The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 23

THE CHURCHILL FACTOR

The truth is that though I love writing and thinking about Winston Churchill, the old boy can sometimes be faintly intimidating. I hasten to say that he is always brilliant fun—but as you try to do justice to his life you are acutely conscious of being chained to a genius, and a genius of unbelievable energy and fecundity.

For those of us who have tried feebly to do just some of the things he did, it can be a little bit crushing. If you have ever wanted to be a politician or a journalist or a historian—or even a painter—you end up wondering where on earth he got it all from.

By now my long lunch with Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames is coming to an end. The Savoy Grill produces the bill—fairly Churchillian in scale; and I try to tackle this last big question. His grandfather was the man who changed history by putting oil instead of coal into the superdreadnoughts. What sort of fuel did Churchill run on? What made him go?

Soames broods, and then surprises me by saying that his grandfather was an ordinary sort of chap. He did what other Englishmen like doing: mucking about at home, hobbies and so forth. ‘You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man,’ he says.

Yes, I say, but no normal family man produces more published words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars. I am trying to grapple with the ultimate source of all this psychic energy.

What, indeed, do we mean by mental energy? Is it something psychological or something physiological? Was he genetically or hormonally endowed with some superior process of internal combustion, or did it arise out of childhood psychological conditioning? Or perhaps it was a mixture of the two. Who knows—depends on your answer to the mind–body problem, I suppose.

‘Some burn damp faggots,’ says William Butler Yeats at his vatic best. ‘Others may consume/ The entire combustible world in one small room.’ If ever you wanted a 12-cylinder, 6-litre entire combustible world consumer, that man is Churchill. I remember when I was about fifteen reading an essay by the psychologist Anthony Storr, in which he postulated that Churchill’s biggest and most important victory was over himself.

What he meant was that Churchill was always conscious of being small and runty and cowardly at school—remember the episode when they throw cricket balls at him, and he runs away. So by an act of will he decided to defeat his cowardice and his stammer, and to be the 80-pound weakling who uses dumb-bells to acquire the body of Charles Atlas. Having vanquished his own cowardice, goes the argument, it was easy to vanquish everything else.

I always thought this analysis was all very well, but vulnerable to charges of circularity. I mean: why did he decide to master his fear? Was he really a coward? Does a cowardly schoolboy kick the awful headmaster’s straw hat to pieces? By now I expect most readers will have picked up quite enough of the data they need to form a pretty good idea of Churchill’s psychology, and perhaps we don’t need to push all the points much farther.

What have we got in the mix? There was the father, no doubt about it: the pain of Randolph’s rejections and criticism, the terror of not living up to him; the need after his timely death (from Winston’s point of view) both to avenge and excel him. Then there is the mother—boy, what a woman. Jennie is obviously crucial in the way she pushed and helped Churchill, his glory being at least partly her glory, after all. We can only wonder to what extent it spurred his derring-do and heroics at Malakand, to think his mother had probably slept with Bindon Blood to get him there.

There was the general historical context in which he emerged. He was born not just when Britain was at her peak, but when his generation understood that it would require superhuman efforts and energies to sustain that empire. The sheer strain of that exertion helped make the Victorians somehow bigger than we are now, constructed on a grander scale.

‘They were harder, tougher people,’ says Soames. ‘Mind you, my grandfather always had someone to look after him, wherever he went.’

And then there was the natural egotism that is shared to a greater or lesser extent by every human being, and the desire for prestige and esteem. I have always thought Churchill had a secret syllogism in his head:

Britain = greatest empire on earth

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man on earth

Andrew Roberts says this is right, but too modest. The correct syllogism should be:

Britain = greatest empire the world has ever seen

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man in the history of the world.

This is in one sense true, but it is also in a way unfair on Churchill. He did possess a titanic ego, but one that was tempered by humour, and irony, and by deep humanity and sympathy for other people, and by a commitment to public service and a belief in the democratic right of people to kick him out—as they did—at elections. Remember his instant forgiveness both at Dundee in 1922 and after the humiliation of 1945.

That is what I mean by his greatness of heart. Just before we go, Soames tells me a last story, to make the point about his sentimentality and generosity.

One evening during the war a lady who was a cleaner at the Ministry of Defence came down to go home, and as she was going for her bus she spotted something in the gutter. It was a file covered with pink ribbon and notices saying ‘Top Secret’.

So she quickly picked it out of the puddle and tucked it under her raincoat, and took it home. She showed it to her son, and he immediately realised it was terribly secret and important. Without opening it he went straight back to the MOD.

By the time he got there it was quite late at night, and everyone had gone—and this young fellow was treated pretty insolently by the people on the door.

They kept telling him just to leave the file there, and someone would deal with it in the morning. He said no, and he would refuse to go until he had seen someone of flag officer rank.

Finally someone senior came down, and took the file—and of course it was the battle orders for Anzio.

Well, the War Cabinet was called the following day, and they had to work out how serious the security breach was, and whether they could proceed with the Anzio landings.

They looked at the file carefully, and decided that it had only been in the water for a few seconds, and that the cleaning lady’s story was true—and so on balance they decided to go ahead with the invasion of Italy.

Churchill then turned to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and he said, ‘Pug, how did this happen?’ Ismay told him about the woman, and her son, and as he did so, Churchill started to cry.

‘She shall be a Dame Commander of the British Empire!’ he said. ‘Make it so!’

His Private Secretary Jock Colville followed up, and he got on to Tommy Lascelles, the King’s Private Secretary, to see if he could push it through. It was one of the few things the King got wrong, because when the Birthday Honours came out she got an MBE.

But I tell you something, when he finally lost office in 1945, there it was in his own resignation honours. Number five on that list was the MOD cleaning lady—DBE.

That story, alas, has withstood all my efforts to verify it at the Churchill Archive or elsewhere. But it illustrates a fundamental truth. Winston Churchill liked to get his way. And thank God he did.

—

LIKE THE GENERATIONS of leaves, so are the generations of men, says Homer. That seems about right to me: we are like leaves not only in our mortality, but in our similarity.

I have always thought that an alien looking cursorily at this planet might conclude that we human beings are not strictly speaking individuals, but all really part of the same organism: like leaves connected by invisible twigs and branches.

We look very much the same, we rustle together, we are blown about by the same winds, and so on. It is easy to see why so many historians and historiographers have taken the Tolstoyan line, that the story of humanity is not the story of great men and shining deeds.

For several decades now it has been fashionable to say that these so-called great men and women are just epiphenomena, meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history. The real story, on this view, is about deep economic forces, technological advances, changes in the price of sorghum, the overwhelming weight of an infinite number of mundane human actions.

Well, I think the story of Winston Churchill is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.

It is easy to think of a few other people who have made a colossal impact on world history—but almost always for the worse: Hitler, Lenin, etc. How many others can you think of who have been decisive for the better, who have personally tilted the scales of fate in the direction of freedom and hope?

Not many, I bet; and that is because when history needed it, in 1940, there was only one man who possessed the Churchill Factor; and having spent quite some time now considering the question, I am finally with those who think there has been no one remotely like him before or since.