September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 17

By LARRY P.  ARNN

“An interesting young researching man,” Lady Diana Cooper described him to Randolph Churchill, “full of zeal to put history right.” Martin Gilbert in 1962, commencing what would be a life’s work.


Winston Churchill’s only son Randolph, the first author of the official biography, began what he called “The Great Work” in 1961, and on his twenty-fifth birthday, 25 October 1962, Martin Gilbert was hired as one of five assistants. The project began grandly. Setting out to write a record for the ages, Randolph insisted that the publishers produce document volumes to accompany the biographical narrative he was writing. This has proven to be, especially under Sir Martin, a task of immense scope. It is one thing, and no easy thing, to cite a document in the course of explaining its meaning in a narrative history, especially when that narrative is constructed almost entirely from these original sources. It is another thing to publish that document so that the reader may understand it independently of a surrounding narrative account.

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This requires extensive indexing and annotation of a different kind. People and events must be, so far as possible, identified and explained. Moreover, one must select the documents to be included, as the total corpus is much too numerous and lengthy to publish in a book or a series of books, even if the books are large and even if there are many of them. The selection must be made on the grounds of relevance, explanatory power, and importance. The provenance of everything must be explained. This activity is a service to history in itself and a major portion, probably by far the largest portion in actual volume of work, of the task.

Martin Gilbert worked as a researcher on the biography for almost five years until June 1967. At this point he withdrew, citing the pressure of work on the biography under the demanding Randolph in combination with his own historical work and his teaching at Merton College, Oxford. In May 1968 Randolph telephoned Martin to say that “a lamp is always burning for you here,” and they agreed in that conversation that Martin would rejoin the staff shortly. Three weeks later Randolph Churchill died.

Randolph and his British publishers, Heinemann, had wanted his son Winston to succeed him as biographer, but Lord Hartwell, owner of the Daily Telegraph and of certain rights to serialize the biography, favoured Lord Birkenhead, son of Churchill’s great friend F.E. Smith, the first Lord Birkenhead. Weeks passed while the pros and cons were discussed among the parties. Eventually the American publishers, Houghton Mifflin, suggested that the young Martin Gilbert, who had been present at some of the discussions through his friendship with the grandson Winston, finish the job. Martin met with Lord Hartwell and “in desperation I think at the thought of missing my train, I made the following suggestion: Lord Birkenhead, a noted one-volume biographer, would write a single-volume biography of Churchill based on the papers of which Lord Hartwell was the effective copyright holder. I would finish the multi-volume work on which Randolph had embarked. Lord Birkenhead’s book would be short and stimulating. Mine would be long and academic.” The compromise was accepted, and the young historian was given the job in October 1968.

During the forty-six years that have passed since Martin Gilbert took up this great task, the number of his published books has risen to eighty-eight. The Churchill biography has become a thing of magnificence in scale, scope and accuracy. It is without doubt the longest biography ever written, as befits one of the largest lives ever lived. It is built upon an effort of research that has consumed the best efforts of this prolific author for most of his life. He has maintained throughout the rigorous commitment to careful chronology, to attention to accuracy in every detail and to reliance upon original documents that is the hallmark of his scholarship.

I was privileged to work for Martin Gilbert for three years in the 1970s; since then, I have been his friend continuously, and have often been privileged to be his colleague. In those three years I witnessed and wondered at the care and energy he put into his work. Martin was not a wealthy man, then or now, but he would spare no expense to make sure that every document that could be found was found. Sensing that the expense of gathering the material was serious, I asked him once if I should be more careful what I copied at the Public Record Office and other archives. He replied with feeling: “You must get everything. We must have it all here.”

His commitment to finding every relevant document was nothing less than fierce, although his manner was never so. He would say: “You have a good memory, and I have a good memory; we do not rely upon our memories.” One learned to look things up, again and again. One learned to write with the evidence directly before one. One learned that it is an infinite job to find all the evidence, but that this knowledge must spur one not to despair but to further effort. The best efforts would yield results: he liked to say, “In the writing of 19th and 20th century history, there is no room for the word ‘perhaps.’” If you used that term with him, his eyebrow would go up, and he would say: “Perhaps not!”

Regarding Churchill, the abundance of the record is an obstacle as well as an opportunity. Martin wrote once that the first step is simply to read what Churchill wrote, and that itself requires months of application. Thinking he would live a short life as his father had, Churchill applied himself to his work with something approaching fury. I keep his Complete Speeches, which is not quite complete, on my bookshelf, not far from the complete writings of Abraham Lincoln. Churchill’s speeches alone are many times more voluminous than all that Lincoln wrote. In addition, Churchill wrote about fifty books, thousands of articles, and memoranda and official minutes by the thousands. And this is only what he wrote himself; he famously inspired opinions about himself and the enterprises with which he was involved from friends and adversaries and historians, in all over fifty million words.

