October 17, 2008

By Roy Jenkins

Reviewed by John Plumpton

    “There are times” wrote the great Cambridge historian, G.R. Elton, “when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill – whether they can see that no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”

    Sir Geoffrey would have judged the new Churchill biography by Roy Jenkins quite favourably. The octogenarian Jenkins, a biographer of Attlee, Asquith, Baldwin and Gladstone, among others, and a political colleague of Labour leaders since WWII, concludes his magnificent biography of Churchill with the following:

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    “I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncracies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”

    As good as this biography is, Jenkins is not the final, definitive view of Churchill. In his Churchill: A Brief Life, Piers Brendon, a former Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England, predicts that “Churchill’s place in history is about to become still more of a battleground.” The computerized catalogue of the papers has just been completed and the entire microfilmed and digitalized archive will eventually become available to scholars throughout the world. Since only ten percent of the papers are now in print, the result of this digital revolution is that there will be, according to Brendon, “almost certainly, an explosion in Churchill studies.”

    The torrent of Churchill books continues even while we await this explosion and students of Churchill’s life should approach each new book asking what new facts or insights can be gleaned from it. The answer to readers of Jenkins’ Churchill, A Biography is: not many new facts but a great deal of the new insights.

    Jenkins does not appear to have delved into the archives himself. He relies on the classics, particularly Churchill’s autobiographical works, Hansard, and the primary research of Sir Martin Gilbert. Mary Soames’ Speaking for Themselves has become an invaluable resource to biographers. Jenkins uses the full diary of Lord Alanbrooke and he has profited from the splendid study by Geoffrey Best. He has a thorough knowledge and makes judicious use of the prolific diary material. Unfortunately, we have only one reference to the diary of his father, Arthur Jenkins, a parliamentary private secretary to Clement Attlee during the war and a junior minister in the 1945 Churchill coalition government. I suspect that there are many more diary comments by the senior Jenkins that would greatly interest us.

    The most important thing Jenkins brings to this book is Roy Jenkins himself. There are many parallels between the lives of Jenkins and Churchill – writer, politician, cabinet minister, longevity in production. Jenkins is one of the few remaining students of Churchill’s life who observed him in the House of Commons. A Member of Parliament for the last sixteen years of Churchill’s career, he tells us what he observed.

    “It was like looking at a giant mountain landscape, which could occasionally be illuminated by an unforgettable light but could also descend into lowering cloud, from the terrace of a modest hotel a safe distance away.”

    Jenkins’ most useful insights relate to Churchill’s political career. Throughout the entire account we are never allowed to forget that Churchill was first and foremost a politician.

    “Throughout his long marriage [Clementine] was to experience no more than the most mild and infrequent gusts of feminine rivalry. But she was nonetheless up against a most formidable competition for his attention, and that was his attachment to what was always to him the great game of politics.”

    One strong feminine presence was Churchill’s life-long friend, Violet Bonham Carter (nee Asquith). When Jenkins was being encouraged by Lady Soames to write this biography, the former Mary Churchill told him: “I would much like another Liberal study of my father.” Although Jenkins seems to have taken up the task with alacrity, he was also aware of the challenge. He calls Bonham Carter’s Winston Churchill as I Knew Him “one of the best and most perceptive of the many Churchill books.” Bonham Carter’s book ends in 1916 so Jenkins’ could be considered something of a sequel. His handling of Churchill’s Liberal years and continuing connections is deft and balanced.

    He writes that “[Churchill freely accepted] a role as LG’s number two in a partnership of constructive liberalism, two social reforming New Liberals who had turned their backs on the old Gladstonian tradition of concentrating on libertarian political issues and leaving social conditions to look after themselves.”

    Having faced the same life and death decisions as Churchill in the office of the Home Secretary, Jenkins was particularly impressed by the attendance of Home Secretary Churchill at John Galsworthy’s proselytizing play ‘Justice’, with its “indictment of the dead hand of penal policy.” Most noteworthy to Jenkins is that Churchill took the chairman of the Prison Commissioners with him in order to influence the development of a more liberal and humane penal policy.

    As much as Churchill sympathized with the deserving poor, Jenkins also reminds us that he did not get too close. “Churchill’s approach, although liberal was high patrician…he did not pretend to understand from the inside, merely to sympathize from on high.”

    Nor did Churchill ever forget his aristocratic origins. ” He was pleased but not dazzled by becoming a senior minister at the age of 33. He thought it, if not exactly his birthright, at least a proper reward for his individual talents building upon an hereditary propensity to rule.”

    Churchill’s comment to King George V that there are “idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social ladder” not only reflected a complex relationship with the Royal Family, it also said much about his views on Britain’s social structure. “[Although he] was an instinctive and somewhat romantic monarchist,” writes Jenkins, “Churchill was essentially a Whig in his attitude to monarchs. He believed himself to be fully their social equal.”

    As strong as he is on the early years, Jenkins does not ignore the later, better known, Churchill years and issues. Instructively, he titles the chapter “Unwisdom in the Wilderness.” He clearly thinks that Churchill was wrong on India and that he should have known better than to take on the party leadership on that issue, because it separated him from supporters like Eden, Macmillan and Duff Cooper.

