Alone, 1932-1940

  But Chamberlain still did not believe in standing up to him. All evidence to the contrary, he remained convinced that if the Führer were treated with generosity, he could become Britain’s best friend. Therefore Churchill remained in Coventry. Lord Camrose, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, called at No. 10 to state the case for Winston. The press lord did not represent himself alone. He spoke for a select group of the most astute and distinguished Conservatives and independents, all of them known to Chamberlain and most of them friends of his. One of them was Harold Nicolson, a disaffected National Labour member, and on June 30, four days before Camrose’s meeting with the P.M., he had noted in his diary: “The vital thing is to bring into the Cabinet people who are known abroad to be pledged to a policy of resistance and whose willingness to enter the Cabinet would show to the whole world that there can be no further Munichs.” Briefing Camrose, the group had discussed “how far the Prime Minister would be opposed to bringing in Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden…. Camrose says that Winston is the vital figure…. The difficulty is that the Prime Minister himself, as well as Hoare and Simon, are terrified of Winston and will put up the strongest resistance. It would be much easier for them to accept Anthony, Amery or Duff Cooper.” Camrose, however, was adamant. “You must have Winston,” he said, and a majority of the group agreed.140

  That was the centerpiece of the case he put to Chamberlain. According to Camrose’s account, the prime minister replied that “while he appreciated Churchill’s ability, his own experience in Cabinet work with him had not been such as to make him feel that his (Churchill’s) inclusion in the Cabinet would make his own task any easier.” Over the years, Chamberlain said, “he had had two discussions with him which had ended in rather violent disagreement.” Anthony Eden’s name had also been put forward, Camrose reminded the P.M. “Well, Winston was Public Enemy No 1 in Berlin, and Eden was the same in Italy. Their inclusion in the Cabinet might strike both ways.” Chamberlain was cautious about Eden; his case was “not of the same consequence as that of Winston.” Ministers, he conceded, made mistakes. “Simon’s judgment, and Hoare’s, might have been wrong at times, but Winston’s was notorious.” Camrose did not mention the notoriety of Hoare’s deal with Laval, a far greater blunder than anything in Churchill’s career.141

  By the third week in July the Men of Munich thought “the Churchill flurry,” as they called it, had ended. Halifax’s chief aide wrote in his diary: “Pro-Churchill campaign dying down; no sign whatever of a move in No 10.” Chamberlain wrote his sister: “As for the Churchill episode it has in Joe Kennedy’s picturesque phrase ‘Fallen out of bed.’… Even Camrose has now dropped it in the Telegraph.” In another letter he wrote Ida that “the drive to put Winston in the government” had merely “enlivened” the week. “Anyway they have as usual over-played their hand,” he said, and Hoare, echoing him in a letter to Lady Astor’s son—she had startled Parliament by coming out for Churchill—wrote that “I was convinced that the attempt would fail. Anything that Winston attempts is overdone, and in this case it was so overdone that it has stirred up a great reaction against him.”142

  Winston hadn’t had a thing to do with it; despite pleas from his supporters, he had remained aloof. At one point he drafted a statement: “I have taken no part in the movement in favour of broadening His Majesty’s Government, in which my name has been mentioned.” On second thought he decided not to make it public. On April 24, before the press campaign to put him in the cabinet had picked up momentum, he had spoken to a large gathering of city workers in the East End: “Those who now come forward to join the Territorial Army are discharging the highest duty of citizenship.” That was hardly incendiary, but once the press lords had tossed his hat in the ring he canceled all public addresses and spoke only in the House of Commons.143

