The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 22

THE MEANING OF HIS NAME TODAY

If you were ever tempted to doubt the strength of the love between Winston and Clementine Churchill, you should look at the countless notes and billets-doux they sent each other all their married life. On the day of her seventy-eighth birthday in 1963, he wrote as follows:

My darling one,

This is only to give you

my fondest love and kisses

a hundred times repeated

——————————-

I am a pretty dull and

paltry scribbler; but my

stick as it writes carries my

heart along with it.

Your ever & always

W

He was now eighty-eight, and in other letters he lamented the passing of that old facility of expression—and recorded his amazement at what he now saw as the speed of others. He still went to the House of Commons, though other MPs were shocked by how frail he had become. It was only after quite some pressure from Clementine that he agreed finally not to seek re-election, and on 24 July 1964 he went to the House for the last time.

When you think of the punishment he had given his mortal frame—the toxins he had ingested all his life—you can see in that very longevity his essential character: his instinct to hold on, fight on, never give in. But he also knew that his work was done, and that his career was beginning to merge with history. As he said to his daughter Diana, ‘My life is over, but it is not yet ended.’ He liked to be gloomy about his accomplishments—possibly because he was fishing for compliments. Really he had no right to such gloom.

In those days his legacy was everywhere, his very name a meme that spread through all levels of society. In that year students were already graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge. Communities in Britain were voluntarily anointing some of the 430 roads, closes, squares and cul-de-sacs that bear his name to this day. When he left the Commons in 1964 a young John Winston Lennon was celebrating the sale of 1.5 million copies of a record called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

Lennon had been born in October 1940—the year of the country’s maximum peril and Churchill’s supreme leadership. For more than ten years Churchill had shared the House of Commons with a man who in 1964 became Defence Secretary—Denis Winston Healey. Healey had been born in 1917 to Churchill fans in Mottingham, south-east London—and he entered the House of Commons in 1952 with the unique distinction of having been named at birth after the man who was then still serving as Prime Minister; which tells us something about the sheer span of Churchill’s life.

Can anyone beat Healey’s record of being named after Churchill in 1917, when he was only forty-two? Step forward Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, who was born in Manchester in 1908—the year Churchill fought the North-West Manchester by-election; the year he entered the cabinet at the age of thirty-three, as President of the Board of Trade, and began his campaign to create Labour Exchanges and end the exploitation of child labour.

Then across post-war Britain and the world there were hundreds if not thousands of young Winstons—many of them Afro-Caribbeans—who were surely named with the war leader in mind.

There are Churchillian eponyms to be found in great works of literature—Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984. Of famous cinematic Winstons we might mention Pulp Fiction’s superbly confident Mr Winston Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel, who is called upon to clear up the mess when John Travolta accidentally shoots someone’s brains out in the back of a car.

There are Churchill night clubs and bars and pubs—about twenty pubs in Britain bear his name and pug-like visage, far more than bear the name of any other contemporary figure.

Sometimes it is easy to understand the semiotic function of the name: you can see why a pub-owner might want to go for Churchill. He is the world’s greatest advertisement for the benefits of alcohol. But why is there a Churchill escort agency? And what do they offer, apart from blood, toil, tears and sweat?

The other day I was cycling through Harefield in the rural far west of London, and I came across Churchill’s Barbers. I looked inside, and saw a tattooed chap with an earring having the back of his neck shaved, and an oil painting of Churchill in a hat. Why, I asked myself, would you fill a little barbershop with pictures of Winston Churchill? He had many outstandingly good points—but he was not exactly famous for his hairstyle; quite the reverse.

Then it occurred to me, of course, that there are millions of men who have a haircut not unlike Sir Winston’s. Oi Baldy! is the message of Churchill the Barbers: you can be a hero, too. Come inside and have a proper trim of what is left.

Whatever the Churchill brand is intended to signify—and it means all kinds of things—the associations are mainly positive; but they are not exclusively positive.

