September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 29

By RONALD I. COHEN


When I met Martin Gilbert more than thirty years ago, I was clutching a track-paper printout of several hundred errata or omissions in Frederick Woods’s 1963 Churchill bibliography. Martin perused my dot-matrix text with an intensity that I came to know well, pointing out a couple of my errors. My indebtedness to him began small, but burgeoned over the subsequent decades. Our relationship was quickly cemented.  Not surprisingly, bibliography remained central to our communications.

Over the next few years, given my day work in the production of motion pictures, part of our communication centred on the prospect of a documentary or mini-series on Churchill. But my business was feature film production, drama not documentary, and nothing came of that proposed collaboration. Martin did go on to write the four-part television series “The Complete Churchill” (1991), and to participate in many other Churchill-related documentaries. He even helped create a video for The Churchill Centre, sitting at the famous desk at Chartwell, explaining why Sir Winston matters.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

We then concentrated on bibliographic issues, and in 1989 Martin kindly wrote to the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts to recommend my access, for what he then generously described as “a comprehensive bibliography on a scale not hitherto attempted.” Five years later, he similarly secured access for me to the Bodleian.  In January 1995, having seen more of my text, he advised a potential publisher that the “work will be the basic reference tool for scholars, students, journalists and Churchill-buffs for the next century.” By the end of that year, he had agreed to write the foreword, which he produced promptly the following June. My progress was slower than hoped, and ultimately it was not needed until early 2006. Yet without complaint, Martin kindly drafted updated forewords in 2001, 2003 and 2006.

In the early 1990s I had broached the prospect of a Gilbert bibliography.  In 1994 Martin wrote to say he approved, proposing a division of the text: pamphlets, books, introductions to other authors’ works, and periodical contributions. We also agreed that Martin’s cartographic work deserved documentation and that works with his maps should also be a component. For years we wrote each other on divisions and content, and in June 1995 I faxed him the happy change to the title page, for he had now become Sir Martin. Alas, the Churchill bibliography took me so long that the Gilbert work has never taken flight, although, given the vastness of Martin’s oeuvre, it is very much merited. There are eighty-eight books (see Christopher Sterling, pages 3436), hundreds of pamphlets, introductions, forewords, prefaces, chapters, maps and periodical contributions.

Martin’s Churchill research, principally from 1968 to 1988, involved sifting through, as he wrote, “an estimated fifteen tons” of documents, most but not all in the Churchill Archives Centre and the Public Records Office (now the National Archives). His monumental work has been my indispensable tool. Without his probing through those archives, and the many others documented in his warm and charming In Search of Churchill, I would have been unable to describe the circumstances of publication that are essential to my work. I wrote him in 2001: “I believe that my Bibliography will also be seen as a monument to your biographical achievement.”

Martin’s perennial attention to detail was also acutely helpful to me in the case of his Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence 1937-1964, the manuscript for which I was able to consult before publication. Among other details, this work constitutes the complete record of published translations of Churchill’s important 1930s articles.

My indebtedness to Martin Gilbert is evident in the footnotes throughout my three volumes. Without him my work would not have been possible, even within the already extended twenty-two years of preparation.

Our years of friendship also gave rise to many amusing exchanges. The peripatetic Martin would often send postcards from exotic locales. One of these, on 2 December 1989, reads “bought in Fulton, posted in Jerusalem!” Another, on 30 May 1997 from Lviv, Ukraine, carried his handwritten names of the ancient city in Russian, German, Polish and Latin! Yet another was sent on Churchill’s birthday in 2003: “I am now—at 30,000 feet—just above Kabul!” On 10 February 2004 came one from Pago Pago, American Samoa: “As we cross the International Date Line at midnight, tomorrow will be February 12—and I will never know February 11, 2004. Isn’t life strange?”

Martin would also fax or e-mail me from venues ashore or afloat, asking if I could send him a reference, or a Churchill speech or other writing, that he needed for a shipboard speech. On 15 March 2006, he explained pertinently: “I am in the Indian Ocean, lecturing at sea, and in two days will be in the Red Sea. Is there any way you could send me the text of Man Overboard!?”

I deeply cherish all those delightful exchanges and opportunities. I find particularly apt the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s tombstone at St. Paul’s, commemorating the life and contributions of the great architect, Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Those who seek the literary monument to the extraordinary achievements of Sir Martin Gilbert need not look far.


Ronald Cohen MBE is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, President of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa, and a Senior Fellow at the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carleton University. The Latin title translates: “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.