Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  Was it possible that The Economist had alerted its readers to the social and historical significance of these rallies in London sports arenas? Great Britain was not on the verge of a religious revival. In fact, from the 1950s onwards, allegiance to any of the major Christian denominations, with occasional blips in the graph, would be in steady decline. There was, however, a distinct change in the air. The ‘intellectual tradition’ of which the ‘Anglican parsons’ formed a part was something which went back to the seventeenth century, when modern England truly began. To the period after the civil wars, and after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, belonged a crucial few decades in which were forged the political, economic, educational and religious fabric of the nation. The Church by law established, with the monarch as its Supreme Governor, chose to be Episcopal; and in the 1950s, the bishops, in their lawn sleeves, continued to sit in the House of Lords; the liturgy, framed in 1662, continued to be the only lawful form of service in established churches, and it was that to which the huge majority of parishes, schools and colleges adhered. The Bank of England, founded in the late seventeenth century, and the City of London, with all its companies, and guilds, and the Stock Exchange, remained independently British, and was the source of the nation’s wealth. That system of capital and credit allied to an essentially Whig-aristocrat form of government was the basis of the British success story, both in its European wars against first the Bourbons and later Napoleon, and in its colonial and Imperialist expansion across the globe. To this late seventeenth-century period, too, belonged the foundation of the Royal Society, the beginnings of modern science, the astounding advances in physics and chemistry made by the likes of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

  The ancient Greeks had, among the great range and succession of their divinities, worshipped two gods who represented fundamentally opposed principles of life. Many cultural historians saw in this tension, between the worship of the god Apollo, and the worship of Dionysus, a key to why Greece had excelled, both as the ancestor of modern political stability, the cauldron of notions of stable statecraft, and also the origin of the great European literature and the birth of tragedy. Apollo, whose epithet Phoebus means radiant, is always represented as a young athlete. His cult was associated with military and athletic training, with discipline, and with ideas of responsible citizenship. He was also the god of music, an art form which depends upon rules. When Marsyas the shepherd thought he could make art by ‘letting it all hang out’, he was forced to sacrifice himself to Apollo; he was flayed, his skin removed, a painful reminder to worshippers of the god that beauty and art, like political systems and military skill, come from discipline, order, degree. Apollo was the god who guided the hand of John Locke and the English Enlightenment, and who kept the British electorate voting for the ‘boring’ political parties, while the rest of Europe lurched from the extremes of fascism and communism. Apollo, too, guided the British idea of humour, which was based on irony, on doggedness, on courage in the face of overwhelming hostility, such as was demonstrated by Hitler in the 1939–45 war.

  The god seen as representing an opposing principle to the orderliness of Apollo was the god of wine, Dionysus, known to the Romans as Bacchus. He was bisexual and bispecial, which is why he came to be seen as a type of Christ, the God-Man. Bacchus/Dionysus was both male and female, human/divine and animal. His followers worked themselves into frenzies. Rules, boundaries and systems, for Dionysus and his followers, existed in order to be transcended or destroyed. Human beings under the influence of drink, drugs or mass hysteria have become the servants of Dionysus. The Greeks channelled the worship of Dionysus to certain periods of the year (one of them, obviously, being the wine harvest) and to certain rituals, which included those of emotional chaos which came to be known as tragedy and comedy. Theatre was the creation of Dionysus.

  Dionysus was a god who came and went. He was not always present. His cult in ancient Athens was evidence of the human need to explore, and expose, the sources of our fears, lusts, rages; to dramatise, and thereby come to terms with, the sexual and familial histories which we all carry about with us. But when the festival was over, the worshippers of Dionysus would go back to the altars of Apollo, to reason, to order, to grammar, to the punishment of wrongdoing and the discipline of mind, body and society.

  England in the 1950s did not realise it, but it was in the process of closing down the temples of Apollo, and handing over its worship to Dionysus.

  Behind all this, there existed a concept of self- and political control which was fundamental to the British Enlightenment. To Billy Graham, the great philosopher Bishop Butler might have said, as he said to John Wesley, ‘Sir, the pretending to gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’27

  4

  A Portrait of Decay

  We sometimes speak of corruption to mean that a government or a group of people is knowingly crooked and dishonest. But corruption is also something which happens to bodies which are dead. Britain in the final administration (1951–5) of Sir Winston Churchill was flyblown and stinking in this latter sense.

  Britain was tired, old, in decay, as was its Prime Minister. In January 1954, Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of the humorous periodical Punch, commissioned (Leslie Gilbert) Illingworth, the cartoonist, to draw Winston Churchill in his decrepitude and to have a caption indicating it was time he went. ‘It’s true, that edition,’ Muggeridge mused, ‘but there’ll be accusations of bad taste.’1

  Churchill was bitterly hurt. ‘Punch goes everywhere,’ he moaned to his doctor. ‘I shall have to retire if this sort of thing goes on…It isn’t really a proper cartoon. You’ve seen it? There’s malice in it. Look at my hands–I have beautiful hands.’2

  It was true, added the doctor, Lord Moran, but he who had so often recorded for posterity Churchill with no trousers on, Churchill’s big, white fat bottom, Churchill having strokes, Churchill coughing, Churchill wheezing, Churchill drunk, could not resist describing the cartoon. ‘The eyes were dull and lifeless. There was no tone in the flaccid muscles. The jowl sagged. It was the expressionless mask of extreme old age.’ Nor could the good doctor resist copying out Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘malice’, which compared old Churchill to the Byzantine Bellarius. ‘By the time he had reached an advanced age…his splendid faculties began to falter. The spectacle of his thus clutching wearily at all the appurtenances and responsibilities of an authority he could no longer fully exercise was to his admirers infinitely sorrowful, and to his enemies infinitely derisory.’

