October 17, 2008

by Martin Gilbert

Reviewed by Noel Taylor in Finest Hour 71
Reprinted by courtesy of the Ottawa Citizen

    In the expanded attic room of Martin Gilbert’s Victorian house in London there is a desk, 30 feet long and U-shaped, which has held in its working career much of the life of Winston Churchill.

    Gilbert, a cheerful academic on a sabbatical from his Oxford college which started 20 years ago and has never finished, rides round the desk’s rim on an office chair with wheels, sifting the evidence, saving what he conservatively estimates at 10 per cent for future reference.

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    The desk is spread at different times with archives, official and personal, and some of the 5,000 letters which Winston wrote to his beloved wife, Clementine.

    A friend has estimated that over the years Gilbert’s desk has carried 15 tons of paper. In words, that’s more than two million over eight volumes of the official biography.

    And that doesn’t include his latest 800-page book, Churchill: A Life. It’s the book he obviously feels will reach that wider readership which doesn’t have the money or the mental energy to wade through eight volumes — and compensate him more realistically for the labor of nearly half a lifetime.

    “It’s been a struggle,” he admits with a wry smile, “a real burden.” The original contract for eight volumes involved no royalties, and no copyrights — only a payment rapidly overtaken by inflation.

    For Churchill: A Life he has both royalties and copyrights and — what’s given him greater pleasure — a four-part TV series for the BBC, which he himself hosts, to be broadcast in January. Worldwide sales, will fatten the pot.

    “It was great: they took me everywhere,” Gilbert enthuses. “We went to the Kremlin, Churchill’s prison in Pretoria, the White House, Yalta. . .” And now it’s brought him back to Ottawa.

    “People here weren’t aware of it at the time but when he came to Ottawa during the war he was just getting over a heart attack in Washington. He was very sick. And I discovered that after Ottawa he went to Florida to recuperate under the name of Mr. Lobb.”

    Churchill incidentally, was very accident-prone all his life. In his mid-60s he got squashed by a car on Fifth Avenue in New York and wrote a 5,000-word article about it for the Daily Mail — for £1 a word. “That was more than his annual salary as PM!”

    It’s items like this which freshen up his latest book. Gilbert is quick to point out it’s definitely not an edited version of his earlier work, reduced to an eighth.

    Everyone asks Gilbert if he ever actually met Churchill. Regrettably, no. But as a schoolboy he regularly went to the House of Commons and watched him in action, and one night stood outside No. 10 (“You can’t do that now of course”) when Churchill gave a dinner party on his resignation.

    Gilbert had, of course, met Clementine. “I used to read chapters to her once a month. She insisted I look at all their private letters. . . . She imposed no censorship whatsoever and let anything be used. . . . She felt he was a large enough man to survive things that were not so creditable. You did not need to whitewash someone like him.”

    The sheer volume of their correspondence amazes even Gilbert. “When he came to Canada, in 1929, every night he would write eight or nine pages to her, and in the trenches during the war, while his fellow officers were sleeping, he would write her five or six pages every night.”

    Gilbert himself did not have an official assistant for years — “I couldn’t afford one” — until enough money was sprung loose for a graduate researcher on a three months’ trial. He married her.

    “We both read all the documents (most of which are photo-copied because of the risk of loss). I write my next chapter and she reads it and points out anything I may have left out. Sometimes she suggests re-writing.” The eighth volume is dedicated to her; the new book, to his two children. It was Suzy, his wife, who recently made a drastic alteration to Gilbert’s writing habits.

    Over the years a total of 40 books, which include definitive works on the Holocaust and 12 historical atlases, Gilbert has always written longhand, in pen and ink on the right-side pages only, leaving space for alterations on the left. But two years ago when he started on Churchill: A Life, his wife presented him with a personal computer.

    “In England, it has become the very first book to be set up with an itemized index program integrated on my screen. It went to the printer on disc and 18 days later I had the printed, jacketed book on my desk. That would have taken months.”

    Gilbert muses on what Churchill would have made of such technology. “He was infatuated by everything technological” — and that included the work of the Wright Brothers and the introduction of the tank in the First World War.”

    As for his own verdict on Churchill, you won’t find it anywhere in his books. Gilbert is firm. That’s not the historian’s function, though some have queried this view.

    “I do not think my opinion is more interesting. My function is to inform the reader and let him form his own opinion.”

    
    Martin Gilbert writes about this review:

    “While it would be churlish to cavil at such a nice review, may I point out that (1) the room is on my first floor (USA 2nd floor), not in my attic; (2) my chair is firmly rooted to the floor; (3) Suzie was my third, but obviously my best, research assistant; (4) our three children, Natalie, David and Joshua, will be happy to know that the new book is dedicated to all of them; (5) I think it would be more correct to say that Churchill was ‘fascinated’ rather than “infatuated” with technology. None of which takes away from Mr. Taylor’s many kind remarks.”