The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 7

HE MOBILISED THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

We join our hero on his feet in the House of Commons. He’s rhythmically thumping out a speech he will never forget. It’s an occasion that will be imprinted in his memory—the time he found a new way to leave his listeners breathless and stunned.

It is 22 April 1904, and the young thruster is at the top of his game. He is twenty-nine, pink in the cheek, with a downy corona of gingery-brown hair still adhering to his head. He almost bursts with brio. This year alone he has spoken dozens of times, yo-yoing up and down to catch the eye of the Speaker on debates ranging from the Army Estimates to the Brussels Sugar Convention to Chinese Indentured Labour; and he is starting to get a bit of a name.

His portrait has been regularly published in the papers, complete with admiring captions. He is seen pounding his fist into his palm, or with hands on hips, or making his famous double-handed chopping motion—and with his impudent attacks on his own party, and with the Tories seemingly swirling towards the electoral oubliette, he is a man on the up. The Liberals are about to find him a seat; he scents the prospect of office . . .

So he slashes away at the Tories on the benches in front of him—as an energetic rambler might thwack a row of thistles gone to seed. The Tories are a ‘sham’, he says. They have forgotten the precepts of Tory Democracy, he tells Balfour, who has already spoken in the debate—and one can imagine Balfour listening and looking inscrutable from beneath his vulturine eyelids.

Around him the Tories are hissing and scratching and fitfully trying to put him off his stroke. It is the Labour benches which are cheering him—and not surprisingly, in view of the kind of thing he is saying.

This isn’t anything a Tory would today recognise as Conservatism. It would send Margaret Thatcher wild. In fact there isn’t even a modern Labour government that would agree to the kind of thing that Churchill seems to be advocating. He is making a case to allow big groups of striking workers to go to the homes of those who are not on strike—and effectively to bully them into joining in. He wants unions to be protected from legal action, so that they can’t be fined even if their members break the law in the course of their agitations.

It’s not so much socialism as neo-anarcho-syndicalism—though before any of today’s Tories get too upset, they should remember the context: Churchill was speaking when poverty was far deeper, and when the working man could still suffer oppression at the hands of the bosses, of a kind that is unknown today. Churchill has been going for forty-five minutes, and going well.

He comes to the climax of his remarks, and lambasts the entire House of Commons for its flagrant lack of proper class representation. Where are the working men? demands this scion of Blenheim. Look at the influence of the company directors, the learned professions, the service members, the railway, landed and liquor interests, he says—and we can imagine his ducal arm sweeping round to take in the balefully staring Tories.

It must be admitted, he says, that the influence of the labouring classes is ludicrously small. ‘And it rests with those who . . .’ he says; and then he stops.

A few eyes turn enquiringly his way. With whom does it rest? What is it that rests? What rests on whom? The House waits.

A whole second elapses. Churchill tries again. ‘It rests with those who . . .’ But by now it is clear that something is up.

It seems he is the victim, ironically, of some kind of mental sabotage—a sudden wildcat industrial action in his memory.

In the vast cargo hold of his brain the baggage handlers have gone on strike. The conveyor belt of his tongue flaps vacantly. No words come out. He tries again, but it is no use. He can’t for the life of him remember what he was going to say next.

For three whole minutes he stands there, while the Tories cachinnate, and the opposition benches try to make noises of sympathy. Three minutes! The House of Commons at the best of times is an unforgiving ecosystem: lose your way for just a few seconds, and you will feel the scorn of the Chamber. By now Churchill has been unable to pronounce a word for longer than you have been reading this chapter.

This is disaster, a living death. People are starting to whisper and look at the floor. This is what happened to Randolph, they say; poor young chap, going the way of his father—overwhelmed by a horrible premature senility. At last he sits down. ‘I thank the House for having listened to me,’ he says in despair, and covers his head with his hands.

The following day the papers are full of Mr Churchill’s shipwreck, and a famous nerve specialist is called upon to diagnose the cause. It is a case, says the doctor, of ‘defective cerebration’. Well, there can’t be a person in the world who hasn’t at some time suffered from defective cerebration—a useful-sounding disorder—but that wasn’t really the problem with Winston Churchill that day.

If we have one unshakeable and instinctive conviction about him, it is that he was the greatest public speaker of the last hundred years; definitely the greatest orator Britain has produced, and perhaps even knocking Martin Luther King off the global number-one spot. He is the only politician whose speeches and speaking style can still be parodied by people of all ages.