  Actually, he had no time to mount a major political campaign. He faced publishing deadlines, and the need to meet them was more urgent than ever. His income from newspaper syndication had dropped sharply, and the blow was not softened by the fact that Hitler was to blame. As the Axis empire grew—and the smaller states bordering the bloated Reich frantically followed pointed advice from the Wilhelmstrasse—editors dropped Winston’s column. Since the fall of Albania, for example, the government in Athens had prohibited publication of any article criticizing fascism or Nazism—this despite Britain’s guarantee of Greece’s frontiers. In Rumania, Imre Revesz wrote him in May, twenty-two newspapers were “controlled directly by the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin.” Poland was now Britain’s ally, but Warsaw authorities had suppressed his piece on the Nazi threat to the Poles. Churchill sent an account of all this to Cadogan at the Foreign Office. He was not the only victim of Goebbels’s strategy: articles by Duff Cooper, Attlee, Eden, and Henry Wickham Steed, Dawson’s predecessor at The Times, had also been rejected. It was “a serious matter,” Winston submitted to Cadogan. “A net is closing round our activities,” he wrote to Revesz, “through fear of Germany.” The literary agent, ever resourceful, opened negotiations with American networks for ten-minute Churchill broadcasts once or twice a month. Responding to this news, Winston wrote him on May 8, congratulating him for having “called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.” In little more than a year his use of that cluster of prepositional phrases, slightly altered, would arouse an embattled free world.144

  As the dreary decade approached its close, Winston’s main effort, the key to his financial survival, was directed toward completion of his History of the English-speaking Peoples, the linchpin of his agreement with Sir Henry Strakosch. The grand design was totally Churchillian: “I have all that in my head,” he explained to one researcher. So was the prose; the entire text came from his muttering lips or, if he was revising galleys, from his fountain pen. He needed a supporting cast, of course, and he picked a first-rate troupe—Bill Deakin, Maurice Ashley, C. C. Wood, Ridley Pakenham-Walsh, John Wheldon, and three scholars who would one day become illustrious biographers of his most famous foes: Keith Feiling (Neville Chamberlain), Alan Bullock (Hitler), and G. M. Young (Stanley Baldwin, perhaps the most hostile official biography ever published). Eddie Marsh once more came aboard to read proofs and make general comments on syntax and grammar; Brigadier Sir James Edmonds, the official historian of the Great War, was recruited because his knowledge of the American Civil War was profound. Considering their skills and the immense amount of time each devoted to his assignments, they can scarcely be said to have been overpaid; the researchers received fifty pounds a month and Marsh twenty pounds per 100,000 words—less than twenty-eight cents a page. But, of course, they weren’t in it for the money. Other scholars would have done it for nothing.145

  Winston’s correspondence during these months reveals a quicksilver gift for bounding back and forth across nearly twenty centuries, from 55 B.C., when “the Proconsul of Gaul, Julius Caesar, turned his gaze upon Britain,” to the Boer War, an adjournment chosen, perhaps, because it was then that the author himself appeared as a historical figure. Churchill opened with the broadest of themes:

  Our story centres in an island, not widely sundered from the Continent, and so tilted that its mountains lie all to the west and north, while south and east is a gently undulating landscape of wooded valleys, open downs, and slow rivers. It is very accessible to the invader, whether he comes in peace or war, as pirate or merchant, conqueror or missionary. Those who dwell there are not insensitive to any shift of power, any change of faith, or even fashion, on the mainland, but they give to every practice, every doctrine that comes to it from abroad, its own peculiar turn and imprint….146

  To an exceptional degree he enjoyed writing and was even invigorated by it. Few writers of depth are actually exhilarated by creativity; it drains them; at the end of a session most are exhausted. In many ways he was an exception. “Writing a long and substantial book,” he said, “is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes mo
re attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in your mind.” His letters seem to reflect the excitement of a writer rejoicing in the power of his inimitable style; to Clementine, skiing in Austria, he wrote: “The days pass quickly for I have so much to do.”147

  One senses his delight in his own virtuosity as, moving from informal to formal English, he shifts tone and syntax. Writing Clementine of his progress with the History, he tells her:

  I have just finished writing about Joan of Arc. I think she is the winner in the whole of French history. The leading women in those days were more remarkable and forceful than the men.

