June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 38

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

“God for a month of power and a good shorthand writer!” —wsc

• Winston Churchill, by John Keegan, Penguin, 202 pp., $19.95, member price $13.

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• Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion, by Chris Wrigley, ABC/Clio Press, 368pp., $55, member price $48.

• Aspects of Winston S. Churchill, edited by T. H. Baughman & Emily E. Suelter, Therese Press, 148 pp, paperback, 2000; not known to be in print.

• Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union, 1940-45, by Martin H. Folly, Palgrave Press, 236 pp., $65, member price $56.

• British History Makers: Winston Churchill, by Leon Ashworth, Cherrytree Books, 32 pp., $19.95, member price $15.

Someone wrote recently that only two kinds of books about Winston Churchill are still publishable: highly specialized studies, such as Stafford’s Churchill and Secret Intelligence; or blood-curdling attack books accusing him of everything from bombing naked cities to dictating naked to secretaries, like Irving’s Churchill’s War. Well, you wouldn’t know that from this group.

John Keegan’s biography in the burgeoning Penguin Lives Series (twenty-three titles out, nine coming, on everyone from Oliver Cromwell to Elvis Presley) was avidly awaited. Defence Editor of The Daily Telegraph, distinguished guardian of the truth, and a gentleman into the bargain, Keegan has always been there to defend the Great Man from trendy slander by slapdash authors out to make a name or a quick windfall. His readers had every reason to expect a major contribution to the literature.

It starts off that way. The first chapter, “Churchill and History,” relating Keegan’s personal epiphany as a young Englishman abroad, listening by chance to recordings of WSC’s wartime speeches, is a masterpiece of keen insight and fine writing. In darkest America in 1957, he realizes what he never comprehended back home: that Churchill had been the electrifying, indispensable leader at a time of maximum peril: “I was suffused with an unaccustomed sense of pride in country, and then with pride in common citizenship with a man who, at a time when ordinary mortals might have looked for accommodation with an overpowering enemy, could feel such courage and call for equal courage from those he led.”

But this brilliant chapter is succeeded by a reiteration of the well-trod story, a palimpsest of the kind Robert Rhodes James would label just another “case for the defence.”

The great columnist Florence King said of a famous American popular historian that one always leaves her books as clean as when one receives them. It wasn’t that what she writes is bad; she just doesn’t say anything to stir the juices, causing us to turn down pages or write furious notes in the margins. In King’s library, a dog-eared book full of ripostes and underlining is a worthy volume—”but give me one of her books and I will return it to you in pristine condition.”

I mark my books in the same way, but went through the first hundred pages of Keegan without a solitary note and only two dog-ears: page 20, where he repeats the old canard that Lord Randolph had been “syphilitic since youth” (see “Leading Myths” last issue); and page 66, where he contrasts Churchill’s attitudes toward Boer, Irish and Indian freedom-fighters.

Irish nationalism remained repugnant to Churchill until 1921, Keegan writes: “…it was the character and courage of Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein guerrilla leader, which altered Churchill’s mood….he never came to admire the Indian nationalists, who took their lead from the pacifist Gandhi rather than the revolutionaries in the independence movement… .Churchill had a gut sympathy for fighters. The Boers were fighters; the Indians were not, nor the Irish either until the extremity of the Anglo-Irish crisis was reached in 1916. Indians he was always to hold in contempt; eventually he was to grant the Irish a grudging respect; it was the fighting Boers who enjoyed his wholehearted admiration.”

So Churchill’s animosity toward Gandhi through 1935 was not racially motivated, as so many have charged? No, Keegan says—it arose because Indians practiced “passive resistance,” rather than getting guns and fighting it out. A fresh, insightful point—but it takes 66 pages to get to it!

An early interesting subject is Clementine Churchill, who is skillfully defined. Her marriage was “a trial. His carelessness with money, his gambling instinct, his endless appetite for talk, his ease in company…his intellectual curiosity, and his artistic and creative bent all grated. Clemmie was simple where Winston was complex, sensitive where he was forthright….She might have been happier with a more ordinary man, he with someone more conventionally feminine. Theirs, nonetheless, was certainly a marriage of true minds. They loved each other deeply and, whatever their differences, always returned to mutual understanding. Clemmie was a clever as well as strong woman. Winston would not otherwise have married her.”

This is thought-provoking and fascinating, but after the marriage of Winston and Clementine we get into the long litany of Churchill’s career— accurate enough, but not evoking three turned down pages. Looking for a masterly summary of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli catastrophes in 1915, we read only this: “…his enemies had got the better of him…he succumbed slowly into political silence.”

Perhaps I have said enough to render this inexpensive little book worth reading anyway. It certainly is, for those unfamiliar with the Churchill saga. It would make a fine text for high school or even older grammar school students, since Keegan rarely sets a foot wrong and summarizes the story with ease born of confidence and balanced judgement. But he has been so effective defending Churchill over the years that I expected a soaring symphony—not a modest fugue.

Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion by Chris Wrigley, Professor of Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, is a specialized study, and was also awaited keenly. The concept is fantastic: an A-to-Z reference work to the issues, events and people Churchill collided with over ninety years. Just what we need—a handy alphabetical index to everyone he knew and worked with (or against); details on the great debates of his age; salvation from timeconsuming Internet hunts to find out “who was who.”

Unfortunately, this is more a Biographical Acquaintance than a Biographical Companion. As far as it goes it succeeds admirably, but there are so many omissions, so much space devoted to the relatively unimportant, that it becomes a massive error of proportion.

The way to demonstrate this is to provide examples. We can find here the Cairo Conference of 1943 but not the one in 1921, Harrow but not Sandhurst, Chartwell but not Lullenden or Hyde Park Gate, spy chief Stewart Menzies but not spy chief William Stephenson or chief spy Sidney Reilly, Pamela Harriman but not Kay Halle, Lord Lloyd but not Lord Moyne, Admiral Brownrigg but not Admiral Jellicoe, John Burns but not John Morley, General Gough but not General Roberts, Oliver Cromwell but not the First Duke of Marlboro ugh, Noel Coward but not Gilbert & Sullivan.

Among issues, we read about the Industrial Charter but not Free Trade, the General Strike but not the Gold Standard, the Boer War but not Irish Home Rule, the Trade Boards Act but not the India Bill, Tonypandy but not the Spanish Civil War. And yet there is room for four pages on Admiral Fisher. (Important, yes, but twice the space devoted to Neville Chamberlain?)

There are no “organizations”—no U.N., League of Nations, India Empire Society. There are no parties—Liberal, Labour, Tory, Irish. Obscure Liberal and Labour politicians get generous coverage, but you look in vain for such key individuals as Ralph Wigram or John Anderson. There are entries for “alcohol” and “cigars” but the information is trite; Lord Randolph dies of syphilis (again!); Winston’s early love Pamela Lytton is apparently still alive at 128; Lady Soames has become “Lady Mary.” We read about Celia Sandys’ first husbands, but of the present, charming, and permanent General Perkins there is no sign. The Vanderbilt heiress who married Churchill’s cousin is called “Consuela.” I didn’t know there was a Briton alive who would ever write “Court of St. James” instead of “Court of St. James’s.”

Lastly, Churchill’s books: Wrigley tells us about the obscure Mr. Brodrick’s Army, but not about the obscure For Free Trade. He says Churchill wrote something called Liberalism and the Social Order, and has the dates wrong when Churchill deleted, then reinstated, Roosevelt, Savinkov and Trotsky in Great Contemporaries. My African Journey is published by Doubleday Doran, who did not exist when the book came out. An hour or two with any of the five books on Churchill’s books would have fixed all this.

Which is not to say serious Churchillians should not own this book. They should, because it’s the only one of its kind. The errors are really not very serious. Professor Wrigley is judicious and evenhanded, and what is here comprises a marvelous spectrum. But there is so much more to say—such a need for a really comprehensive job—that one can only wish we could lock Professor Wrigley in a luxury suite with all the tools needed and pay him a handsome stipend to write twice as many pages.

Reading the present opus, I found myself repeating Churchill’s famous lamentation to his wife from the trenches in 1916: “God for a month of power and a good shorthand writer!”

• • •

Aspects of Winston S. Churchill, published in 2000, is noteworthy for the frustration it will cause anyone trying to buy a copy. It is not available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or secondhand listings—nor, alas, from the Churchill Centre Book Club. We tried the publisher, who didn’t reply; the printer sent us to the editor, who refused to reply to our message to his very well disguised email address. Apparently Dr. Baughman likes his privacy, even if you want to buy his book.

Assembled here are eight essays on Churchill by undergraduate history students at Benedictine College in Kansas. The first two discuss his youthful confrontations with Tories over Free Trade and suffragettes over votes for women; the last discusses his warnings of the German threat in 1935. The other five concentrate on the brief and generally untrodden period of 19191926: the Versailles and Irish Treaties, the General Strike and British Gazette; and Churchill’s pro-Zionist efforts over the Mandate of Palestine in 1921.

A blurb on the back cover claims that each chapter illuminates a facet of Churchill’s life and career, and demonstrates “the kind of quality work undergraduates can produce when they are encouraged to do their best.” Well…

The students certainly picked untrod subjects, but they deserved better editing. Their concentration on 191926 was an opportunity to knit together Churchill’s horror over World War I and his hopes to prevent future wars. Each of these essays demonstrates in its own way Churchill’s famous determination to pursue a quarrel when the argument was joined, and to show compassion in victory. As it is, they just come at you, unconscious of each other. The editors could also have spared us the repeat insertions of birth and death dates for each individual mentioned; since some are mentioned many times, this quickly gets boring.

