Churchill Read online

  Churchill

  New York • London

  © 2011 by Ashley Jackson

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2014

  Quoted text by Winston S. Churchill from Speaking for Themselves, My Early Life, Never Give In!, My African Journey and The World Crisis reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill

  © Winston S. Churchill

  Cover painting © Webb, Hugh Bourn Collection

  Quoted text by Clementine Churchill from Speaking for Themselves reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge

  © Clementine Churchill

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  e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-805-2

  www.quercus.com

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Derek Paul Jackson and Lesley Vivienne Jackson, with gratitude and love—and happy memories of our lives together

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1. Landscape for a Lifetime: Winston, Woodstock, and Oxfordshire

  2. Cadet to Frontier Soldier: Warrior and Writer

  3. Pundit and Politician: A Rising Star

  4. High Office: War on Land and Sea

  5. Home and Colonial: New Nations, Strikes, and Gold

  6. Man of Kent: A Frenzied Unemployment

  7. War Machine: The Management of Global Conflict

  8. A Higher Vision: Postwar Government and a Changing World

  9. Symbol of the Nation

  Epilogue

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Photography Credits

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Blenheim Palace

  January 1884: Jack, Jennie and Winston Churchill

  Churchill as a schoolboy at Harrow, aged thirteen

  The Boer war: Churchill aboard a steamer at Durban, 1899, war correspondent for the Morning Post and combatant

  In formal dress uniform

  The young politician: Churchill in 1904, shortly after he left the Conservative Party for the Liberals. Note the picture of Lord Kitchener behind him

  Churchill and Kaiser Wilhelm at military exercises in the years before the First World War

  September 1915: Churchill speaking at the opening of the YMCA hostel for munitions workers, Enfield, Middlesex

  March 1924: Churchill and Clementine at the by-election in the Abbey division of Westminster

  February 1928: Building a wall at Chartwell with daughter Sarah

  January 1932: Churchill on the move after a bout of typhus

  February 1939: Churchill at his specially designed standing desk, Chartwell

  January 1937: Painting the Cháteau de St George in Normandy

  January 1942: Churchill addressing the 4th Hussars, his old regiment, in Egypt

  November 1942: The famous “V” sign

  December 1943: The Bermuda conference. French Premier Joseph Laniel, President Eisenhower and Churchill

  July 1944: Churchill poring over a map with General Bernard Montgomery

  December 1944: Crossing the Rhine

  July 1945: Churchill sitting on a chair from Hitler’s chancellery amidst the ruins of Berlin, surrounded by Russian soldiers

  October 1947: Churchill and poodle at Chartwell

  Riding in the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt at Chartwell Farm, 1948

  Churchill with his Foreign Secretary and heir apparent, Anthony Eden, returning to Downing Street in September 1954

  February 1959: Churchill is taken out to Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Christina O, while on holiday in Morocco

  The funeral cortège passes the Houses of Parliament

  January 1965: The queue in Bladon, waiting to enter the churchyard of St. Martin’s to see Churchill’s grave

  Introduction

  “My life is its own message.”

  “I knew he always shaved himself with a safety razor before wallowing in a bath filled to the brim with water. From my bedroom I could hear the splashing as he sponged himself with the outsize sponge he always used. I listened for the signal which always told me Mr. Churchill’s bathing was almost over. I did not have to wait long before I heard a noise like a whale ‘blowing.’”1

  Thus wrote Churchill’s valet, Norman McGowan. The fact that we know so much about Churchill’s bathing habits and often encounter him in a state of near or abject nakedness, looking like Humpty-Dumpty, as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff put it, speaks volumes about the man and his historical image. Not only do we read of him addressing generals and presidents while déshabillé or dictating to secretaries from the throne, we know a good deal about the colorful dressing gowns, jumpsuits, unusual hats, and Blenheim Bouquet cologne he wore. One can get carried away, in fact, with the idiosyncrasies and foibles of dress and manner that embellish his memory. The contrite Pug, the last lion, and the famous bulldog are familiar facets of the Churchill caricature, and along with hints of lovable Pooh Bear or irascible Mr. Toad, they can invest Churchill’s image with cartoonlike elements that are unusual when considering the world’s most important international leaders. While these aspects point to the sheer vitality and humanity of the man, and make him an incomparably more interesting biographical study than most politicians, it is necessary to remind ourselves that, above all else, Winston Churchill was a formidably powerful human being, a man whose achievements and greatness have become so interwoven with twentieth-century world history that it is easy to take them for granted. His achievements were awesome, and he was larger than life long before his death at the advanced age of ninety. “He was for me Pitt the Elder, Horatio Nelson and Benjamin Disraeli rolled into one; the cartoonists’ John Bull too, no doubt, but a John Bull with culture, intelligence, style and what came over as the common touch.”2