Ah, Churchill! we say, and we jut our chins and recite something, in that familiar sing-song growl, about fighting them on the beaches. He stands in relation to oratory as Shakespeare stands to the writing of plays: the top performer, a mixture of Pericles and Abraham Lincoln with a small but irrefutable dash of Les Dawson.

We think of him as somehow supernaturally gifted, as if he had sprung from a union of Zeus and Polyhymnia the very Muse of Rhetoric. I am afraid we are only partly right.

The truth is that he was a genius in his own way, but he wasn’t really a natural. He was no Lloyd George; he was no Luther King, at least in the sense that he could not improvise as some born speakers can; and when he spoke it certainly did not pour from his full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Churchill’s speeches were a triumph of effort, and preparation, in which phrases were revised and licked into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs. Dancing before him like a will-o’-the-wisp was always the ghostly luminescence of his father’s reputation, and as he grows up we can feel him straining and yearning in emulation.

We catch him at Harrow, speaking up noisily in a debate with senior boys. As a Sandhurst subaltern, he makes a passionate defence of the right of some prostitutes to frequent the bar of the Empire in Leicester Square. ‘Ladies of the Empire,’ says the nineteen-year-old virgin, rising on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, ‘I stand for liberty!’

It is not immediately obvious why this subject—the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade—should have prompted the first public speech by Britain’s greatest statesman.

There is no evidence of any reward for his intervention, carnal or otherwise. The answer is surely that it was a jape. He wanted to draw attention to himself—and he succeeded. The speech was reported in the papers.

By the age of twenty-three he thought himself a sufficiently experienced orator to write an essay on the subject called ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’. This is a splendidly portentous and self-confident document—never published in his lifetime—in which he seems to be analysing what he obviously considers to be his own success. ‘Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience,’ he says—a point that may not be unconnected with his lisp, and what he claimed was an obstructive ligament in his tongue, unknown to the anatomy of any other human being.

He goes on to describe the effects of his prescribed methods on the human herd: ‘The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned all direction.’ That is certainly a trick that some orators have been able to perform. That was the skill that fate had given his greatest adversary—the German dictator against whom he would have to wage rhetorical war in 1940 and beyond.

But was it really Churchill’s skill? Did his audience quiver like aspens? Were they convulsed by emotions they were unable to control? His maiden speech in the Commons is generally held to have been a success; and yet at least one observer thought he looked a bit weedy—‘scholarly and limp’. People inevitably drew comparisons with Randolph, and they were not always kind.

‘Mr Churchill does not inherit his father’s voice—save for the slight lisp—or his father’s manner. Accent, address, appearance do not help him,’ said one review. Another journalist noted, in an essentially friendly piece, that ‘Mr Churchill and oratory are not neighbours yet. Nor do I think it likely they ever will be.’

This kind of criticism was perhaps frustrating for Churchill. He took enormous pride in his speeches, and in his novel Savrola—written when he was in India—he paints a gloriously self-aggrandising picture of his (aka Savrola’s) methods of composition.

What was there to say? Successive cigarettes had been mechanically consumed. Amid the smoke he saw a peroration, which would cut deep into the hearts of a crowd; a high thought, a fine simile, expressed in that correct diction which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate, and appeals to the most simple; something to lift their minds from the material cares of life and to awake sentiment. His ideas began to take the form of words, to group themselves into sentences; he murmured to himself; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated. Ideas succeeded one another, as a stream flows swiftly by and the light changes on its waters. He seized a piece of paper and began hurriedly to pencil notes. That was a point; could not tautology accentuate it? He scribbled down a rough sentence, scratched it out, polished it, and wrote it again. The sound would please their ears, the sense improve and stimulate their minds. What a game it was! His brain contained the cards he had to play, the world the stakes he played for.

As he worked, the hours passed away. The housekeeper entering with his luncheon found him silent and busy; she had seen him thus before and did not venture to interrupt him. The untasted food grew cold upon the table, as the hands of the clock moved slowly round marking the measured tread of time. Presently he rose, and, completely under the influence of his own thoughts and language, began to pace the room with short rapid strides, speaking to himself in a low voice and with great emphasis. Suddenly he stopped, and with a strange violence his hand descended on the table. It was the end of the speech. . . .

