October 17, 2008

By William Manchester
Boston & Toronto: Little Brown & Co.; London: Michael Joseph, 1988.

Reviewed by Joe Sramek
Published in Finest Hour

    When I first read this book, I was struck by its rhetorical brilliance. This was exhilarating at first, but later on it became troubling. I asked myself: could Manchester be trying to oversell his product, my childhood hero, Winston Churchill? I decided to take a closer look at Manchester’s work, particularly its many historical inaccuracies.

    For example, Manchester describes the 1932 London hunger riots as playing “…a role in the formation of the most disastrous foreign policy in the history of Britain and its empire.” (40-41). Manchester offers no footnote to his assertion. By contrast, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-45, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965) states: “….Unemployment was the spur towards a more aggressive socialist policy. It also provided an opening through which Communist influence broke into the middle classes….The Communists stepped eagerly into the vacant place. Wal Hannington, their nominee for leadership, hit on the device of “hunger marches”– an echo of the old Blanketeers. Select bands of unemployed from the depressed areas marched on London, where they demonstrated to little purpose….”

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    A second example: In 1933 a Labour candidate at a bye-election in East Fulham turned a Conservative majority of 14,000 into a Labour majority of 5,000, which Manchester ascribes to pacifism among the voters. (46) Here Manchester takes the position of Charles Loch Mowat in Britain Between the Wars, 1919-40, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1955): “In 1932 and 1933 pacifist sentiment, a vague belief in the League as the guardian of peace, a disbelief in the possibility of a European war were still dominant among the British people….More portent in influencing policy was the by-election in East Fulham in October 1933. The Conservative candidate, advocating an increase in the strength of the army, navy, and air force, was defeated by the Labour candidate who accused him of preparing for war.” (422)

    Mowat, like Taylor, is a respected historian of the era, but on this question he and Manchester are in a distinct minority. Taylor, writing ten years later with the benefit of more scholarship on the period, suggests that their view “was probably mistaken….Electors, as distinct from politicians, were interested in housing and unemployment, not in foreign affairs. In any case, there was a natural swing back to Labour after the freak results of 1931 (when they went from 289 to 46 seats).” (367) John W. Young’s Britain and the World in the 20th Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) supports Taylor: “The October Fulham by-election, which the Conservatives lost to a pacifist Labour candidate on a swing of 19,000 votes, was not simply fought on the peace issue. (emphasis mine), but it shook Conservative leaders and pointed out the need for a popular education campaign before rearmament was undertaken.” (105) So does Carl F. Brand’s The British Labour Party (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1974): Labour’s candidate was “no pacifist,” Brand writes; his victory “proved the popularity of collective security.” (179) Finally Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life (New York: Holt 1991) notes: “This decision to continue with disarmament was a secret one; it therefore failed to help the Government on the following day, when a by-election at East Fulham the seat was won by an anti-Government candidate on a disarmament platform.” (523)

    No one will deny that pacifism was a factor in this key bye-election. Yet in trying to oversell Churchill, Manchester essentially argues that it was the only factor–which I must assume is an attempt to magnify Churchill even more against his time period.

    Winston Churchill is, indeed, the “Last Lion,” but does he need to be lionized? This, unfortunately, is what Mr. Manchester has done. His book fawns over Churchill’s lonely stand against Hitler–although he was not alone–and ignores or fabricates history to prove that Churchill was a great man, which, on the evidence, is superfluous.

    On the whole, William Manchester makes a good, although flawed, contribution to Churchill scholarship. There is nothing wrong with popular history, or “historical literature,” per se, so long as the reader knows the basic story already. Thus I would only recommend reading The Last Lion after reading Gilbert, Rhodes James, Rose, and others. As a person who is serious about history, I fear that the ordinary reader, the so-called “history buff,” will read Manchester’s book before the others, and come away with erroneous impressions of the 1930s. This would be a disservice to our understanding of Churchill and his time-period.