The official biography turned out to be bigger than Martin Gilbert foresaw, almost bigger than even he could do. His method was simple yet ambitious. He looked everywhere possible for every original source. He covered secondary sources with care: more care when the authors were original witnesses to or participants in the events, more care still when their recollections were recorded at the time of the events. This vast treasure of material, once collected, was placed in strict chronological order.

The documents were put in “wodges,” as he called them, and each wodge had a blank sheet of paper with the beginning date on it. The wodges were held together with “black clips” or “bulldog clips.”

The biography deployed hundreds, then thousands of these. When a wodge got too big, it was split into several wodges. They were all kept on his desk, which was about thirty feet long, in their own chronological order. Secondary sources were photocopied and placed at the appropriate point in the chronology. One had to be careful not to put any wastebasket under the edge of a desk: something might fall into it! One did not carry the documents away anywhere. If he needed to use one, he made a photocopy.

Martin would sit at his long desk for hours, beginning at the latest at 9 am sharp, writing from these documents. Sometimes “flags”—long strips of paper held by a paper clip—would be placed alongside a document of particular importance, some carrying a little summary at the top of what the document was or the theme it concerned. Until the last fifteen years or so, he wrote everything by hand in a clear script. He liked the Lami Safari fountain pen, had many of them lying about the desk. He owned one or two of Churchill’s fountain pens, but did not use them. Once one went missing and a frantic search began, enlisting all hands, until it was uncovered. When it was found, to great relief, he went about the room checking to be doubly sure that no wastebaskets were positioned so that something could fall into them by accident.

A friend said to me once: “I do not see how he produces so much; I could never do so.” I replied that probably none of us could do it, but we could try to follow his example in one respect. We could sit down every day not later than 9 am and get on with the work. Martin was stricken once with Bell’s Palsy, as a result of which part of his face was paralysed. He worked on regardless, the same hours, holding his pen in one hand and in the other a handkerchief which he held against his mouth to keep it fully closed.

Ihave thought since I first met Martin that he was made for this work and it was made for him. I have been privileged to know and to study with a few great scholars, and now I work with some here at Hillsdale College. I have never seen any with such capacity to master detail and render it into order and sense. I have never seen any so diligent in making sure that what he wrote reflected the evidence that was before him.

His efforts remind me of one of the most brilliant passages that Churchill wrote about the great painters:

…trying to paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything, more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same. It is the same kind of problem, as unfolding a long, sustained, interlocked argument. It is a proposition which, whether of few or numberless parts, is commanded by a single unity of conception. And we think—though I cannot tell—that painting a great picture must require an intellect on a grand scale. There must be that all-embracing view which presents the beginning and the end, the whole and each part, as one instantaneous impression retentively and untiringly held in the mind. When we look at the larger Turners— canvases yards wide and tall—and observe that they are all done in one piece and represent one single second of time, and that every innumerable detail, however small, however distant, however subordinate, is set forth naturally and in its true proportion and relation, without effort, without failure, we must feel in the presence of an intellectual manifestation the equal in quality and intensity of the finest achievements of warlike action, of forensic argument, or of scientific or philosophical adjudication.

Let this be a description of Sir Martin’s achievement in making this Great Work.

I will close with two points of a personal nature. The first is a word of praise to the members of Sir Martin’s immediate family. I have known most of them—Helen, Susie, Natalie, David, Josh, Margaret and Esther—for decades, and their support has always been steadfast. Martin’s wife Esther has been brave, strong and loving in caring for him in good times and bad.

The second is a word about this man who was my teacher and employer. To such as he, a student owes a debt that cannot be repaid. In my case the debt is compounded by the fact that I met my wife, now of thirty-three years, in his home. For much of the time while we worked for Martin, Penny Houghton, now Arnn, was the only other member of the staff, and this gave me the privilege I still treasure of coming to know her. Sir Martin’s example, which we have observed and sought to follow now for more than three decades, is one of the greatest benefits we have reaped.


Dr. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, is editor-in-chief of Martin Gilbert’s official biography, Winston S. Churchill. Hillsdale College Press has republished the twenty-four previous volumes, recently published the seventeenth document volume (1942), and plans up to six further document volumes running through 1965. This article is excerpted from Dr. Arnn’s introduction to The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, Testing Times, 1942.

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