A dozen sheets of note paper, covered with phrases, facts, and figures, were the result of the morning’s work. They lay pinned together on the table, harmless insignificant pieces of paper; and yet Antonio Molara, President of the Republic of Laurania, would have feared a bombshell less. Nor would he have been either a fool or a coward.

I like this sketch, because I am sure it shows his early speech-making methods; and it shows the absolute primacy of his interest in language. It is the words which count, and the pleasure of assembling them to get the rhythm he wants, and the effect that he wants.

It’s all about the music of the speech, more than the logic or the substance. It’s the sizzle not the sausage.

And that was the charge against him—the fatal suggestion that he did not quite believe what he was saying. There is a very simple reason why he crashed and burned that day in April 1904. He was not speaking from the heart; he was not speaking from profound and intimate knowledge of the matter acquired over years of dealing with trade unions.

He was speaking from memory. He had written the speech in the Savrola manner, and then he had learned it parrot fashion, word for word. And after forty-five minutes of sledging from the Tories he just forgot what came next—or possibly succumbed to some subconscious repulsion at the socialist sentiments he was expressing.

He never made that mistake again. He kept his sheaf of typewritten notes, pinned together, and had no shame whatever in peering down at them through his black horn-rims. Churchill’s speeches were Ciceronian in their essentially literary nature: they were declamations of text.

He had great triumphs in the Commons—see his speeches as Chancellor, compendious and lucid expositions of economics as he understood it—and yet for most of his career his listeners would report that there was something missing. Yes, he was good at the verbal pyrotechnics: but where was the feeling, where was the truth, where was the authenticity? Lloyd George said in 1936 that Churchill was ‘a rhetorician and not an orator. He thought only of how a phrase sounded and not how it might influence crowds’. In 1909 the Liberal MP Edwin Montagu wrote to Asquith: ‘Winston is not yet Prime Minister, and even if he were he carries no guns. He delights and tickles, he even enthuses the audience he addresses—but when he has gone, so also has the memory of what he has said.’

Even his keenest supporters saw this flaw in his make-up. Lord Beaverbrook was one of those who helped propel him to power in 1940; but in 1936 he observed that ‘he lacks the proper note of sincerity for which the country listens’.

As so often, Churchill was more than willing to acknowledge his own defects. He knew that he got carried away with words, and he admitted it. ‘I do not care so much for the principles I advocate as for the impression which my words produce,’ he once said.

That is perhaps how he might now be remembered—as an old-fashioned and hyperbolical merchant of bombast; the kind of speaker who thinks it droll to refer to an untruth as a ‘terminological inexactitude’; or to remark, with unthinking and jaw-dropping prejudice, that the Hindus were a ‘foul race protected by their pullulation from the doom that is their due’.

He might be thought of as a man whose love of lush language exceeded his good sense, who lacked that vital note of sincerity—and therefore who lacked the final power to persuade.

All that changed in 1940, because by then events themselves had reached their own pitch of hyperbole. The crisis facing Britain attained the exalted level of Churchill’s speeches. At once he seemed neither over the top nor archaic in his manner, because he was required to evoke ancient instincts—the deep desire of the islanders to beat off an invader; and the danger was so intense and so obvious that there could be no question about his sincerity.

Churchill responded to history with some of the most sublime speeches ever made. It is not that they were necessarily masterpieces of oratorical theatre. Set Hitler and Churchill side by side; look at the recordings of their speeches on YouTube—and it is obvious that for sheer demagogic power the Nazi leader is way out in front.

It is true that he used Goebbels as his warm-up act, whipping the audience to an anti-Semitic frenzy; and he used tricks of staging: searchlights, music, torches, all designed to accentuate the mood. But that wasn’t the secret. Look at Hitler, if you can bear it, and see his hypnotic quality. First the long, excruciating pause before he speaks; and then see how he begins so softly—with his arms folded—and how he uncoils them as his voice starts to rise, and then the awful jabbing fluidity of his gestures, perfectly timed to intensify the crescendos of his speech.

He has some paper on the table in front: but he hardly refers to it. He seems to be speaking entirely without notes. See the effect on his audience: the happy beams on the faces of the young women, the shouts from the men, and the way their arms rise as one to salute him like the fronds of some huge undersea creature.

Listen to the way he brings them all to their collective climax: with short verbless phrases—grammatically meaningless, but full of suggestive power. It was to become a highly influential technique, copied, among others, by Tony Blair.