How many babies would be called Winston in Britain today? The value of his name and brand is strong, but it has perceptibly shifted, and that is because in the fifty years since he died there has been a more or less continuous assault on his reputation. One by one they have fired their missiles in his general direction.

Some of the artillery fire has been wielded by right-wingers like David Irving, who have accused him not just of unnecessarily waging war on Hitler, but of colluding in such crimes as the bombing of Coventry (untrue) and assassinating the Polish leader Władysław Sikorski (rubbish).

In recent years, however, the most damaging attacks have come from well-meaning people who object that Churchill’s speeches, letters and articles are riddled with ideas and language that today consign him to a leper colony of rank political incorrectness. He is accused of being a racist, a sexist, an imperialist, a Zionist, an Aryan and Anglo-Saxon supremacist and a believer in eugenics; and as he recedes from us in time the unpasteurised Churchill can seem a bit ripe for our delicate modern taste.

If his words are cleverly filleted, they can indeed be made to appear unacceptable (‘All my daughter’s friends think he is a racist’, one London mother told me); and there is enough truth in the charges against him to cause some embarrassment to the educational establishment. When the Department of Education sent out a commemorative VE Day video to all schools in 1995, they managed to give Churchill only fourteen seconds in a thirty-five-minute history of the Second World War.

There are all sorts of defences against those who seek to apply modern standards to Churchill. He did have what is now considered to be a racist interpretation of the difference between one society and another; but he hated the mistreatment of anyone of any race. See his anger at Kitchener’s butchery of the Dervishes; remember his rage at the Lugards, and their disdainful and murderous treatment of the natives of West Africa. He didn’t believe that the white man should hold the whip hand, as if by genetic right. He believed in merit.

As Colonial Secretary in 1921 he announced that within the British Empire ‘there should be no barrier of race, colour or creed which should prevent any man from reaching any station if he is fitted for it’. It must also be said that his views on racial distinctions—though widely attacked—were by no means exceptional for a man born in 1874; and there were plenty of others who consciously or unconsciously held the same sort of opinions.

Sometimes he delighted in skewering the hypocrisy of his opponents. In the middle of the war Roosevelt attempted to wind him up at a White House lunch, by seating him next to Mrs Ogden Reid, a publisher and fierce campaigner for the independence of India.

This woman duly asked him: ‘What are you going to do about those wretched Indians?’

Churchill replied: ‘Before we proceed further let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?’

Churchill one, Mrs Ogden Reid nil, I feel.

Those who continue to bash him for being out of date on race might also remember that the USA continued with a system of active racial segregation, of a kind he would never have tolerated in Britain, until the late 1960s.

Yes, it is also true that he said some things that now sound very sinister about eugenics and the need to sterilise the feeble-minded. As a young minister in 1910 he wrote to Asquith warning that ‘the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate’.

But again, he was by no means alone: Bills for the segregation of ‘morons’ were overwhelmingly passed in Parliament. It was an age when people were themselves feeble-minded on the subject of feeble-mindedness, and had a very poor understanding of psychology and genetics.

Perhaps it gives a flavour of the context if I point out that in 1927 the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes recorded a judgement agreeing with the sterilisation of a woman called Carrie Buck, who had been labelled feeble-minded, along with her mother and daughter. ‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough,’ he said. Between 1907 and 1981 the USA forcibly sterilised 65,000 people.

Churchill may indeed have said such things, a decade or two previously: but—thankfully—he never actually put these whacky ideas into practice.

And yes, it was true that by today’s standards he was pretty much a male chauvinist pig—at least ideologically; no doubt of that.

Nancy Astor was the first woman to enter the House of Commons, and when in 1919 she asked him why he was so cold towards her, he gave this psychologically rich reply: ‘I feel you have come into my bathroom and I have only a sponge with which to defend myself.’ There speaks an alumnus of an all-male English public school.

