January 1, 1970

‘Working for Randolph taught me a great deal about how to find out the most obscure historical points. He turned me into a master of reference books! He also told me that he was not interested in defending his father (whom he adored) but in telling the true story.

In 1968 Randolph died and I was asked to take on his work. The government had recently abandoned the fifty-year rule for closed documents, and replaced it with thirty-year rule, so a mass of new material suddenly became available, and the original four volume plan was extended to eight volumes. In addition, Randolph had taken as his methodological theme the nineteenth-century concept of Walter Scott’s biographer (Lockhart), “he shall be his own biographer”. I replaced this by the more twentieth-century concept of letting the voices of family, friends, colleagues, critics, and opponents, and their diverse arguments, also be heard. Churchill’s wife was a particularly acute critic; her method of setting down her points in writing, for him to see at the breakfast table (he always breakfasted alone) was a boon to the historian.

I delved in the archives for twenty years. My work took me as far east as Calcutta, as far south as Port Elizabeth, and as far west as San Francisco. One kind commentator suggested that by the time my task was done I should have lost my eyesight and become permanently stooped, but when I finished the eighth volume in 1988 I could still see, and am still fairly upright in posture.’

(Martin Gilbert, ‘Churchill: More than a Biographer’, for Magdalen College Record, 1993)

Martin Gilbert, eminent historian and member of the Iraq inquiry, died on 3 February 2015. He was the author or editor of over eighty books on twentieth century history; on the first and second World Wars and the history of Israel, but his greatest achievement was the 24 volumes of the Official Biography, the result of over forty years’ work. Read this tribute to his Churchillian labours.