Look at good old Churchill, on the other hand. There he is—notes in hand, organised like a series of haikus on the page, though every one is a full and grammatical sentence, complete with main verb. His gestures seem wooden by comparison, and slightly mistimed: now and then an arm thrown out in a disjointed way.

As for the delivery: well, the sad thing is that we don’t have his Commons performances, and must make do with recordings he made for broadcast. There is plenty of growl—but he certainly neither rants nor raves, and if anything some of his phrases have a downward slide, a dying fall. Perhaps he gave things a bit more oomph in the Commons, but you can see why he didn’t always get good reviews.

In fact, as Richard Toye has recently shown in his excellent survey The Roar of the Lion, it is a bit of a myth to think that the country ‘rallied behind Churchill’. Here is our old friend Evelyn Waugh, taking the opportunity of his death in 1965 to put the boot in again. ‘Rallied the nation indeed! I was a serving soldier in 1940. How we despised his orations.’

Churchill was a ‘radio personality’ who had outlived his prime, said Waugh. Some people complained that he was drunk, or tired, or too old, or that he was trying too hard for effect. Toye has unearthed the verdict of A. N. Gerrard, a clerk from Manchester, who said of Churchill that ‘he gives the impression, when he speaks, of knowing he is expected to “deliver the goods” and of endeavouring to make his speeches of such quality that they will be handed down to posterity, as in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for instance. I think he fails miserably.’

Toye finds soldiers listening to him in hospital wards, and shouting ‘fucking liar’ or ‘fucking bullshit’. At the end of one of his radio addresses, the aunt of a diarist by the name of M. A. Pratt said, ‘He’s no speaker, is he?’

There were people who disliked him for being too Tory, or too anti-communist, or too bellicose. They gave their opinions freely to a government-financed social research exercise called Mass Observation—and it is when one thinks of all these dissenters, innocently knocking the great war leader in the country’s hour of maximum peril, that one is tempted to turn Toye’s argument on its head.

Surely it doesn’t really detract from Churchill’s reputation that he had robust criticism from a sizeable slice of the British public. What was the war all about—at least, according to him? What were we fighting for?

Churchill’s whole pitch to the nation was that we were fighting for a series of old English freedoms—and high up among those freedoms was the right to say what you think of the government, without the fear of arbitrary and extrajudicial arrest. Of course some people found some of his speeches irritating. But that is true of virtually every great speech ever made.

Someone might have reminded the waspish A. N. Gerrard, who compared Churchill unfavourably to Lincoln, of what The Times had said in 1863. ‘The ceremony at Gettysburg was rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor president Lincoln.’

The reality is surely that the bashers and the knockers were there in numbers, and quite rightly, in a way that the Nazis would never have allowed. But look at the statistics at the end of Toye’s book: the massive audiences for his broadcasts, the stratospheric approval ratings. People were buoyed, bucked, energised by what he said.

They felt the nape of their necks prickle and tears in their eyes, and when Vita Sackville-West heard him one night on the radio she felt a shiver down her spine—not of disgust or embarrassment, but of excitement and the knowledge that he was right.

He found in the war the words to speak directly to people’s hearts—in a way that had perhaps eluded him in his previous career. He didn’t always tell the exact truth. At one stage, said Harold Nicolson, his estimates for the size of the British navy included some steamers on the Canadian lakes.

Group Captain A. G. Talbot was responsible for the anti-U-boat campaign at sea. He got the following response, when he had the effrontery to question Churchill’s statistics for the sinking of the German submarines: ‘There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot. You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.’ But in the main people felt he was straight with them, and certainly frank about the challenge facing the country.

They liked his jokes, because laughter gave them release from the anxieties of their lives. His fellow MP Chips Channon was among those who thought his ‘levity’ was out of place—but the public generally enjoyed the way he called the Nazis ‘Narzis’ and Hitler ‘Herr Schickelgruber’ and Pétain ‘Peetayne’. Above all he spoke to people in language that was instantly understandable. Harold Nicolson summed it up in 1943. ‘The winning formula was the combination of great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational. Of all his devices it is the one that never fails.’

He was going back to one of the key precepts of his essay of 1897, on the Scaffolding of Rhetoric—the use of short words. We hear the youthful Churchill speaking down the decades to the old war leader, whispering in the wrinkly ear of his sixty-five-year-old avatar.

‘Audiences prefer short homely words of common usage,’ he says. ‘The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understanding than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek.’

