The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 6

THE GREAT DICTATOR

Aha, I am thinking, as I stand at last in Winston Churchill’s study. So this is how he did it. By special leave of the staff at Chartwell I have come right up to the desk—beyond the rope barrier. I am looking at the very same pair of round black John Lennon-ish Bond Street spectacles that he used; and there are his hole-punches. There is the bust of Napoleon, rather bigger than the bust of Nelson, and there are the paperweights that you see in some of the photographs.

As I stoop to examine the deep scuffing in the right arm of his desk chair—a reminder of the odd way Churchill used to clutch it, perhaps because of his dislocated shoulder—I am politely asked to step back. I think they are worried I am going to test the chair with my weight.

I comply unhesitatingly. I have seen enough.

This is not just an English country house, with a stunning view of the weald of Kent, with fish ponds and croquet lawn and a cinema and painting studio and every civilised amenity that could be devised by a gentleman of leisure. No, no: this much-amended Elizabethan manor is no scene of repose. This is a machine.

It is no wonder that the design of this house proceeded from the same teeming brain that helped invent the tank and the seaplane and which foresaw the atom bomb. Chartwell Manor, Westerham, Kent, was one of the world’s first word processors. The whole house is a gigantic engine for the generation of text.

Downstairs there is a room with green lamps hanging from the ceiling, and maps on the wall, and a telephone exchange: and here he kept his researchers—about six of them at once, junior Oxford dons, research fellows, some of them destined for high academic honours. There they were, filleting, devilling, rootling around in books and documents in search of stuff that might be of use.

They were his Nibelung, his elves, the tinkling dwarves in the smithy of Hephaestus. Or, to compare them with their modern equivalent, they were Winston Churchill’s personal search engine—his Google. When they needed more books, they would pad down the corridor to the library—with its 60,000 mainly leather-bound volumes. This was his data bank. When he needed some fact or text, he would figuratively hit the ‘execute’ key, and summon them; and up they would go—only one at any time. They would go into the study, and there they would find him in the act of composition.

One of the many reasons for feeling overawed by Churchill is that he could not only discharge his duties as a minister of the Crown by day. He would then have a slap-up dinner, with champagne, wine and brandy. Only then, at 10 p.m., refreshed and very jovial, would he begin to write.

—

I KNOW THAT I speak for many journalists—and many others—when I say that it is perfectly possible to write after lunch, even if, or particularly if, you have had a bottle of wine. It is simply not possible to do this after dinner; not after booze. I don’t know anybody else who is capable of knocking out first-class copy after a long day and a drunken dinner.

There must have been something unique in his metabolic pathways; and what makes it even more astonishing is that most of the time he didn’t even write. He dictated. He would gather his thoughts and then, wreathed in tobacco and alcohol—and perhaps wearing his monogrammed slippers and the peculiar mauve velvet siren suit made for him by Turnbull and Asser—he would walk the wooden floorboards and growl out his massively excogitated sentences. And that was barely the beginning of the word-processing system.

Typists would struggle to keep up, but on he jawed, even into the small hours of the night, licking and champing his unlit cigar. Sometimes he would take them with him into his tiny and austere bedroom, and then while they blushed and squeaked he would disrobe and submerge himself in his sunken Shanks bath and continue to prose on, while they sat on the floor and pitter-pattered away on the specially muffled keyboards that he preferred.

The sheaves of typewritten paper he would then correct and amend by hand—and we have innumerable examples of his cursive blue-inked marginalia—and then the results would be typeset as they would appear on the page; and even that was not the end.

Now I pace across the room to an upright sloping bureau that is set against the wall, like a newspaper-reading slab in a club. It was here that he engaged in the final exercise of word-processing, a ritual that we would now perform effortlessly with our Microsoft programmes. He would fiddle with the text. He would switch clauses around for emphasis, he would swap one epithet for another and in general he would take the utmost delight in the process of polishing his efforts; and then he would send the whole lot off to be typeset again.

It was a fantastically expensive method of working, and yet it enabled Churchill to produce not just more words than Dickens, or more words than Shakespeare—but more words than Dickens and Shakespeare combined. Go into so many respectable middle-class English homes, especially of the older generation, and you will see them there, bulking out the bookshelves next to the Encyclopaedia Britannica: The World Crisis; A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; The Second World War; Marlborough—His Life and Times, and many others—and then ask yourself which ones have actually been read.