  Then, in his manuscript, we see the magic, his bold strokes, the might he could always invoke:

  There now appeared on the ravaged scene an Angel of Deliverance, the noblest patriot of France, the most splendid of her heroes, the most beloved of her saints, the most inspiring of all her memories, the peasant Maid, the ever-shining, ever-glorious Joan of Arc.148

  Eden wrote that he read Winston’s accounts of the past “to forget the haunting apprehensions of our present days.” His historical works appeared to offer Churchill the same asylum. “It has been a comfort to me in these anxious days,” he wrote Mortimer Wheeler, keeper of the London Museum, “to put a thousand years between my thoughts and the twentieth century.” On July 10, 1938, he had written Keith Feiling:

  I have definitely plunged into the “English Speaking Peoples” and am now rollicking with the “Piltdown Man,” Cassivalanus, Julius Caesar, the Scribe Gildas, the Venerable Bede and other hoary figures. How to make anything of this that is (a) readable, (b) original, (c) valuable and (d) true, is known only to the presiding genius of Britain who has not yet imparted his secrets to Yours most sincerely, Winston S. Churchill.149

  And yet…

  It was anything but a lark. Ten days later he wrote Eddie Marsh, “I am staggering along to the end of this job, and am glad to have found the strength to have accomplished it.” Over half the present volume was in galleys, but ahead lay the insertion of special studies by Deakin and Bullock, checking facts, and soliciting comments from scholars who were expert in various areas. “I have had to work very hard,” he wrote his publisher, “and many a night have sat up until two or three in the morning.” In early 1939 he wrote Clemmie, “I have been leading a life of unbroken routine at Chartwell—and have now got into print no less than 220,000 words i.e. 63 days ahead of the vy hard task I prescribed of 1,000 a day from August 1. At this rate I shd cover the whole ground by May, wh wd leave 7 months for polishing. It is a formidable grind; but if accomplished will put things in a vy satisfactory basis.”150

  The strain was evident to those closest to him. Grace Hamblin recalls him as “a very hard taskmaster. He drove us.” Kathleen Hill recollects that he “could be very ruthless.” But he was exciting, too. Mrs. Hill was now living at Chartwell, and she remembers her first impressions of it: “I had never been in a house like that. It was alive, restless. When he went away it was still as a mouse. When he was there it was vibrating.” In retrospect she sees him as “a disappointed man who was waiting for the call to serve his country.”151

  Pride and drive, that inner gyroscope which never failed, spurred him on. His remarkable output is even more extraordinary when seen in the context of the time. As events accelerated in central Europe he continued to be the best-informed private citizen in the country. Following his instructions, foreigners arriving in London would take the Oxted train from Victoria Station and detrain to find Winston himself there to greet them. Flattered, they would enter his car, sublimely unaware that they were putting their lives in the hands of the worst driver in the British Empire.

  Vansittart, fuming under the meaningless title Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Secretary, had become his silent partner. But Van remained on His Majesty’s payroll; he had no establishment to support and could devote all his working hours to gathering and analyzing the European situation, which grew in complexity and frightfulness after the Anschluss, as Hitler led the Continent from crisis to crisis. Somehow Churchill kept all that in one part of his mind and his work in another. Only the first Queen Elizabeth could check his creative flow. In August 1939 he wrote to G. M. Young, the Oxford historian and Fellow of All Souls College. Young had agreed to vet parts of the work, and Winston now wondered “how you are getting along with the proofs I sent you.” He himself, he added, had “completed the Commonwealth story (Lambeth and Monk), but have still not cleared away the Queen Elizabeth block. I am now working on the Chatham period, which is very inspiriting.” He overcame the Queen’s intimidation after the war, when his work was published. And that block stands alone. If in his long career he ever again struggled with anyone more complex, there is no record of it. And if he had, there would be.152