  Worse was to come when members of both Houses of Parliament raised money for Sir Winston’s eightieth birthday. It was agreed that Graham Sutherland should be commissioned to paint Churchill’s portrait. As the artist remembered matters, a memory not untinged with bitterness, he believed ‘that the portrait was to be given to [Churchill] by both Houses on his 80th birthday for his lifetime and that after his death it would revert to the House of Commons. I was even shown places where it might hang.’3

  After three sittings the old man was anxious to get a glimpse of the canvas. ‘Come on. Be a sport. Don’t forget I’m a fellow artist.’ But when he saw the work, he immediately protested. ‘Oh no, this won’t do at all. I haven’t a neckline like that. You must take an inch, nay, an inch and a half off.’4

  Once the painting was complete, Churchill did his utmost not to exhibit the picture publicly. He wrote to Sutherland that ‘the painting, however masterly in execution, is not suitable as a presentation from both Houses of Parliament… About the ceremony in Westminster Hall. This can go forward although it is sad there will be no portrait. They have a beautiful book which they have nearly all signed, to present to me, so that the ceremony will be complete in itself.’

  In the event, Charles Doughty, the secretary of the Parliamentary Committee which commissioned the picture, went to Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, and told him he had to accept the picture, and accept it publicly.

  The eightieth birthday of the Prime Minist
er was on 30 November. Already The Times had published a photographic image of the portrait and the paper’s art critic praised it, saying it was more successful than Sutherland’s portraits of Lord Beaverbrook and Somerset Maugham. When Churchill accepted the gift on the podium he resorted, as he often did in life when threatened, to that very English shield, facetiousness:

  I doubt whether any of the modern democracies abroad has shown such a degree of kindness and generosity to a party politician who has not yet retired and may at any time be involved in controversy [laughter]…the portrait…[he turned theatrically to look at it]…is a striking example of modern art. [Yelps of philistine laughter and applause] It certainly combines force and candour. These are qualities which no active member of either House can do without or should fear to meet.5

  The son of a former Lord Chancellor and himself one day destined to fill that office, Quintin Hogg MP, immediately leapt in with his comments: ‘If I had my way, I’d throw Mr Graham Sutherland into the Thames. The portrait is a complete disgrace…Churchill has not got all that ink on his face–not since he left Harrow, at any rate.’6 But those who had seen the man, and the picture, knew that Sutherland with his brush strokes had perceived the same truth as the cartoonist and the satirists had seen. Churchill was past it, which is what made him such a very apposite Prime Minister at this date.

  When the Labour Party won the General Election of 1945, by an overall majority of 136 seats in the House of Commons, many were astounded. The people of Britain had spoken so unambiguously, so clearly. They had dismissed the individual who for many, at the time and since, was ‘the man who won the war’ (and at the time of the election it was not quite over–the election was in July, the Americans bombed Hiroshima with an atomic bomb on 6 August); the ‘greatest Englishman’, Winston Churchill. They had voted in as their Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who seemed like a nonentity but who had a very clear, and a very clearly explained, programme. Clement Attlee and his team wanted the socialist government which had begun in wartime–state control of supplies of food and fuel and production–to continue in peacetime. His party was quite happy with the first great global consequence of America having entered the war on the side of the Allies–namely, the dismantlement of the British Empire. Attlee lost no time in negotiating the liberation of India from the Imperial straitjacket (as it was seen). It was surely only a matter of time before the other colonies, in Africa and Asia, followed suit. Britain, bankrupted by the war and deprived of her Empire, was in a position where she could not but choose to become a new thing. And surely the landslide election result had made it very clear what a majority of the electorate wanted. They wanted Britain to recognise that the strange story of its Empire, and its growth as a world power between the eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, had been an historical aberration. She was only a north European Protestant archipelago, of tremendous resourcefulness, of great technological expertise, of deep cultural brilliance, but no longer an Imperial power. She was poised to become something a little like Sweden–a northern European socialist state, in which the major sources of supply and manufacture, as well as the health, education and welfare of the people, were paid for by high taxation and a centralised government.

  After five years of it, however, the electorate made it plain that its wishes were very much less clear-cut. The appalling weather, the deep snows and frozen pipes of 1947, perhaps contributed to the feeling; the frequent runs on the pound, a metaphor which suggested a recurrent national indigestion, a universal feeling of faint sickness, made many people feel that the last thing they wished was to have their life savings and their income confiscated by the state, the more so, since there was not much evidence that the railways, as British Railways, ran any better than they did as LNER, LMS or the old Great Western. As the years went by, the nationalised coal and steel industries performed noticeably less well than their continental rivals. The National Health Service was deemed to be a success, but the more hypochondriacal everyone became, and the further medical and pharmaceutical research advanced, the less affordable it seemed.