There are some people—faced with this vast quantity of text—who may be tempted to dismiss or downplay the virtuosity of Churchill as a writer. Indeed, he has always had his detractors. Evelyn Waugh, that inveterate Churchill-basher, said he was a ‘master of sham-Augustan prose’, with ‘no specific literary talent but a gift of lucid self-expression’. After reading Churchill’s life of his father Randolph, Waugh dismissed it as a ‘shifty barrister’s case, not a work of literature’.

By the late 1960s his historical gifts were being pummelled by the likes of J. H. Plumb, the Cambridge University pioneer of ‘social history’. ‘There is no discussion of the labouring classes and industrial technology,’ complained Plumb of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘He had an ignorance of economic, social and intellectual history of staggering proportions.’ His prose style was ‘curiously old-fashioned and somewhat out of place, like St Patrick’s cathedral on 5th avenue’.

As for his amazing achievement in winning the Nobel prize for literature, it is conventional to treat this as a joke—an embarrassing attempt by the Swedes to make up for their neutrality in the war. Even relatively sympathetic historians, such as Peter Clarke, have dismissed the possibility that there was any merit involved. ‘Rarely can an author’s writings have received less attention than those of the winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1953,’ he says. This is not just a little bit snooty, but surely untrue.

Look at the list of Nobel winners in the last century. Avant-garde Japanese playwrights. Marxist-feminist Latin Americans. Polish exponents of the concrete poem. All of them are no doubt meritorious in their way, but many of them are much less read than Churchill.

Why did Evelyn Waugh sneer at Churchill’s writings? Notice that he—Waugh—had actually tried to emulate Churchill in the 1930s, and got himself sent out to cover a war in Abyssinia. He produced Scoop, of course, one of the great stylistic landmarks of the twentieth century. But his reporting had nothing like the same journalistic impact as Churchill’s.

Is it that Waugh was a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and the reason was not just that Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty-five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that, for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point of comparison.

By 1900 he had not only written five books—some of which had been best-sellers—but he had become just about the highest-paid journalist in Britain. For his Boer War coverage he was paid £250 per month—the equivalent of £10,000 a month today. He was commissioned to write the life of his father in 1903, and given a staggering payment of £8,000. To give you the scale of those riches, consider that there were then only a million people in the country who had the privilege of paying income tax, and that was because they earned £160 per year.

These publishers didn’t pay him this kind of money because they liked his blue eyes. They paid him handsomely because he was popular with the public, and helped boost circulation, and the reason he was popular was that he wrote so well, with a rich and rollicking readability. He was a superb reporter. Try this account from the Morning Post of April 1900.

We take up the story as Churchill and his fellow mounted scouts are trying to beat the Boers to secure a kopje, a rocky outcrop in the South African plain.

It was from the very beginning a race, and recognised as such by both sides. As we converged I saw the five leading Boers, better mounted than their comrades, outpacing the others in a desperate resolve to secure the coign of vantage. I said, ‘We cannot do it’; but no one would admit defeat or leave the matter undecided. The rest is exceedingly simple.

We arrived at a wire fence 100 yards—to be accurate 120 yards—from the crest of the kopje, dismounted, and, cutting the wire, were about to seize the precious rocks when—as I had seen them in the railway cutting at Frere, grim, hairy and terrible—the heads and shoulders of a dozen Boers appeared; and how many more must be close behind them?

There was a queer, almost inexplicable, pause, or perhaps there was no pause at all; but I seem to remember much happening. First the Boers—one fellow with a long, drooping, black beard, and a chocolate-coloured coat, another with a red scarf round his neck. Two scouts cutting the wire fence stupidly. One man taking aim across his horse, and McNeill’s voice, quite steady: ‘Too late; back to the other kopje. Gallop!’

Then the musketry crashed out, and the ‘swish’ and ‘whirr’ of the bullets filled the air. I put my foot in the stirrup. The horse, terrified at the firing, plunged wildly. I tried to spring into the saddle; it turned under the animal’s belly. He broke away, and galloped madly off. Most of the scouts were already 200 yards off. I was alone, dismounted, within the closest range, and a mile at least from cover of any kind.

