August 19, 2024

Finest Hour 200, Fourth Quarter 2022

Page 46

Review by Alastair Stewart

Alastair Stewart is a public affairs consultant, freelance writer, and chair of ICS Scotland.

Andrew Liddle, Cheers, Mr Churchill: Winston in Scotland, Birlinn, 2022, 272 pages, £20. ISBN 978–1780277899

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Winston Churchill has to walk into mine. If Rick Blaine were a Scottish writer, that would undoubtedly be his feeling when reading Andrew Liddle’s new book Cheers, Mr Churchill!

Churchill’s connections to Scotland are plethoric, but there is a glaring absence of a dedicated book on the subject. Any index of any biography on Churchill clearly cites a mishmash of Scottish placenames, compatriots, and famous faces, to say nothing of his fourteen years as Member of Parliament for Dundee.

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Then there is his leadership of the Royal Scots Fusiliers during the First World War, his wife’s Scottish ancestry, and the range of Scottish ministers and secretaries of state with whom he served. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was a Scottish prime minister who gave Churchill his first government appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonial Office.

But Churchill is a punchline in modern Scotland. His rejection by the Dundee electorate in 1922 forgets that he was returned five times from 1908. Others accuse him of mass murder, sending in tanks to crush a rebellion in Glasgow, and deliberately sending the 51st Highland regiment to perish because they were Scottish. All to say nothing of a pernicious lie that Churchill wanted to abandon Scotland should the Nazis invade. (See FH 189 for details about these controversies.) 

Liddle touches on this, for most countries would clamour to cash in on such a famous connection as Churchill. But you will find no statues, no hotels or bars in Scotland named in honour of the great war leader. Instead, Churchill’s legacy is the crooked backbone of contemporary debates between Scottish independence and unionism in Scotland.

To understand modern Scottish politics is to understand Churchill. English and Scottish nationalisms in the early twenty-first century exist in reaction to the British state. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, Churchill was a banal nationalism in himself: he was as quintessentially British as Queen Elizabeth II and red post boxes and as unparalleled as Edinburgh Castle, sitting atop a dead volcano.

In 2019 an elected member of the Scottish Parliament tweeted Churchill was a “mass murderer” and “white supremacist.” When I was invited to debate Ross Greer on BBC radio, he knew little beyond a pastiche version of Churchill that has been bandied about and certainly knew nothing of Churchill’s extensive Scottish links.

This is the backdrop to which this book is set. Liddle’s contribution starts to pull these threads into one volume and helps to undo the damage that years of neglect has done to Churchill’s reputation in Scotland. This work is exhaustive but not complete, nor could it be. The hard part is selecting what to include.

Indeed, it is staggering to reflect the first and last dedicated book to examine Churchill’s involvement with Scotland was Churchill: A Seat for Life published by Tony Paterson in 1980. A Scottish Life: Sir John Martin, Churchill and Empire published by Michael Jackson in 2000 is an excellent read about one of Churchill’s private secretaries but it is not a study of Churchill and Scotland. The Scottish Secretaries by David Torrance (2006) necessarily involves Churchill in discussing the Scottish politicians with whom he worked, but this, like the others, merely dips a toe; it never dives into the deep sea of Churchill Scotland ties.

Liddle, then, has the solemn task of making up for seventy years of oversight. These innumerable connections sit below the surface like a rich oil field, ready for drilling. Cheers, Mr Churchill! is historical, but the explanation for Churchill’s rejection from the Scottish zeitgeist is tied to his total contemporary politicisation in Scotland. There are statues of George Kinloch, Robert Peel, and even William Gladstone in Scotland, but only a half remembered bust of Churchill in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum. His erasure is complete, his memory a colonial imposition.

Schroedinger’s Churchill is an irony in Scotland. His detractors, like Greer, love to remember to cancel him. Beyond that, Scottish connections are ignored, and Churchill increasingly becomes strictly an English historical figure.

After years of writing features about Churchill and Scotland, I f ind no nugget of information as funny, ironic, or demonstrative of the amnesia around the former prime minister as his friendship and service in the trenches with Andrew Dewar Gibb, the Scottish National Party founder. Gibb’s book With Winston Churchill at the Front (1916, re-released 2016) is a must-read in its own right.

Churchill was a good friend to Scotland. He liked Scotland, noting that he held special memories of the northern kingdom, and that it gave him his wife, his constituency, and his regiment. As his successor Harold Macmillan articulated, Churchill believed that the Union between Scotland and England was “of the wedding ring, not the handcuff.”

Before opting for Chartwell, Churchill nearly bought an estate in Scotland. Serendipitously, he was born on 30 November, the feast day of Scotland’s patron saint, Andrew. As a wonderful dovetail, the first biography of Churchill was written by Alexander MacCallum Scott, a former private secretary, Liberal MP, and a man as Scottish as his name implies.

Churchill followed Prime Minister Asquith in calling for “Home Rule all round” and several times supported Scottish devolution as part of a federal United Kingdom. Churchill reiterated this in the 1950s when saying he would not interfere in the Scottish covenant and called for a Scottish Parliament.

Liddle’s emphasis on Dundee is authoritative, for it is the myth that every other lie is built upon. His book is not some grand act of alchemy. It is a rare treat to find something new in the ocean of Churchill scholarship, and Liddle pulls together a refreshing new take on Scotland to make for an entirely fresh viewpoint.

With genuine delight, I can report the book is precisely the kind of output for which the International Churchill Society has been calling. Liddle is continuing a renaissance that rightly brings together the joyful, brilliant, and typically Churchillian story of his relationship with Scotland. This book is not a must-read. It is a necessary one.