There was a truly terrible moment in March 1944, when the House was debating Butler’s Education Bill, and a female Conservative MP called Thelma Cazalet-Keir had successfully moved an amendment calling for equal pay for women teachers. Churchill decided to use this as a pretext for humiliating his backbench critics. He turned the matter into a confidence vote—which few would want to oppose—and forced his MPs to overturn equal pay for women teachers by 425 votes to 23.

He was rightly pilloried at the time; and yet no one could accuse him of being a misogynist—he loved clever women (Pamela, Violet); and he got there in the end. He redeemed himself when one of his last parliamentary measures, announced at the beginning of 1955, was equal pay for women in teaching, the civil service and local government. As he said to Jock Colville in 1958, when proposing that women should be admitted on equal terms to Churchill College, Cambridge, ‘When I think of what women did in the war, I feel sure they deserve to be treated equally.’ (The college eventually admitted women in 1972.)

You can criticise Churchill for being an imperialist and a Zionist—as he certainly was, both—but a fair-minded person would have to admit that he supported both these projects because he conceived that they entailed the advance of civilisation. His language on India sometimes seems unhinged (‘Gandhi ought to be bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant . . .’); but you have to bear in mind that he saw the Raj as a restraint on barbarous practices—suttee, bride-price, the shunning of the Untouchables, and so on.

Those who despise the empire have to ask themselves whether they hate it more than they hate, say, slavery, or female genital mutilation. In Churchill’s imperialism there was much more than just the extended egotism of the super-patriot. He was unlike so many other politicians, of every age, in that I think he was at heart a genuine idealist. He believed in the greatness of Britain and her civilising mission, and that led him to say some things that seem quite bonkers today.

All these embarrassing quotations have been picked over for years by the anti-Churchillians. Their bones lie bleached and shocking in the corner of the picture. But they are only a part of a vast and glorious landscape; and they have done nothing to put off politicians from every part of the spectrum, who have tried to ape him, to invoke him or somehow to channel his genius—from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher to Kwame Nkrumah to Fidel Castro to Nelson Mandela.

That is because the story of Churchill is bigger and more inspiring than a mere political creed. It is about the indomitability of the human spirit. He may seem horribly unfashionable in his views to us today, but in his essential character he is a source of eternal—and perhaps growing—inspiration.

Look at the hordes of visitors tramping through the gardens of Chartwell: 212,769 of them in 2013—a record. With the greatest respect to that famous house, it is not an architectural masterpiece. If you were being mean, you might say it was rather dumpy in style, and heavy on the red brick. The grounds are rolling and pleasant enough, but not a patch on those of most stately homes.

People go to Chartwell because it is redolent of the spirit of Churchill; and that is why they go to the underground Churchill war rooms by the Cabinet Office—a record half a million last year, 38 per cent more than the previous year. They go to feel the almost physical presence of the former Prime Minister: to see the camp bed he used for his power naps, the map of Britain’s coastal defences in front of him, the cigar like a strange brown coprolite in the ashtray beside him.

They feel his greatness and his bravery in that moment of desperation; and that is why not a single one of the revisionists has really got a shot on target. Year after year the little puffs of their gunfire explode around him, and he sails through it all on his white pony, waving his hat in the air, as serene and unscathed as when he came through the musketfire of Malakand.

—

I WAS THINKING about this quality of Churchill’s—this megalopsychia, greatness of heart—when I remembered that there was an aspect of his creative life that we haven’t properly discussed. So one hot afternoon I decided to drive down to Chartwell again, to join the crowds of pilgrims.

As I sat in the South London traffic I remembered a story about how he would leave London at 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday, and he would collect the typist and Rufus the poodle, and every week he would stop to buy the Evening Standard at the same place by Crystal Palace. Every time the vendor would step forward and salute, and he would refuse to accept any payment; so every time Churchill would give him the remains of whatever cigar he happened to be smoking (you will recall that another beneficiary of his stubs was the gardener at Chartwell; the poor fellow died of cancer). Is there any politician in the world today who could pay someone in half-chewed cigars?