One consolation I had—my pistol. I could not be hunted down unarmed in the open as I had been before. But a disabling wound was the brightest prospect. I turned, and, for the second time in this war, ran for my life on foot from the Boer marksmen, and I thought to myself, ‘Here at last I take it.’ Suddenly, as I ran, I saw a scout. He came from the left, across my front; a tall man, with skull and crossbones badge, and on a pale horse. Death in Revelation, but life to me.

I shouted to him as he passed: ‘Give me a stirrup.’ To my surprise he stopped at once. ‘Yes,’ he said, shortly. I ran up to him, did not bungle in the business of mounting, and in a moment found myself behind him on the saddle.

Then we rode. I put my arms around him to catch a grip of the mane. My hand became soaked with blood. The horse was hard hit; but, gallant beast, he extended himself nobly. The pursuing bullets piped and whistled—for the range was growing longer—overhead.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ said my rescuer; ‘they won’t hit you.’ Then, as I did not reply, ‘My poor horse, oh, my poor horse; shot with an explosive bullet. The devils! But their hour will come. Oh, my poor horse!’

I said, ‘Never mind, you’ve saved my life.’ ‘Ah,’ he rejoined, ‘but it’s the horse I’m thinking about.’ That was the whole of our conversation.

Judging from the number of bullets I heard I did not expect to be hit after the first 500 yards were covered, for a galloping horse is a difficult target, and the Boers were breathless and excited. But it was with a feeling of relief that I turned the corner of the further kopje and found I had thrown double sixes again.

This isn’t Gibbon. This isn’t sham-Augustanism. It is more like something from the pages of Victorian adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard: crisp, punchy, full of the kind of wham-bam short sentences that keep the reader moving down the page. Churchill could do action reporting better than many of the greatest modern exponents—and he had the inestimable advantage of being able to use the first person.

He could do the Boy’s Own stuff. He could sound, when he chose, like an extract from The Wonder Book of Daring Deeds. But Churchill had so many more shots in his journalistic locker. He could do the meditative passages as well: the evils of Islamic fundamentalism; the horrors of war. Sometimes he was angry—and angry at his own side.

His description of the aftermath of Omdurman, where he made that famous charge, is one that lives in the eye and in the nostrils: the machine-gunned corpses lying three deep, men still living but already putrefying; men dying of thirst but crawling pathetically towards the Nile; here a man with one foot who has covered a mile in three days; here a man with no legs who is making 400 yards a day.

It has long been a theme of imperial writing—since the ancient Romans—to dwell tearfully on the sufferings of the subject peoples, and thereby to intensify the triumph of the conquering race. But Churchill takes it a stage farther, actively bashing the British authorities and their bland assurances. ‘The statement that “the wounded dervishes received every delicacy and attention” is so utterly devoid of truth that it passes into the realms of the ridiculous,’ he wrote.

He publicly abuses Kitchener for his conduct of the war. He slates him for desecrating the tomb of the Mahdi, and for keeping his head as a trophy—allegedly in a tin of kerosene. Churchill’s criticism was justified, but it was outrageous and hubristic.

Kitchener was his Commander-in-Chief, the man he had personally assisted, on the morning of the battle (though there is some doubt as to whether Kitchener knew that the officer he was talking to was the notorious Churchill). Kitchener was not some has-been; he was to go on and command British forces in the First World War.

Here he was—being rubbished by some jumped-up young officer in his own army. Churchill infuriated the generals because he seemed to be riding at once with the hare and the hounds. He was using his military status to get into the action—and then slagging them off. Mind you, Kitchener should have known better. Churchill had done it before—and everyone knew it.

This is how he repaid Sir Bindon Blood for his kindness in taking him on with the Malakand Field Force. He blasted the expedition in a letter to his mother, saying ‘financially it is ruinous, morally it is wicked, militarily it is an open question and politically it is a blunder’, and the important thing is that he said more or less the same in public. He ended his final Daily Telegraph article, a dispatch from Nowshera on 16 October 1897, with this gloomy analysis: ‘It is with regret that I do not see any sign of permanency in the settlements that have been made with the tribesmen . . . They have been punished, not subdued; rendered hostile, but not harmless. Their fanaticism remains unshaken, their barbarism unrelieved.’

