Richard Toye - Winston Churchill: A life in the News

On 4 June 1929, a photograph of Winston Churchill appeared on the back page of the Daily Herald. It showed him outside 11 Downing Street, the Chancellor of the Exchequers residence which he had not yet vacated following the defeat of the Conservative government at a general election a few days earlier. The picture showed Churchill carrying a book with the one-word titleWARclearly visible. The caption to the photograph suggested that war was one of his favourite subjects. But was the photograph genuine? Churchill angrily concluded that it was not, after a member of the public wrote to him comparing the Heralds shot with a similar one that appeared in another paper; in this version the word WAR could not be seen. On Churchills instructions, Edward Marsh, his friend and private secretary, wrote to the Heralds editor, William Mellor, in outraged terms. Obviously your photographer, or someone at your office, has deliberately faked or forged a copy of the photograph which was published in the Daily Herald for the purpose of sustaining a prejudicial caption, he claimed.

To understand why Churchill jumped to this conclusion, it helps to know of the bad blood that had long existed between him and the radical left-wing Herald. Ten years before, when he was Secretary of State for War and Air, it had passionately opposed his support for the White anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian civil war. He, in turn, had issued orders that the War Office was no longer to facilitate the circulation of the paper to British troops in France and Germany, because it contained propaganda of an essentially disloyal and subversive character. Some copies that had already reached their destination may have been destroyed. The anti-war poet and former soldier Osbert Sitwell had been moved by this to pen the following lines:

The Daily Herald

Is unkind.

It has been horrid

About my nice new war.

I shall burn the Daily Herald .

Now, perhaps embittered by the Labour Partys success at the polls and his own loss of office, Churchill was seen by his enemies to be lashing out once more. The Herald, for its part, was absolutely sure of its ground, to the point of appealing as a referee to the organ that was its ideological polar opposite. This was the Morning Post, sometime defender of General Reginald Dyer (the Butcher of Amritsar) and former employer of Churchill himself as a young correspondent three decades earlier. The Posts experts examined the materials submitted to them and were unanimously agreed that they can find nothing in the negative to suggest that it is not perfectly genuine. The contact print from the negative and the enlargement from which the reproduction in the paper was made were also genuine and bore no trace of having been touched. Whereas in the printed version the word WAR had been made blacker and more distinct, this was merely an emphasis of definition such as is employed in every process room to make clear some point of special interest in a picture.