It is a lesson that infuses the great speeches of the war. If you look at the manuscript of the ‘finest hour’ speech, you can see that he has actually crossed out ‘liberated’ and put ‘freed’ in its place.

For a perfect example of that combination mentioned by Nicolson, the swoop from the lofty to the plain, look at that immortal line about the Battle of Britain. It is 20 August 1940, and the war for the skies is at its height. In fact, the point has come where Britain has no reserves left; virtually every single aircraft is up there trying to fight the Germans off.

General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, his military secretary, described being with Churchill. ‘I felt sick with fear. As the evening closed in the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers. Churchill’s first words were, “Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.” After about five minutes he leaned forward and said, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”’

Now Churchill was not just asking for silence so that the emotion could wash over him, but so that he could do what all good journalists do in such circumstances: he wanted to verbalise and articulate his feeling.

We begin with the elevated diction—‘the field of human conflict’ is a pompous and typically Churchillian circumlocution for war. Then we go to those short Anglo-Saxon zingers. Look how much work those six words are made to do.

‘So much’. What is this thing that is owed in such quantity? He means gratitude: for protecting England, for warm beer, suburbia, village cricket, democracy, public libraries, everything that makes the country special and that had been placed in mortal peril by the Luftwaffe.

‘So many’. Who are the many? He means the whole country, and those beyond England who depend on her to survive; the subjugated French; the Americans; everyone who hopes that Hitler will not win.

‘So few’. It is a very ancient idea that there is a particular heroism in the struggle of few against many. We few, we happy few, says Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in Churchill’s mental hard drive there are the 1,200 lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, including the speech of Horatius Cocles, who held off the Etruscan hordes. ‘In yon straight path a thousand may well be stopped by three,’ he cried.

In this case every listener understood him to be referring to the tiny number of the RAF pilots—relative to the millions of people then under arms—who went up into the skies, and so often failed to come back, but who determined the course of the war.

It is a perfect epigram, in that you can remember it as soon as you hear it, tightly compressed; and it is rhythmically perfect. To use technical rhetorical terms, it is a classic descending tricolon with anaphora, or repetition of key words. Each leg, or colon, is shorter than the last.

(Never in the field of human conflict has)

So much been owed by

So many to

So few.

If you want a classic ascending tricolon, then try his peerless line from 1942, after the victory at El Alamein.

Now this is not the end.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

When he uncorks this one at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, you hear his audience laugh with pleasure and surprise. That is because in this case the last colon is varied by chiasmus, in that he swaps ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ so as to make the mind race and, again, to create an instant quotation that is entirely etymologically Anglo-Saxon.

I dwell on these rhetorical tricks, because it is important to recognise that all great speeches to some extent depend on them. Since the days of Gorgias the sophist there have been those who have argued that all rhetoric is suspect, that it makes the weaker argument the stronger, that it bamboozles the audience.

If you listen to Hitler on YouTube, you will find him making a speech that is distressingly similar—in theme and structure—to Churchill’s ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech. ‘We shall never slacken, never tire, never lose faith’, etc., etc. And yet you have only to make the comparison to watch it disintegrate.

What does Hitler want? Conquest and revenge. What emotions do his speeches provoke? Paranoia and hate. What does Churchill want? Well, that is a good question—because, apart from survival, there is a wonderful vagueness about his teleology, uplifting though it is.

He wants ‘broader lands and better days’, he says, or ‘broad sunlit uplands’. He likes the idea of a ‘definitely larger period’. A larger period? What’s that? Sounds like something to do with obesity. And what does he mean by ‘broader lands’? Norfolk?

I think he doesn’t really know what he wants (a problem that was to become politically acute once the war was over), except a general sense of benignity and happiness and peace and the preservation of the world he grew up in. As for the emotions that his speeches provoked—they were entirely healthy.

Yes, there were plenty of sceptics. But for millions of people—sophisticated and unsophisticated—he deployed his rhetorical skills to put courage in their hearts and to make them believe they could fight off a threat more deadly than any they had ever known.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.

The world was lucky he was there to give the roar. His speeches were to earn him an undying reputation, and undying popularity. He loved that applause, of course; and to some extent making a speech was like his constant search for physical excitement.

He wanted the risk, the exposure, the adrenalin—and the acclaim. Many people are made like that, and many are performers who exist only for their public. They are loved by the multitude; and often they turn out to be monsters in private.

That was emphatically not the case with Churchill. He not only took the wider public with him, he earned the devotion of those who were closest.