How was that supposed to cheer up the Telegraph reader? At other points he is more gung-ho about the whole business; but no wonder his superior officers never recommended him for a Victoria Cross—in spite of all his ostentatious and sometimes lunatic bravery. No wonder Kitchener was so leery of having him along to the Sudan—only giving way, it seems, in 1898, when a friend of Jennie’s wrote to him, saying: ‘Hope you will take Churchill: guarantee he won’t write.’ Ha! That was a good one, eh?

Who knows what shameless undertakings Jennie gave to this woman, or to her friends in the British military—but her son passed the first and most important test of a journalist. He put the reader first.

He told the story as he saw it. He opened his heart. Of course, he wasn’t some anti-imperialist and anti-Western campaigner—some precursor of the famously anguished reporters of the Vietnam War. He was a passionate believer in empire. But that did not mean he could ignore what he saw: the superior fighting spirit and marksmanship of the Boers; the evil of the Maxim gun.

No one has ever unpicked the essential honesty of his accounts. Harold Nicolson was later to say of him, in another context, that it was among his many virtues that he ‘cannot really tell lies’. That verdict needs some qualification: he certainly sometimes stretched things in wartime. But in his journalism there was a genuine determination to get to the heart of things.

I say: stuff his snobbish detractors. When did Evelyn Waugh write a dispatch that was half as good as Churchill’s reports from Malakand or the Sudan? The reason Churchill has lasted, and the reason his phrases are still on people’s lips, is that he could deploy so many styles: not just the pseudo-Gibbonian periods, but Anglo-Saxon pith.

Some chicken, some neck. Fight them on the beaches. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

Often he is orotund and Augustan, but the phrases for which he is remembered are masterpieces of compression. He loved new words as much as he loved new machines. He was entranced, for instance, on first hearing the word ‘stunt’, imported from America. ‘Stunt. Stunt,’ he kept saying, rolling it around his mouth and announcing that he would use it at the earliest opportunity.

He was one of the great linguistic innovators of recent times. When world leaders meet to discuss a crisis they might have a SUMMIT at which they discuss the MIDDLE EAST or possibly the risk that Russia will create a new IRON CURTAIN. All three are neologisms either invented or championed by Churchill. Sometimes he could be Gibbonian; sometimes he was more of a funky Gibbon; but he was always fertile, and he was fast.

It began very early. Indeed, it is one of the myths about Churchill that he was always backward at school. Even at his prep school in Brighton, in 1884, he came top in classics. Take his first ever essay at Harrow, on the subject of Palestine in the time of John the Baptist. Here he is on the Pharisees. ‘Their faults were many. Whose faults are few? For let him with all the advantages of Christianity avouch that they are more wicked than himself, he commits the same crime of which he is just denouncing them.’

That is pure Churchill. The Pharisees were famously savage in their judgements of others; but if we judge them harshly we are ourselves pharisaical! Paradox! Even at the age of twelve or thirteen he is groping for epigrams. Long before he went to India and spent his long afternoons reading Gibbon and Macaulay, he had memorised 1,200 lines of the Lays of Ancient Rome.

He had all the rhythms of English imprinted on his silicon chip, and together with a vocabulary that has been estimated at 65,000 words—most people have a half or a third of that number—he had an unbeatable tool to serve all his interconnected purposes and ambitions.

It was a way of dramatising and publicising himself; he could operate his own spotlight. Unlike any other young hussar, he could ensure that there was a long and gripping account of his bravery, because he would supply it. And like his father, he could use his facility with words to deal with a financial position that was almost always precarious.

—

THE CHURCHILLS WERE not poor. That description would be absurd. But as ducal families go, they hadn’t much ready income—the fortune being more or less tied up in Blenheim. In spite of her long list of male admirers (her conquests have been reckoned to number 200, though Roy Jenkins thinks this number ‘suspiciously round’), Jennie was not especially good at converting their attentions into cash; and at one stage Churchill was forced to take legal action against his mother to stop her squandering his—and his brother Jack’s—inheritance.

Sure, his income from writing was vast by the standards of the day. His early success was continued, with average earnings of £12,883 between the years 1929 and 1937—about ten or twelve times what a prosperous professional could hope to make. But his outgoings were epic.

