Geoffrey Wheatcroft - Churchills Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

Churchills Shadow

The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill

GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

To the memory of my father, Stephen Wheatcroft, Sub-Lieutenant Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Fleet Air Arm pilot in HMS Indomitable 194345;

and of his brother, Albert Wheatcroft, Flight Sergeant, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 455 Squadron Coastal Command, killed 24 May 1943;

and of my mother, Joy Reed Wheatcroft, personnel manager, Hoover munitions factory 194345;

and of her brothers, Geoffrey Reed, Lieutenant Royal Engineers, Prisoner of War in North Africa, April 1941, and Robert Reed, Lance-Sergeant, Royal Artillery 7 Commando, Prisoner of War in Crete, May 1941;

and of my wifes father, Frank Muir, Aircraftman First Class, Royal Air Force 194045;

and of his wife, Polly McIrvine Muir, Wren, Womens Royal Volunteer Service 194345;

and of her sister, Sister Isabella IBVM, ambulance driver in London, 1940;

and of her brother, Brian McIrvine, Lieutenant, Seaforth Highlanders, Prisoner of War at St Valery, May 1940;

and of all who served in Churchills war.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Winston Churchill, May 1940

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, 1949

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

Adolf Hitler, September 1939

Churchills Shadow

A hush fell as he entered the chamber in a wheelchair and took his seat, not on the Treasury Bench where he had sat as prime minister at an exalted moment in his countrys history, but in another hallowed place below the gangway, from where he had once delivered his warnings about the threat from Adolf Hitler, and before that about the threat from Mohandas Gandhi. Sir Winston Churchill had sat in the House since the beginning of the century, but hadnt spoken for some years, was visibly frail, and may not have properly followed proceedings: by now more sacred talisman than elder statesman.

That day in the summer of 1963 was the one occasion when I ever saw Churchill plain and close at hand. I was a schoolboy absorbed by politics, and a friends father, a Labour Member of Parliament, had given me a pass to the gallery of the House of Commons. For all that he was aged and infirm, I was glad to have seen him for myself, and to have seen him where I did. This little place, Churchill had once said, is what makes the difference between us and Germany. He was talking to another MP as they left the darkened chamber late one night in 1917, but he might have used the same words still more truly in 1940: This little room is the He left Parliament at last the year after I saw him, and died only months later, in January 1965 aged ninety, as if the last drop of political lifeblood had been drained from him when the initials MP no longer stood after his name.

This book is an attempt to make sense of the man I saw that day long ago; to look hard at his reputation during his lifetime, and his influence since he died; to make a reckoning with his life and with his legacy, the long shadow he still casts; and to understand what he really meant to his contemporaries, and what he means to posterity. When I saw Churchill, no reminder was needed of how much he had loomed over our lives; what I couldnt have guessed then was how large he would still loom so long after his death and yet how hard to grasp the reality of Churchill it would still be.

A few things should be said. Far too much has been and is being , said Auden, and the official life of Churchill, begun by his errant son Randolph and completed by the late Sir Martin Gilbert, while costing a good deal more than a shilling, gives you many of the facts, though by no means all.

But then thats only part of the story. The posthumous life of Winston Churchill is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the post-Churchillian age and might serve , the eminent American historian of modern England Peter Stansky wrote as long ago as 1974, on the occasion of Churchills centenary, less than ten years after his death! Nearly fifty years later, as we approach his sesquicentenary, Churchills posthumous life has become a far more remarkable phenomenon. At one time I thought of writing a book to examine that afterlife, the scholarly and political debates over his reputation, his representation or misrepresentation in popular culture, Churchillism in England, and the truly extraordinary growth of the Churchill cult in America. But I found it impossible to explain that without looking back at his life. Even then, to do so in a comparatively short compass might have a ring of Monty Pythons summarise Proust competition, but I emphasise that this is not a Life and Times.

As far as possible Ive tried to write as what Keynes called . Events must be understood according not to how they turned out, but to how men at the time expected them to turn out: a principle which applies to Churchills career more than most. And while I havent tried to imitate the fashionable cinematic technique of non-linear narrative, since Im not constrained by a month-by-month, year-by-year account, Ive sometimes taken episodes out of sequence with flashbacks, and my lens has sometimes panned round a wider field, or zoomed in for close-ups of critical moments.

This has allowed me to dwell on certain passages or controversies in Churchills career which have a particular resonance to this day: his imperial and racial attitudes; his belief in the English-speaking races (later peoples) and their supposed unity, particularly in the form of an Anglo-American special relationship; his strategical ambitions, obsessions and follies; his dealings with Ireland; his support for Zionism; his confused and conflicted attitude towards the bombing of cities and civilians; his complicated engagement with European integration and with what part, if any, the British should play in it; and, far from least, the legacy to this day of what he so dubiously called his wilderness years and his critique of appeasement and the Munich agreement.

Part of the problem may be the sheer vastness of Churchills life. He was born less than ten years after an American Civil War which would endlessly fascinate him, fought in a country he would visit for the first of many times at the age of twenty, and which would play a large part in his life, long before he was adopted there as a national hero and made an honorary citizen, in a ceremony which took place almost exactly on the centenary of Gettysburg. Or again, he was born four years after the Franco-Prussian war, whose sequel would dominate much of his life; he played a leading part in two more wars between Germany and France, but lived to see that re-creation of the European family based on a partnership between France and Germany of which he had dreamed in 1946, if not quite the he also advocated.

He rode in a cavalry charge in 1898; he lived to control atomic bombs. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday in 1895 while witnessing a patriotic rebellion in Cuba; he approached his eighty-eighth birthday as the world was nearly plunged into nuclear war over Cuba. He was elected to Parliament in the reign of Queen Victoria; he was prime minister to greet a new young queen fifty-one years later. He was appointed a Parliamentary Under-Secretary aged thirty-two in December 1905; he resigned as prime minister aged eighty in April 1955, the longest such ministerial span in British political history. The scope of his story is still hard to grasp.