  While history has rightly been kind to Winston Churchill’s memory, he attracted far more criticism when he was alive than he has since his death. A surprising number of people nurtured a visceral loathing of the man, sometimes spiced by contempt for his relatives, who were often in the headlines for the wrong reasons. The Ulster leader Sir Edward Carson, who hated Churchill’s liberal policies for Ireland, recorded his “savage satisfaction” at a Churchill special-election defeat: “I think W. Churchill really degrades public life more than anyone of any position in politics,” he wrote.3 In 1915, Prime Minister Asquith wrote that Churchill “was by far the most disliked man in my cabinet.”4 Evelyn Waugh, never a man to let prudence and politeness get in the way of his pronouncements, refused to take part in the “obsequies” when Churchill died. According to Waugh, Churchill was “always in the wrong, surrounded by crooks, a terrible father, a radio personality.” Even during the war, Waugh had “despised his orations” broadcast on the radio.5 So not everyone has been happy with Churchill, the man or the myth, and debunking him has become as central to some writers’ careers as burnishing him has to others.

  The problem
with so many of these assessments and inchoate snapshots of “the greatest Briton ever,” is that they apply to him, or demand of him, qualities of judgment and foresight that no human being has ever possessed, allow him to dominate in a way that in reality he never did, and divorce both his triumphs and his failures from their essential context. And yet still we try, to the tune of dozens of articles and volumes per year, to distill the Churchill essence. It is difficult for a man’s spirit to remain free, when so many have tried to capture it. Yet despite the best efforts of an army of writers penning portraits of Winston Churchill, from old masters to cigarette package doodlers, he remains splendidly unreduced, perhaps because he is more enigmatic than one might expect: there is no diary, no recorded interview. He also remains enormous fun, because the iconoclasts have failed to tarnish him, while the idolaters have failed to reduce him to “great man” plasticity. Never omniscient or omnipotent, Churchill would make a poor demigod, because he would always be caught in the act, behaving badly, warming to the sound of his own rhetoric while colleagues cast their eyes heavenward, sticking his tongue out in the House of Commons, or nipping off for a pee.

  But his evident humanity, which could so frustrate and anger his peers—even his wife—only adds to his appeal as a biographical subject. So, too, does the fact that his faults are visible to anyone who cares to examine his life. Even his family made candid reference to them. His daughter Mary acknowledged that he could be “maddening” and sometimes behaved like a “spoiled child.” His son, Randolph, meanwhile, explained how Churchill hated whist for the simple reason that he wasn’t any good at it: “Rarely,” Randolph wrote, “even in later life, was Churchill apt to take an objective view of affairs. A game at which he did not prevail was naturally a bore. He was already developing that egocentricity which was to become such a predominant characteristic, and to which must be attributed alike his blunders and his triumphant successes.”6 Yet Churchill’s egotism was tempered by humor, a marked lack of pomposity, mischievousness, and a capacity to back down, or be persuaded, even if it took a scrap to get there. His Harrow contemporary, Leopold Amery, might scold him in Cabinet; General Sir Alan Brooke might compete with fist-banging resolution; his son, Randolph, might snap and snarl at the dinner or the card table (“Stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you,” Churchill might yell at him). “In the course of my life,” he said, “I have often had to eat my own words, and I must confess I have always found it a wholesome diet.”7

  Of course, Churchill has only himself to blame for much of the skirmishing that has occurred around his reputation. The power of the image that he created of himself, and that his life left in the memory of ordinary people, still far outweighs the image created by the biographical pursuers who have variously followed in his footsteps and attempted to chase him. The magnitude of Churchill’s achievements, the vibrancy of his character and lifestyle, and his sheer longevity have ensured his elevation above the realms of ordinary human life.

  Winston Churchill was rooted in the heart of England at birth and in death and has been central to British national identity since the Second World War, a remarkable turnaround for a politician who, had it not been for Hitler, might have found his career consigned to the same scrap heap as that of his mercurial father. Winston was more than just the embodiment of the nation he led during its most dangerous years, for he lived in an age of empire and global ideological struggle. Because of the British Empire and his constant, if ultimately unrealistic, conception of it, his decisions and voice carried far beyond these shores. He was an international peacemaker but unflinchingly believed that peace could only come through strength, and sometimes through war. Indeed Churchill’s lifelong preoccupation with the idea of an English-speaking civilization gave him the vision to see beyond even the vastness of empire to the rising power of America. In hitching Britain’s fortunes to that power, first as an equal and later as a subordinate, Churchill helped define British foreign policy for decades, perhaps generations. He was also an advocate of closer European integration—hence the famous triumvirate of overlapping “circles,” which in his view defined Britain’s position in the world: empire-commonwealth, Anglo-American alliance, and European harmony founded on the balance of power.

