May 15, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 58

Reviews – The Least of the Lot—by a Long Way

His Finest Hour: A Biography of Winston Churchill , by Christopher Catherwood. New York: Skyhorse; London: Robinson, hardbound, 272 pp., $22.95, Member price $18.35.

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By David Freeman

Prof. Freeman teaches history at California State University Fullerton.

The turn of the century brought in a flood of mostly respectable, brief biographical studies of Churchill which crested in 2005 with Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero, a book rightly described in these pages by the late John Ramsden as the best of the lot “and by a long way.” That judgment remains secure as the ebb tide now brings in the detritus that is His Finest Hour: a book that must be regarded as the least of the lot—by a long way.

Already the author of two meretricious monographs about aspects of Churchill’s career, Catherwood does not take animadversions well, opining in the final chapter of his latest book that “a biographer who tries to steer a middle, balanced course gets attacked from both sides” (228). Before remonstrating, he should have taken the time to check his facts. It takes neither a Churchill admirer nor a critic to find that his book recycles far too many myths and misconceptions long ago set straight by more level-headed historians.

For openers, the chapter dealing with Churchill’s youth features generous use of words like “possibly” and “perhaps,” while resting heavily on the dubious, shop-worn suppositions of Anthony Storr and Lord Moran that Churchill was an alcohol-dependent manic depressive.

Lady Soames once addressed Storr’s pretentious pronouncement of her father’s malady as a remarkable diagnosis from someone who never knew him. Lord Moran knew him—very well indeed—but usually when he was ill. Moran’s “diaries” (Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1965) departed significantly from the material he actually wrote in his diary at the time. Relying on such sources contributes to Catherwood’s catalog of conjecture, which itself merely precedes a series of gross factual errors.

Catherwood’s understanding of issues like Imperial Preference and the Ten-Year Rule is seriously flawed, while his accounts of episodes such as Sidney Street, Tonypandy and Irish independence are just dead wrong. Incidentally, Martin Gilbert’s “The Golden Eggs” (pages 20-27) does a nice job of sinking Catherwood’s fatuous theories about WSC’s decision making in World War II. The full list of errors runs too long to be cited here, and would bore our readers, who have been over the same ground repeatedly in the past.

There can be no excuse for this kind of professional ineptitude in an age when facts can be easily verified by Internet research as well as traditional print sources. For example, a brief visit to the “Leading Churchill Myths” on www.winstonchurchill.org, or a reading of Martin Gilbert’s 1991 biography, Churchill: A Life, could have forestalled most of the errors Catherwood commits. Faced with such sloppy scholarship, the potential reader is well advised to turn instead to the vastly superior studies led by Paul Addison, Geoffrey Best, John Keegan and Ian Wood. This is one Finest Hour that isn’t.