  The Lambeth Articles of 1595 can scarcely be regarded as possessing great historical significance. There were nine articles, and they were meant to express Calvinist doctrine in such weighty matters as predestination and justification. Since they were never adopted by the church in any synod, they lacked ecclesiastical authority and are interesting to us only because they interested Churchill. Nor could George Monk, a Devonian soldier, be regarded a key figure in the vastness of history, though he was certainly more engaging. At the outbreak of the English Civil War he fought for the King; captured by Roundheads, he was imprisoned in the Tower for two years, emerged as an admirer of Cromwell, fought hard for him while intriguing for the reestablishment of the monarchy, and became a duke. During the plague of 1665 and the great fire a year later, he restored order in London; he wound up fighting the Dutch as a British admiral. In the long reach of history, he deserves a footnote at most; his prominence in Churchill’s work is startling.

  But history, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. If it happened, and if the writer believes it to be consequential, in it goes. To the dismay of the dons advising him, Churchill overruled their recommendation that he cut the tale of King Alfred burning the housewife’s cakes, on the ground that myths are as important as facts in the memory of a people. Actually, the weight of four thousand years was on his side. In ancient Greece and Rome historical accuracy was subordinate to style and dramatic tone. During the millennium which followed, theological historians—there were no others—sought evidence of divine motives, intervention, and design. This was the evocation of Saint Augustine’s City of God and, in 1681—a thousand years later—Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle. Interpreting human experience was considered the function of religion or philosophy—even of poetry or other imaginative works. Modern historiography, constructing a documented record of mankind’s activities and then interpreting it, did not emerge until early in the nineteenth century. By 1900, however, it had emerged as a distinct discipline, the preserve of academicians who, jealous of their hard-won recognition, regarded interlopers like Churchill as trespassers.

  Yet despite jeers that Churchill was shallow, volatile, the Barnum of politics, Sir Isaiah Berlin, singling out a 1928 condemnation of Winston’s style, comments that “the stern critic and his audience were… mistaken. What he and they denounced as so much tinsel and hollow pasteboard was in reality solid; it was this author’s natural means for the expression of his heroic, highly coloured, sometimes over-simple and even naive, but always genuine, vision of life.” Both as a politician and as a historian he was an unrepentant romantic. He did indeed divide those of whom he wrote into white hats and black hats. But that is how he saw life, as a struggle between the forces of light and the powers of darkness. He never tried to hide it, or veil it, or hoodwink or mystify or dupe his audiences. It was an authentic view of life; there was and is no need to justify it.153

  His grand vision, as the History testifies, was of an expanding British Empire governed by Great Britain and the United States, ruling in tandem. A. J. P. Taylor comments that while this theme “has a few merits… he never considered how far England and America had been associated,
which was very little, and—particularly—how far they could be associated in the future.” To Churchill, it is clear, the great thing, apart from the fact that the two countries shared the same language, was that they had fought side by side. Wars, to Winston, were of immense historic importance; like Carlyle and Nietzsche, he believed that armed conflict was a natural state of man. Although one may argue that events since 1945 have vindicated him, this viewpoint put him on a collision course with mainstream intellectuals of his time. His derogators declared that he was a boy who had never outgrown playing with toy soldiers. This denied him not only maturity but also the high seriousness to which he was entitled.154

  Nevertheless, his zest for combat was excessive. In a revealing comment to Lord Moran he complained that 1830–1860, when England and the United States were at peace, were “thirty years when nothing happened.” So marked was his lack of balance that in his second part, dealing with the era between 1485 and 1688, Shakespeare was not even mentioned in the index, and in the third the Industrial Revolution was disposed of in a single paragraph. His trivial dismissal of those who abhor war is jarring, as is his later remark, in the 1940s, to a British general: “Cheer up! We can’t have a war every day.” It was Crane Brinton, an American historian, who observed that the fourth part, covering the years between Waterloo and the end of the nineteenth century, gave “disproportionate attention” to the bloody struggle between America’s North and South, while the development of the British Dominions received “comparative brevity.”