September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 21

By PAUL ADDISON

It is nearly half a century since I first met Martin and I have never forgotten his kindness and generosity all those years ago.

He was a Fellow of Merton College and the coauthor, with Richard Gott, of a much acclaimed book, The Appeasers. I was a humbler form of life, a postgraduate making precious little progress with a Ph.D. on British politics in the Second World War. Martin took me up, entertained me to lunch or dinner, inspired me with his own enthusiasm for research, and radiated a sense of delight in the study of history.

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I see now that he was a bit of a misfit in the Oxford of the day, a stuffy old place in many respects, and that I was a bit of a misfit too. Both of us were pupils and admirers of a great maverick historian, A.J.P. Taylor, against whom there was much feeling in Oxford. It was mainly due to widespread jealousy of a historian who attracted packed student audiences to lectures at 9 am, gave brilliant talks without a note on television, and wrote for a popular newspaper, The Daily Express. Martin sometimes had a historical bone to pick with him, whereas I regarded him as infallible, but we were both devoted fans.

This was not the only suspect item on our CVs. Both of us worked, at different times, as research assistants to Randolph Churchill on the official life of his father. Randolph had been such a hell-raiser in his time that he was virtually banished from polite society, not to mention the pubs near his home at East Bergholt, Suffolk. He could be quite impossible, but like other researchers on his team Martin and I discovered his more admirable and endearing qualities. By the time we knew him his drink-fuelled excesses were in the past and his mission in life was to make the official biography as accurate and comprehensive as possible. Martin himself never met Sir Winston Churchill, but I am sure that working with Randolph gave him an intimate sense of Churchillian characteristics—above all a fearless independence of spirit—that were passed on from father to son.

Martin is such a celebrated figure today, and the literature on Sir Winston so vast, that it is hard to recall how very different the situation was in 1968, when Randolph died and Martin was appointed as his successor. Scholars were immersed in the study of earlier centuries and the Oxford History faculty decreed that History, as a subject for teaching and research, had ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Twentieth-century Britain was virtually a black hole. In spite of his legendary status, much—perhaps most—of Churchill’s life was sketchily documented and little understood. For several years Martin was a lone pioneer, on the British side of the Atlantic, of Churchill studies.

So many things can be said of the official biography that I will single out one only, the outstanding quality of the research on which it is based. When Martin used to lecture at Oxford he would rivet his audience by making dramatic use of unpublished documents. I remember him reading out a letter of scathing rebuke from Lloyd George, who was then Prime Minister, to Churchill as Secretary of State for War in 1919. It was a shock to realise that the renowned and revered figure of Sir Winston Churchill had once been treated as a delinquent schoolboy. It also demonstrated Martin’s love of original documents, and his enterprise in pursuing them. This was a new departure.

In the past, political biography had been a gentlemanly pursuit, entrusted to a man of letters, a member of the family or an eminent public figure. The biographer would browse through the great man’s papers, publish one or two extracts, summarise the main events, and strive to create an essentially literary portrait. Martin set new and demanding standards that turned political biography into the most exacting of professions. Although he had exclusive access to the Churchill papers, he pursued every conceivable source with the excitement of a prospector panning for gold. He would then marshal the materials with astonishing precision.

I called on him one day at his home in London and found that he had reached 4 October 1940. All the documents for that day were arranged in strict chronological order along a printer’s desk. They were the raw material not only for the main volume of narrative, but also for the massive companion volumes of documents.  What other historian has ever displayed, for the benefit of readers, all the documents on which his account is based?

A distinguished historian once said to me, of Martin’s biography: “It’s what we used to call précis writing.” The documents, in other words, became in Martin’s hands a substitute for historical analysis. Since they were mainly composed by Churchill himself, they also tended to present the past through Churchill’s eyes. There is substance in these criticisms, which I have sometimes expressed myself in reviews. They are, however, dwarfed by the colossal scale of the achievement. Martin’s admiration for Churchill is profound, but his principal aim has always been to create a chronicle so comprehensive that it makes all the relevant materials available to readers and allows them to reach their own judgments. Even now, perhaps, there are one or two documents still withheld from public gaze. But thanks to Martin Gilbert, Churchill stands as naked before posterity as any statesman in history.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of moving a vote of thanks to Martin after a public lecture he gave in Edinburgh. I said: “I think Sir Martin will have persuaded you that whatever criticisms might be made of Churchill as a war leader, nobody could have done it better. The same can be said of Sir Martin as his official biographer—nobody could have done it better.”

Dr. Addison is a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh and author of the outstanding short life, Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (2005), as well as the definitive account of Sir Winston’s domestic politics, Churchill on the Home Front (1993), recently released as a Kindle title.