  Because of his breadth of vision, his lengthy association with the affairs of the British Empire, and his pivotal position between 1939 and 1945, Churchill belongs not only to Britain, but to the world. He was the greatest international statesman of his age, to the extent that one can ever make such claims. He was an honorary citizen of the United States, champion of the freedom of small European nations, freeman of towns and cities around the world, warrior on imperial frontiers in Africa and Asia, summit visitor to ancient Middle Eastern capitals, holidaymaker and painter in Italy, and Atlantic and Mediterranean mariner. Scores of nations commemorated his death, or the anniversary of his birth, issuing postage stamps and a hodgepodge of souvenirs. Everybody wanted a piece of Winston Churchill, and the fact that he seemed effortlessly to cope with the demands of his impossible superman status (while robustly defending his privacy) has contributed to his enduring fame and fascination.

  General Ismay, explaining to General Auchinleck that there was really no substitute for a personal meeting with Churchill, said that “you cannot judge the PM by ordinary standards, he is not in the least like anyone you and I have ever met.”8 This gives a sense of the utter uniqueness of the man. Churchill was a singularly intriguing and powerful human being: at once impetuous, generous, courageous, energetic, selfish, bombastic, and inspirational. Clement Attlee thought that his compassion was his most notable, though least acknowledged, character trait. His essential humanity and endearing qualities were blemished by irritating and downright unpleasant traits, the study of his life made all the more absorbing because the observer knows the heights he scaled during his life, and the depths to which his career sank. Beyond his talents and his longevity, he attracts attention because of the way he looked, the way he dressed, the manner in which he spoke, and his many idiosyncrasies. His evident ability to enjoy life to the full, while shouldering the burdens of state, has also held his admirers transfixed, as well as irritating the prudes and teetotalers. Some of the mud that has been slung at Churchill over the years has been as unfair as it has been predictable; the fact is, that if one were to pore minutely over the public and private correspondence and utterances of almost any man, especially when spread across several generations, one would be hard put not to encounter material that reflected poorly upon its author, especially when taken out of context.

  But many criticisms of Churchill have also been unfair because he was not a biblical figure, and far from a saint. His flaws and mistakes were many and often egregious. To his critics, often outraged by his contemporary success as well as the veneration that history has afforded him, he was an unremarkable parliamentarian, a poor debater, a cause of British disarmament rather than the hero of Britain’s most perilous hour. To some he was an untrustworthy political turncoat, a bully, a warmonger, an egotist; if not a downright liar, then a manufacturer of truth and distorter of the historical record; and an enemy of the common man. He was loathed by many in the Southern Hemisphere for allegedly abandoning Australia when Japan went on the rampage in the Far East and for squandering Anzac blood at Gallipoli; he has been accused of setting Iraq on course for an unsettled and bloody century; he advocated the use of poison gas against defenseless Africans (and also Germans and Russians) and killed Frenchmen in cold blood in order to prove a point about Britain’s wartime resolve. Churchill’s crime sheet, deserved or not, accurate or not, is a lengthy one. Quite apart from his historical reputation, Churchill was unpopular and notorious enough to require a bodyguard for most of his adult life.

  But against most of these dramatic, often histrionic charges, Churchill can be defended in detail, or at least properly contextualized. They do little to dent his reputation—which always had two sides—or to diminish his achievements. Studying t
he life of Winston Churchill, cast against a backdrop of political, social, imperial, and personal foment and spread across ten decades, there are many qualities to admire, in addition to the undeniably beneficial work he conducted as a social reformer, war leader, writer, and international statesman of unique talent. These include his determination to succeed and his thirst for glory and notability; his belief in his own importance and his destiny as a shaper of national and international events; his bravery, loyalty, energy, and willingness to take the lead and provide ideas, even when the stakes were dauntingly high; his military and strategic acumen; his compassion and ability to apologize after he had erred; his devotion to his wife; his love of the countryside, of history, of tradition; his sentimentality; his inability to hold a grudge, even against those, like Lord Fisher, who very nearly ruined him; his time for hobbies; his capacity to write brilliant books and to paint skillfully; and his ability, apparently, to do all of this while serving in the highest offices of state and smoking a cigar. Geoffrey Best, one of the most perceptive writers ever to attempt a life of Churchill, wrote that he shared certain defining characteristics with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill: “Egotism, boldness, the need to be noticed, political ambition, bouts of depression, the ability to master complicated subjects, quickness of conception, energy, loquacity, cheek, humor, oratorical talent, impetuousness, irreverence, and sometimes disastrous tactlessness and failure of judgement.”9

  This book seeks to describe the contours of Winston Churchill’s remarkable life and career while offering a sense of the man behind the piercing eyes and bulldog features. From thrusting junior officer to political pup in a hurry, from Cabinet outcast to the greatest war leader of modern times, from electoral loser to elder statesman on the international stage in the years of Cold War and imperial decline, this is the story of Winston Churchill’s appointment with destiny.