    Jenkins analyzes Churchill’s tactical errors with regard to the Committee of Privileges and subsequently to the House of Commons after Hoare and Derby were exonerated. What he does not do, and should have, is tell us that, notwithstanding the tactical misjudgments, Churchill was right. Hoare was, quite simply, guilty!

    But the India issue was not merely political tactics. India was a matter of principle for Churchill as was illustrated in a letter that Jenkins cites as Churchill’s “total rejection of the optimism, which was a feature of both Gladstonian and Asquith Liberalism. Thomas Hobbes has replaced John Locke as the presiding philosopher.”

    The letter included this comment by Churchill. “In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life, and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights.”

    While considering the larger national issues Jenkins is never far from the political, including Churchill’s constituency problems at the time. He points out a potential irony that had Churchill won on the issue of Edward VIII “he might have found it necessary in 1940-1 to depose and/or lock up his sovereign as the dangerously potential head of a Vichy-style state.”

    Due consideration is given to the Churchill-Halifax dispute in 1940 but he is equivocal about “Professor Lukacs’s two most important assertions…’Chamberlain sat on the fence’…and…’Churchill, at least momentarily, thought that he had to make some kind of concession to Halifax’. The balance of likelihood however seems to be on Luckas’s side on both statements.”

    Jenkins is particularly good on Churchill’s relationship with political colleagues – both foreign and domestic. Churchill’s appraisal of Eisenhower was hostile; he had a guarded ease of relationship with Roosevelt; for Truman he probably had the most respect of the three Presidents. Among his British colleagues, Bevan never commanded Churchill’s admiration or liking; of Amery he was instinctively impatient; Bevin and Attlee were treated with a wary respect; Eden and Sinclair, being closest to him, received the most rebukes.

    The fact that Beaverbrook and Bracken had far too much influence, often on issues they knew nothing about, led to a famous letter of remonstrance (often ignored by other historians) from Clement Attlee on the conduct of the government. Only the sage advice of others prevented a major rupture between the two party leaders.

    All of these people were treated with less attention than was the House of Commons. Churchill’s self-description: “I am a child of the House of Commons” continued throughout the most trying days of the war. “What was also noticeable,” writes Jenkins, “was the extent to which he applied himself to some at least of the routine business of leadership of the House. He did not cocoon himself in the raiment of a remote war leader who could only make epic pronouncements.

    While Jenkins’ similar experiences significantly enhance his account of Churchill’s political activities, there are too frequent references to personal and later non-Churchill events. I’m not sure the January 1945 correspondence between Attlee and Churchill over the conduct of the government benefits from our being told that in the middle of it Attlee was attending Jenkins’ wedding. Nor do I think it important to compare the military’s reaction to a Churchill speech in 1914 to the Conservative party response to a Michael Portillo speech in 1995. The comment that Churchill’s weapons of choice were knives and forks is useful, but does it matter that champagne and oysters at Chartwell and the Savoy Grill foreshadowed Harold Wilson’s beer and sandwiches approach at 10 Downing Street? However, one reviewer compared this book to Toscanini writing about Beethoven, so perhaps this criticism (and other nit-picking) is focusing too much on individual notes and missing the melody.

    Like many other readers, I suspect I had to make frequent referrals to a dictionary in order to understand the “fissiparous nature of the opposition” or how Jenkins varied “the fructiferous metaphor.” Jenkins also has a fondness for Latin and French phrases but that certainly does not prevent this biography from being a magnus opus with wonderful gems de haut en bas.

    With one anecdote Lord Jenkins puts these quibbles into perspective. Churchill returned from America in 1943 to face domestic criticism. He said that press criticism reminded him of the ‘tale about the sailor who jumped into a dock, I think it was at Plymouth, to rescue a small boy from drowning. About a week later this sailor was accosted by a woman who asked, “Are you the man who picked my son out of the dock the other night?” The sail replied modestly, “That is true ma’am.” “Ah,” said the woman, “you are the man I am looking for. Where is his cap?” ’

    The book has a couple of notable features I particularly liked. There is a glossary of parliamentary terms that will be useful to American readers and, in addition to the usual photographs, it has a splendid collection of photographs of Churchill paintings.

    Andrew Roberts, a master biographer himself, thinks that “it will be a brave, if not to say foolhardy, author who will attempt to write another life of Churchill for at least a decade, perhaps longer.” However, with the impending explosion forecast by Piers Brendon, I expect that we are likely to witness many intrepid souls eager to engage on the Churchill battleground. These future biographers will be better because of this biography by Roy Jenkins, who has himself stood on the shoulders of Sir Martin Gilbert, Violet Bonham Carter, Lady Soames – and Winston Churchill.

    Because, in the words of G.R.Elton, Churchill “remains quite simply, a great man” and, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, he was “the largest human being of our time” there will never be an end to assessments of his life. May they all be as good as this one.

    Aspiring biographers take note: Churchill, The Liberal Years still needs to be written.