Since the authors seem confused on occasion, the editors might have better directed their conclusions. For example, Steven Freenor’s piece on the Mandate of Palestine, “In the Name of Honor,” concludes: “Although Churchill believed the Zionist policy was the wrong course for Great Britain, he did not want Great Britain to lose the respect of the Jewish people. Therefore , Churchill set aside his personal feelings and created a Jewish state in Palestine, in the name of honor.” What? Wasn’t Zionism a Zionist policy? Does any 1921 map show a Jewish state in Palestine?

This is a respectable group of essays, thoroughly footnoted, quoting many sources. But the conclusions are not always well thought out, and there’s little new that leaps out of the pages. Given that Churchill Centre seminars on other topics—Churchill’s autobiography, for example—have produced penetrating observations by students which none of their elders had thought of, I feel sure this is not the best undergraduates can do.

Have Churchill and the Soviet Union been done to death? Early on we had Big Three studies by Feis, Harriman, Mee, and Clemens. Lately we have had David Carlton’s critical Churchill and the Soviet Union; and Warren Kimball touched the subject often in such books as the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence, The Juggler, and Forged in War. Now comes Martin Folly, lecturer in American Studies at Brunei University in London, who looks at the UK-USSR relationship in terms of the Foreign Office, and how well (or badly) they represented Churchill’s policies during the war years.

This is not revisionist history but a plainspoken summary of previous books and official documents. It is thorough, not to say tedious, and draws unremarkable conclusions: Churchill and the Anglo-Americans didn’t cause the Cold War; neither did they do much overtly to prevent it. (Could it have caused itself?)

Churchill, Folly says, “felt the American attempt to pretend the special relationship did not exist and to deal with the Soviets without prior agreement on tactics with the British weakened the Allied position and encouraged Stalin to be truculent. [WSC] was frustrated by what he saw as a U.S. failure to understand the dynamics of the situation almost as much as he was by Stalin.” (162) Well…we know that.

Folly believes the idea that the British were divided over how to treat with Stalin by the end of the war is something of an exaggeration. Despite major Allied disagreement, as over who would govern Poland, the British (and Americans) did think the USSR had grown: “The changes towards a classbased, socially conservative society were seen to have inevitable consequences regarding Soviet conduct on the international scene. Obviously it made a difference if it was true that the country was now run by managers not revolutionaries….In both the U.S. and British governments there continued to be debate as to whether it was better to treat the Soviets robustly because they suspected gestures of goodwill—or conversely to bring them to act like civilised allies by treating them as respected equals.” (169)

With commendable reticence for a contemporary historian, Folly avoids judging whether Churchill or Foreign Office mistakes contributed to the Cold War. He does not believe the British were all wrong: “many of their assumptions were astute (though some, such as Stalin’s military wisdom, were wide of the mark).” Both sides, in a period of uncertainty, “were unprepared to forgo entirely their reinsurance policies, but could not unambiguously convince the other that these were not primary policies, for ‘frank’ communication never really took place.” This is all very believable and comfortable, but one wonders if there are many new lessons or conclusions to be drawn.

The collection of juveniles discussed last issue comes an addition by Leon Ashworth, a mere 32 pages long but similar in format to Fiona Reynoldson’s excellent “Leading Lives” biography: lots of color, simple language, bright laminated covers, and a target audience of the young—in this case the very young. Ashworth’s book is best suited to children just beginning to read seriously or becoming aware of history.

The book consists of thirteen double-page spreads which concisely document Churchill’s life, with brief sidebars contrasting Churchill’s life with the lives of “ordinary men and women,” a practice now de rigueur among children’s publishers. The layouts are imaginative, with much color, and there is a glossary, index and list of “places to visit” at the back of the book.

This is an impressive demonstration of how Churchill’s massive life can be compressed, but it falls short of Reynoldson’s effort. Granted, Ashworth has only half the number of pages to work with. But unlike Reynoldson, he makes no attempt to interpret the meaning of Churchill’s experiences, contenting himself to report facts. There is not even the hint of a position, however controversial the subject. (The Dardanelles was tried, it failed, and Churchill resigned.) Nor is the glossary as good as Reynoldson, who had the bright idea to boldface glossary words in her text. The sidebars are either chronologies of events or brief explanations of how the “common people” lived in Churchill’s time.

It doesn’t cost as much, but this is a mere shadow of Fiona Reynoldson’s superlative “Leading Lives.” The reading level is a bit lower, so if you find her book just a little too sophisticated for your young reader, this might do the job. At least it will do no harm.

After digesting these books, the writer is left with the question of the old lady at MacDonald’s after sampling one of their hamburgers (a phrase cleverly picked up by Walter Mondale in the 1984 Presidential election campaign): “Where’s the beef?” There have been over 600 books published about Winston Churchill— sometimes it seems like half of them appeared last year—and if you really want to make an impression in that crowd, you need to supply “more beef.”