of 1951. It is a disturbing thought that if he had remained in office it might never have been done at all. If, by carrying on with his overwhelming efforts as premier, especially in the disheartening conditions of the postwar world, he had shortened his life, it would certainly not have been done. The world would have lost a masterpiece, and our view of Churchill might now be distinctly different.

The work was a team effort. Chartwell became a writing factory, with ghostly co-writers, research assistants, historical consultants, and military experts flitting in and out, and with secretaries and typists pounding away by day and taking dictation by night. Churchill called his creative formula “the three Ds—documents, dictation and drafts.” The book was a documentary history as well as a personal memoir. He had from an early age always hoarded papers (as did George Washington), and Chartwell had been refashioned by him partly to house this archive efficiently. What he learned from writing
The World Crisis
was the need to make the earliest possible use of official papers, and if possible to get physical possession of them as well as the legal right to use them. From the start in World War II, he applied this lesson assiduously. It is likely that many of his wartime writings—memos, orders, assessments, and strategic directives—were written by him with a view to future use in his memoirs. It was one reason he always gave or confirmed his orders in writing. Before he left Downing Street in summer 1945 he and the then cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, made what has been called “a remarkable bargain.” Churchill asked for no financial, honorific, or other reward for his unique wartime services. What he asked for, and got, was agreement that a vast quantity of the wartime official papers be classified as his personal property. Moreover, he was allowed to remove them to his personal archive at Chartwell. The only qualification was that their publication had to be approved by the government of the day. This bargain meant that Churchill was able to document his account in full from the start. He was right ahead of the field, by miles. There was virtually no competition during the seven years it took him to write and publish the work, especially from the very top. Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt were dead (so were Chamberlain and Baldwin, of course). Stalin wrote no memoirs, thinking—the fool!—that Soviet official history, supervised by him, would do instead. Churchill published well before the various generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians who had also participated could get their word in. He also benefited from exclusivity. The British documents to which Churchill alone had full access were closed to everyone else except certain authors of official histories on specific and narrow subjects. In 1958 legislation permitted access, subject to the “fifty year rule,” which meant any particular document could not be seen by the public for half a century. In 1967 the period was reduced to thirty years, but by then Churchill was dead, having got his word in first.

In effect, the period of revisionism did not start until the decade after Churchill’s death. By then many of the verdicts he sought to impose had become deeply embedded in the received version of history, taught in schools and universities, and the heroic epic of Churchill, largely written or inspired by himself, had passed into the public historical memory. Was it truthful? A large proportion of it is documentation, especially the wartime minutes and telegrams. Churchill dictated long passages on key episodes of particular importance to him, which he recalled vividly. There were also extensive drafts, corrected by Churchill, which were written by “the Syndicate,” the team of research assistants under the leadership of Bill Deakin, an academic and the only professional historian on the team, Henry Pownall, and Gordon Allen. Experts and participants—service chiefs, industrialists, and scientists—were summoned to help with special passages. All these people served to correct Churchill’s memory of events when necessary and to balance his exuberance. But his memory was superlative at this stage of his life and remarkably free from any grudges, let alone malice. The production of the work has been compared to results achieved by a big scientific research group directed by a genius who gets the credit. Asked if Churchill really wrote the book himself, Denis Kelly, office manager of the Syndicate, replied that was like asking a master chef, “Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands?” A careful study of both the work and the way it was put together may reveal manipulations, omissions, and suppressions (for obvious reasons, little is said of Enigma and successful code breaking such as Ultra). But the impression that emerges is that Churchill was a historian of passion, romantic and often inspired to special insights and near poetry, and a writer of dynamic power and energy, as well as a recording angel of striking ruthlessness. By giving his version of the greatest of all wars, and his own role in it, he knew he was fighting for his ultimate place in history. What was at stake was his status as a hero. So he fought hard and took no prisoners. On the whole he won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.

War Memoirs
was immensely successful, not least because so much in it was new to the reader, and especially fascinating to those who had lived through the years he described. Indeed it was one of the most popular and highly rewarded books ever published. The original deal of May 1947 covering five volumes brought Churchill $2.23 million, the equivalent of about $50 million today. But he also got huge sums from the
New York Times
and Time Life for serial rights. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, only the second historian to be so honored (the first was Theodor Mommsen, who wrote on ancient Rome). At the time of this prize giving, the
Daily Telegraph
of London, which had serialized the latest volume, stated that volumes one to five had already sold 6 million copies in English and had been serialized in fifty newspapers in forty countries. No book of comparable size—nor many of any size—has so quickly achieved such circulation. The British and American publishers made fortunes from the work, as did Churchill’s agent, Emery Reeves. The Churchill family benefited bountifully not only from the work’s earnings but also by the bargain over the papers, which were donated to the Chartwell Trust and sold to Lord Camrose of the
Daily Telegraph
. This incorporated a clever legal device to avoid the punitive taxation which would have made the memoirs pointless financially.