When we arrived at Chartwell we went straight through the grounds, past his vast round swimming pool, to the studio by the ponds.

Churchill got into painting in 1915, in his state of post-Gallipoli gloom, at a rented house called Hoe Farm near Godalming. He later described how he took it up, in a passage that shows his journalistic flair for making something wonderful out of not very much . . .

Some experiments one Sunday on the country with the children’s paint-box led me to procure the next morning a complete outfit for painting in oils.

Having bought the colours, an easel, and a canvas, the next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto. But after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. There could be no doubt that blue paint mixed with white should be put on the top part of the canvas. One really does not need to have had an artist’s training to see that. It is a starting-point open to all.

So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint in the palette with a very small brush, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean upon the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response. At that moment the loud approaching sound of a motor car was heard in the drive. From this chariot there stepped swiftly and lightly none other than the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery. ‘Painting! But what are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush, the big one.’

Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette, clean no longer, and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.

The studio takes up the entire interior of an old cottage, with high windows and his easel facing the fireplace. There next to it is the painting of Randolph, looking prawn-eyed and haughty, with the rent still in the canvas: the one that he was meant to be repairing when he had ‘The Dream’.

A tall open-shelved chest rests against the wall, once a vast cigar collection from the people of Havana, now containing hundreds of tubes of paint, squeezed and streaked and laid out in rows. One has a sense of the energy with which he threw himself into his art: the military-style planning of the stools and easels and palettes and umbrellas and smocks and turps and linseed oil—all the paraphernalia of the artist with which he equipped himself before assaulting the canvas.

But when your eye ranges over the room, you realise that this was no pose. He wasn’t fooling around, here. There are canvases running in rows round the room, from floor to ceiling—some of the 539 that he did in his lifetime.

Not even his most fanatical admirers would call him a technical virtuoso; he is no freehand master of the human form. To get a likeness he sometimes uses a peculiar device called an epidiascope, which beams a photograph on to the canvas—and he has employed this to do some slightly frozen studies of rugby players at a line-out, and A. J. Balfour and his wife looking a bit like capuchin monkeys. But there are plenty of others that express his personality, and sometimes they are lovely.

I am here with a couple of friends, and we soon work out what gets him going. He likes colour, the brighter and lusher the better—and any excuse nature will give him to bring them together. He loves a pink palace wall, or a gorgeous ochre ruin, and then an azure sky and preferably a line of snow-capped mountains somewhere in the distance.

He can’t get enough of the shadows on the Pyramids, or the light on the waves as they crash on some Mediterranean shore. Anything involving dark green cypresses, lime-green lawns, bright blue skies, and pinky old buildings—Churchill is your man.

You can feel the release and the enthusiasm with which he has splodged that pigment on. One of my colleagues tries to sum up her response. ‘They are so light, and so optimistic,’ she says. That seems about right. He sets out to please and reward the viewer, and he succeeds. One Churchill landscape has just been sold for $1 million—as much as a Monet, for heaven’s sake.

People feel drawn to his works not because they are polished masterpieces, but precisely because they are not. He was willing to try it out, to court ridicule, to make mistakes—but the crucial point is that he is at least willing to throw himself into it and to run that risk.

Sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes it comes off triumphantly. That was the spirit that he took with him into that dark and tobacco-filled room in the early summer of 1940. Other hands dithered in front of the blank and terrifying canvas. Churchill took the plunge, loaded up his brush and applied his bright-hued and romantic version of events in broad and vigorous strokes. And that, amigos, is the final rejoinder to all his earnest doubters and critics.

—

BRITAIN BY 1964 was in so many ways an incomparably better country than it had been when Churchill entered Parliament at the beginning of the century. There was less deference, less class-consciousness—of course there was, when you consider that the pilots of the Battle of Britain had been state school boys. The few came from the ranks of the many.

The grinding poverty that Churchill had seen in his youth, the slums he had surveyed in Manchester as he strolled in his top hat—most of that had been wiped out. Women were in the process of emancipation, higher education was beginning its massive post-war expansion, a National Health Service had been created and a welfare state intended to help everyone in adversity.

