February 19, 2013

Finest Hour 156, Autumn 2012

Page 16

“It is as if the world has not moved” – Great Contemporaries: Seventy-five Years On

By H. Ashley Redburn

The late Henry Ashley Redburn OBE, of Rutland and Hampshire, England, compiled the first bibliograhy of works about Sir Winston Churchill. He was a constant contributor, adviser and friend to Finest Hour and its editors, Dalton Newfield and Richard Langworth, from 1970 until his death in the mid-1980s, always providing superbly written prose with precisely the word count needed. Great Contemporaries (Cohen A105) was originally published in 1937 by Thornton Butterworth, London, and Putnams, New York. The new edition was published by ISI Books in 2012: softbound, illustrated, 506 pages, $22, member price $17.60.

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The first appearance of Great Contemporaries included twenty-one studies, while the 1938 “revised extended edition” offers a further four which comprise valuable entries on Fisher, Baden-Powell, Parnell and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [The ISI edition adds five very significant sketches although one is mystified by the omission of Carson and his influence on the Irish problem. The biographies, mostly about men whom Churchill knew intimately, are of unique value. Churchill’s wit is never better illustrated than in his essay on the only man of letters included, George Bernard Shaw, whom from Churchill’s canon: H.G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin, Kitchener, Kipling and King Edward VIII. —Ed.] Each study first appeared as an article. As detailed in the he treats not as a dramatist but as a strange political creature, “the unique double-headed chameleon, the acquisitive capitalist yet sincere communist…the world’s most famous clown and Pantaloon in one.” But there runs through this, and indeed all the pieces, emendations based on new information. Unhappily, the article on Lloyd George (from the series “Great Men of Our Time”) is omitted, but this one and others excluded can be read in the four-volume Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975).

The central theme of Churchill’s collection is the group of British statesmen who dominated politics at the turn of the 20th century: Balfour, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Morley, Asquith, Curzon. These urbane, erudite, cultured and civilised public men dominated Imperial affairs with a brilliance which contrasts with the drabness of today’s political barbarians. On the whole the book is a valuable study of the course of history in the first four decades of the 20th century, an overriding cordiality and liking for the subject, for Churchill was not a hater. Only once, over Hitler, would he be totally unforgiving. While recognizing mankind’s frailties and foolishness, he retained compassion and hope, and was never cynical. His judgments are of justice tempered with magnanimity.

In Bargaining for Supremacy (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1977), James R. Leutze accused Churchill of being “oddly unaware of other people’s reactions…not much interested in others.” This is a frequent charge, but as these essays testify, Churchill had a greater awareness of human nature and regard for human beings than most. The imaginative man does not need to experience poverty in order to understand it.

Churchill’s awareness of others is perhaps best demonstrated in his chapter on Philip Snowden, who had truly been reared in poverty, and with whom Churchill spent seven years wrangling during their suc- cessive terms as Chancellors of the Exchequer. After recounting their fierce conflicts WSC adds, “never have I had any feelings towards him which destroyed the impression that he was a generous, true-hearted man….the British Democracy should be proud of Philip Snowden.” Snowden’s widow wrote Churchill when this essay first appeared to thank him for this salute to a political opponent.

The first several pages of “Georges Clemenceau” are strangely dull, probably because they were culled from George Adams’ biography of “The Tiger.” But when Churchill turns to his personal contact the text takes on a familiar glow.