September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 20

By BARRY SINGER

As the only standing bookshop in the world devoted to the writings of Winston Churchill, -Chartwell Booksellers has inextricably been interested in the writings of Martin Gilbert. This association has yielded a delightful dividend: unlike Sir Winston, Sir Martin could actually visit us. Many of his visits resulted in parties. The first was in December 1986 when we feted him on the publication of Road to Victory, the seventh volume in the official Churchill biography.

Martin’s humility and straightforward communicative eloquence, so evident on every page of the official biography, was manifest from the moment one met him. We toasted his achievement that evening with Pol Roger champagne and marveled at what lay ahead: Volume 8, and the end of his remarkable biographical journey.

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Little more than a year later, I visited Martin at his then-home on Parliament Hill, near Hampstead Heath. He swept me inside with unexpected giddiness. “I’ve just finished it!” he announced, practically crowing: “The last chapter. Let me read it to you.” And he did.

I felt giddy myself. What impossible luck to stumble in on the day that Martin Gilbert completes the official biography. So dazzled was I by the moment (and the reading) that I almost didn’t grasp what Martin said next: “Would you like to see the Fulton speech?”

In 1946 Churchill had delivered his most famous postwar speech at Fulton, Missouri’s Westminster College, catapulting himself back to the center of world events in the wake of his ouster as prime minister the previous year—a speech containing the famous warning: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Martin, sifting through masses of paper strewn across his huge desk, lifted what appeared to be a typed roll of toilet paper: “Churchill had the sheets pinned together with straight pins, you see, as he revised it on the train out from Washington.” The narrow pages were indeed pinned at the edges, creating one long, linked scroll.

We hunted for the page containing Churchill’s “iron curtain” watch phrase. “I prefer to work from the original documents,” muttered Martin simply, as we spooled along. “I am often given leave to borrow them. Quietly.”

Indeed.

Twenty-two years later, a sequence of events that captures both Martin’s bone-deep modesty and understated meticulousness was set in motion by a telephone call. President Obama, then newly elected, had caused a stir by returning to the British government a bronze Churchill bust that had been loaned to the Oval Office as a sign of solidarity in the wake of September 11th. It was one of two White House Churchill busts sculpted by Sir Jacob Epstein (the other was presented during the Johnson years, and is still there). President Bush had given the second bust a place of honor but had left it behind upon his departure. President Obama had replaced it with a bust of Abraham Lincoln. A small furor had ensued, particularly in Great Britain.

Cut to the morning of Thursday, 26 February 2009, when my telephone rang and I heard the familiar greeting, “Martin here!” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was coming to Washington the following week for his first official meeting with the President. “I have been asked to suggest an appropriate Churchill-related gift that the PM might bring,” said Martin.

His idea was to offer Brown a maquette of the Epstein sculpture that Martin kept on his own desk. I allowed that this was a symmetrical exchange, but hardly an improvement. Why not give Obama a complete First Edition set of the official biography, signed by Martin Gilbert? The President was known to read voraciously.

At first, Martin balked at what he perceived to be rank self-aggrandizement. Finally, however, he relented. There was a set in his house, Martin said, that he could hand over to the PM’s staff immediately. But it was missing Volume 5.

I offered to fill in the blank with a copy Martin had signed on one of his visits here. Martin alerted Number Ten. The seven-volume set left London with the Prime Minister and his entourage, while we shipped off a signed copy of Volume 5 to a waiting operative at the British Embassy in Washington. Our book would be added to Martin’s set in time for Gordon Brown’s meeting with President Obama. All would be well.

Then on the appointed Tuesday, emails like this one began to appear in my inbox: “In the Daily Mail online the following statement appears: ‘Mr. Brown arrived laden with gifts, including a seven-volume first-edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s biography of Winston Churchill.’ I’ve found no trace of this set. Do you know anything about it, and will it be available for sale in the U.S.?”

Apparently Number Ten, in its advance press release, had simply counted the books on hand. I checked newspapers around the world online. Every one of them reiterated the same inaccuracy: “Sir Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography”!

Frantically, I phoned our British Embassy contact in D.C. Yes, she reassured me, Volume 5 had arrived in time and President Obama had correctly been handed a complete, eight-volume official biography.

Martin remained nonplussed. “They so rarely read it,” he sighed, as we commiserated by phone. “Now I know they don’t even count it.”

Mr. Singer is proprietor of Chartwell Booksellers in New York City and the author of Churchill Style (reviewed in Finest Hour 155).