People will differ as to Churchill’s role in this transformation, though it strikes me that the Labour government of 1945–50 owes a huge amount to him; not just to the work done by Churchill and Lloyd George in the first decades of the twentieth century, but also to Churchill’s own instincts in the wartime coalition government. He made a speech on 21 March 1943, called ‘After the War’, that more or less anticipated the big changes in health, pensions and social security. As Attlee was later to say, ‘he had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world’.

He did not much rejoice in the prospect of mass immigration to Britain (he spoke of ‘Hottentots’, and so on). But as Andrew Roberts has rightly pointed out, that very immigration was partly the product of Churchill’s continuing and romantic vision—well into the 1950s—of Britain as the great imperial motherland.

That was why he and the Tory cabinet found it so hard to wrap their heads round the question, and to slam the door shut; and the paradox therefore is that in his imperialist conception of Britain he was actually one of the founders (if unwittingly and grudgingly) of the multiracial society of today.

Overall, a revolution had taken place in Britain—but a benign revolution in which the essentials of the constitution had been preserved. He had first met Queen Elizabeth II in 1928, when she was two years old. He remarked to Clementine that she was a ‘character’ with an ‘air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant’.

You might think there was something a bit smarmy about detecting an air of authority in a two-year-old, but he lived to be Prime Minister when she was crowned, and it is almost certainly true to say that she was crowned only because he had lived to be Prime Minister. That is the point to send his critics into final confusion and rout: none of those changes and improvements—none of them—could have been taken for granted if Britain had folded in the face of the Nazi threat.

There would have been no great reforming Labour government, because there would have been no democracy to install it. There would have been no unions, because they would have been repressed, along with free speech and civil rights; and London would not have been emerging as the swinging capital of the world but as a dingy and put-upon satellite where the parents of pop stars—if there were any—were encouraged to christen their children Adolf rather than Winston.

If there is such a thing as the British character (and there probably is, more or less), then it has morphed around the features of Winston Churchill—broadly humorous but occasionally bellicose; irreverent but traditionalist; steadfast but sentimental; rejoicing in language and wordplay of all kinds; keen to a fault on drink and food.

He means something not just to the politicians who claim to espouse his ideals, but to a huge spread of humanity. He is there as a role model for anyone who wasn’t much good at school, anyone who never made it to university, anyone who wasn’t much cop at maths.

He speaks for all those who have worried about living up to the expectations of their parents, anyone who has felt that they are a failure, anyone who has struggled with depression, anyone who has ever eaten or smoked or drunk more than was strictly good for them, anyone who feels that they must battle on against the odds.

Add those categories together, and you have a lot of human beings.

—

ON 24 JANUARY 1965 Winston Churchill died, at the age of ninety. An estimated 300,000 people filed past his coffin as it lay in state in Westminster Hall—the first such lying-in-state to be accorded to a commoner since the Duke of Wellington. You can see them in the footage—the Britain of my parents’ generation: old men with sunken chaps and trilby hats, women with heavy coats and headscarves; but also young men in drainpipe trousers, and women with short skirts and mascara and peroxide hair and red lipstick; people crying, staring, holding up their primitive cameras.

After the funeral in St Paul’s, his body was taken on a launch called the Havengore from Tower Pier to Waterloo, and as she passed the docks of the Pool of London, the cranes bowed in salute. A special train took him to Bladon in Oxfordshire, where he was buried in the grounds of the church—the church whose spire can be seen from the window of the room where he was born.

There is quite properly no particular sign in the village that this is his resting-place, certainly no advertisement on the roads. I go through the lychgate and stand over the grave. Already lichen and other natural changes have started slightly to blur the inscription on the great slab.

He lies with his wife and his mother and his father and his brother and his children. It is time to meditate, for one last time, on the greatness of that spirit: not what he did, or how he did it, but where that vast energy came from.