The bill from his wine merchant alone was three times the earnings of a male manual worker of the time. He had to pay for the upkeep of Chartwell, whose comforts included a Neronian circular outdoor pool that he kept heated, all year round, to a temperature of 75 degrees—a feat that necessitated a coke-fuelled boiler on the same scale as that of the House of Commons.

There is something gloriously unstingey about his approach to life: he once boasted that there had never been a time when he had not been able to order a bottle of champagne for himself and one for a friend. Sometimes, though, he was driven to all kinds of hack work, just to pay the bills. At one stage the News of the World commissioned him to condense and rehash a series of classic novels, under the title Great Stories of the World Retold.

It was not, as he himself confessed, an ‘artistic’ success. But what the hell: he was paid £333 per piece; or rather, he was paid £333, while his long-suffering secretary Eddie Marsh, who really did them, was paid £25. And then there were the awful depredations of the taxman—and here the scholarship of Peter Clarke has unearthed some spectacular manoeuvres.

As he was perfectly entitled to do, Churchill believed in keeping up the writing even when he was a minister of the Crown. He kept working on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for instance, even when he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924. But he nonetheless decided (or some brilliant accountant decided) that for tax purposes he had ceased, at the moment of putting on his father’s Chancellor’s robes, to be an ‘author’, and that the huge payments he was receiving—totalling £20,000—should be classified not as income but as ‘capital gains’.

Which had the preposterous result that he didn’t pay a penny of tax! Pol Roger all round.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, he would often say, quoting Dr Johnson; but of course in his case that was far from true. He also wrote because his temperament demanded it.

His creative-depressive personality meant that writing (or painting, or bricklaying) was a way of keeping the ‘black dog’ of depression at bay. He wrote for that sensation of release that comes with laying 200 bricks and writing 2,000 words a day.

Above all, he wrote his journalism and history and biography because for Winston Churchill writing was—to adapt Clausewitz on war—the continuation of politics by other means. These torrential literary efforts were his most potent weapons in his various campaigns, whether against Indian independence or against complacency about Hitler.

He could dramatise events and personalities in a way that was given to few other politicians, adding the emotion and colour that suited his cause. Neville Chamberlain fatefully said that Czechoslovakia was a faraway country of which we know little. Churchill had the literary and imaginative skill to bring the tragedy home—even to people who had never thought much about Czechoslovakia at all.

By the time he came into Downing Street in May 1940 he had written and read so much history as to have a unique understanding of events, to see them in context, and to see what England must do. J. H. Plumb mocked what he saw as Churchill’s simplistic understanding and complacent belief in British greatness.

‘The old Whig claptrap echoes in chapter after chapter,’ he said—and by that he means to attack the central idea that guided Churchill all his life: that there was something special about the rise of England, and of liberty in England: the process by which freedoms were won from the Crown, the growth of a sovereign and democratic Parliament.

Huh, said J. H. Plumb: ‘The past is a pasteboard pageant that indicates nothing and does not signpost the future.’ Well, I look at the world today, and I think Plumb is wrong about that. Look at the fringes of the former Soviet Union, look at what is happening in the countries of the Arab Spring—I think most people would say that those ideals are still being fought for and are still worth fighting for.

It was greatly to the advantage of this country and the world that Churchill was able to articulate that vision with such confidence. He knew what England, for all her faults, had given the world—and that gave him his certainty of eventual victory.

There are two final ways in which his literary exertions made Churchill the only man for 1940. As even Plumb admits, in his study of Marlborough, there is something orchestral about Churchill’s ability to deploy and coordinate his material: switching from Holland to Paris to London and to the Seven Seas. He knew instinctively which subject needed attention and when, while driving the central narrative along. Which was more or less how he ran the war.

Finally, let us go back to that figure in the study in Chartwell, pacing up and down and dictating to Mrs Pearman or Eddie Marsh. It takes prodigious mental effort to assemble the right words in your head, and then ensure that they are loaded on to the conveyor belt of the tongue so as to emerge in an order fit for printing.

Surely it was that endlessly repeated oral discipline which improved him not just as a writer but as a speaker. We may not read enough of his books today, but it was his speeches which galvanised the nation.

As we shall now see, the greatest orator of the modern era did not always speak fluently or well.