  So it was, that by the time that this book begins its story, the electorate of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had decided that it did not wish to be a northern socialist state such as Sweden. It re-elected the Conservative Party, whose leader was still the old war hero, Winston Churchill. Having watched the debacle when India was partitioned and over a million were killed in the fight between Muslim and Hindu, some conservative-minded people at home wondered whether the paternalistic old Empire had been such a cruel idea after all. Was there any need to abandon the African colonies, to which, especially in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, so many ex-servicemen had taken their families for a new life after the war? Watching the chaos in the Middle East since the establishment of a ‘State of Israel’ and the growth of anti-Western populist movements in Egypt, did the British public want to retire altogether from the world scene? Did they not still possess, in the British Commonwealth of nations, a unique position of influence in the world? Was it not right, in spite of the shift of power to the United States, that Britain with all her wisdom, influence, historical links with Egypt, Malaya, Cyprus, Malta, Africa, should continue to play a role which was utterly unlike any other country?

  So, Britain, by re-electing Winston Churchill, thought again about its own national identity. The old King died of lung cancer, and he was replaced by his beautiful, and completely mysterious, from birth to old age, daughter Elizabeth. It was inevitable that headline writers and clichémongers would seize upon the idea of a New Elizabethan Age, but…why not? Britain never completely resolved the irreconcilable differences concealed in the post-war elections: in 1945 they had wanted a benign socialism, in 1951 Imperialist nostalgia. Having just lived through the financial ruin of the war, the bankruptcy of the peace, the millions of deaths and bereavements, the misery of the austerity years in which a banana seemed a luxury, small wonder the British were confused about their identity.

  Churchill’s chief function, in his last spell in office, was symbolic. He was the Grand Old Man who had won the war, and as long as he was the Prime Minister it was possible for some of the electorate, at least, to nurse the illusion that Britain still enjoyed the power and prestige which it had known before that calamity.

  Churchill was tired and old, however, and he had little or no control over the changes which were evident to anyone of his political acuity. At the end of November 1952, for example, he asked to be told the numbers of coloured people–as they were called in those days–who had entered Britain. He wanted to know where they lived; also, the number of ‘coloured’ students. Two days later, he asked in Cabinet whether the Post Office was employing any ‘coloured’ workers, pointing out that ‘there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created’ if this turned out to be the case.7 On 18 December 1952, he set up an inquiry to see how further immigration by ‘coloured’ people could be prevented, and whether they could be kept out of the civil service. When the report was ready, in February 1954, Churchill told the Cabinet that ‘the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people’. But he agreed that it was ‘too soon to take action’ in the matter.8

  He was reluctant to continue the policy, which he had inherited from the previous Labour administration, of granting African colonies their independence, and when forced to go ahead with allowing Kwame Nkrumah to become the Prime Minister of the Gold Coast (later Ghana) he wrote apologetically to the apartheid government of South Africa, ‘I hope you recognise that the decisions taken about the Gold Coast are the consequences of what was done before we became responsible.’9

  The blatant racism of the old war hero shocks a later generation. For this reason, it is convenient for historians to suggest that it was only ‘extremists’, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, who thought in this way. (Mosley tried to revive his old fascist th
ugs of pre-war days and stood for Notting Hill in the 1959 election.) It was in Notting Hill, where many blacks had settled, that the race riots had occurred in 1958. It is easy, and correct, to see Mosley as inflammatory. Less easy for the imagination to absorb is the fact that when it came to his views of black people, the leader of the British fascists had views which were commonplace for a white man of his generation. They were shared by Sir Winston Churchill. They were shared by the hero of El Alamein, General Montgomery (1887–1976). After the war, Clement Attlee as Prime Minister sent Monty to Africa to provide a confidential report on the suitability of giving the Africans self-government. It was a shock for the liberal-minded ‘Clem’ to be told by Monty, after a two-month ‘fact-finding tour’, that ‘the African is a complete savage and is quite incapable of developing the country himself’. He recommended making the whole of sub-Saharan Africa into a British-controlled bulwark against communism, to be aligned with South Africa. His advice was only to come to light in 1999, and a fellow peer, Lord Chalfont, commented that ‘his reputation is irredeemably damaged’.10

  Churchill’s attitudes to Europe were no more progressive than his ideas about ‘coloured’ people. Although Churchillian quotes on the European subject were often cited, as the British quarrelled among themselves about it in later years, it is hard to imagine him lining up with Jacques Delors or Tony Blair. True, in 1946 Churchill had airily spoken of the possibility of a United Europe, but in private he conceded that ‘I have never thought that Britain…should become an integral part of a European Federation’. In 1950, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, he called for a United European Army to be formed against the Soviet Union, but by 1952 he was telling President Truman, ‘I have been doubtful about a European Army… It will not fight if you remove all traces of nationalism. I love France and Belgium, but we cannot be reduced to that level.’11