Churchill

by Ashley Jackson

  This reading of the Churchill story between 1945 and his death in 1965—what one might call the “decline” narrative—intermingles with another trend in Churchill biography: the “splendid anachronism” narrative. This latter narrative suggests that Churchill was unfit to govern in the 1950s and was increasingly out of touch—“gloriously unfit for office,” as Roy Jenkins puts it—and reflects, among other things, a common condescension toward age. While Bevan’s quip that Churchill looked “like a dinosaur at a light engineering exhibition” fits readily with popular perceptions of Churchill’s personality and physical appearance, it also strikes a chord because it implies he was unfit for postwar government because he was old and unmodern. This is a shallow portrayal; older people are often more intellectually supple and balanced than their younger peers, and being over sixty-five is not a bar to service or utility. Churchill, in fact, was no different from the vast majority of aging people. What is more, the image of Churchill the dinosaur sits ill alongside clear evidence throughout his life of adaptability to changing circumstances and resilience in the face of both personal and public change and tragedy. He kept abreast of a rapidly changing international landscape and the ramifications of a nuclear age, focusing firmly on the future, revering aspects of the past, yet always able to act effectively in the present. “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,” he said, “we shall find that we have lost the future.”1 “I have no fear of the future. Let us go forward into its mysteries, let us tear aside the veils which hide it from our eyes, and let us move onwards with confidence and courage.”2 Churchill positively embraced change, even if he did not necessarily like it: “Without measureless and perpetual uncertainty,” he acknowledged, “the drama of human life would be destroyed.”3 What is more, in addition to this mental suppleness in his sunset years, Churchill lived the life of Riley into his eighties, smoking, drinking, buying racehorses, expanding the Chartwell estate, establishing a college for science and technology, gambling on the Riviera, and yachting with exotic friends such as Aristotle Onassis. Some dinosaur!

  Churchill had been accused of being backward-looking throughout most of his career. Leopold Amery said in 1929 that the key to Winston was to see him as a mid-Victorian, “steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view.”4 This was as unfair then as it is now, implying that the vast concourse of British politicians of the mid-twentieth century were habitual modernists moving swiftly with the changing times, bending to every new wind and seeking to preserve little of the past. It was simply not true that Churchill’s world view remained stuck in the 1890s (or that there was a set Victorian view). To see Churchill as being “in decline” and “out of touch” in the postwar period is unhelpful and tells us little more than that he was aging and that, as ever, Britain and the wider world were changing. If one looks at his achievements, and the portentousness of some of his pronouncements about the world, a quite different image emerges. This is particularly the case during the decade following the end of the war, the period between his seventy-first and eighty-first birthdays. To have won a Nobel Prize and produced the most influential work on the Second World War in six dense volumes, to have completed scores of paintings of distinction and commercial value, and to have become prime minister for a second term while dominating a major political party is achievement beyond the wildest dreams of even the most overachieving men in history. At the time, his achievements received due acclamation; Time magazine named him “Man of the Year” in 1950 (not “old man” of the year), and as the aging process really began to erode Churchill’s mental and physical abilities after a stroke in 1953, the press, his friends, and colleagues drew a discreet veil around him so that the wider public was unaware of the extent of his decline.

  Harsh assessments of Churchill’s capacities (or incapacities) are also sometimes founded on the tendency to view him in isolation and to judge him by more exacting standards than those normally applied to politicians and noted public figures. Too often, Churchill is portrayed as a giant in a historical landscape that he could (or should) have dominated, one largely devoid of other people and the swirling movement of real life and the manifold forces that shape it. Of course, life isn’t like this, and even the most powerful men cannot command the tides of history, even if, on rare occasions, they have the opportunity to influence them. Should Churchill have known and understood everything? No one else would have. Other prime ministers, both in war and peace, have shown gaps in their political skill, knowledge, and interest; previous and subsequent prime ministers have variously been bored by domestic issues or impassioned by them, have bestrode the international stage either with ease or with the gaucheness of youth. Moreover, Winston Churchill cannot be blamed for having achieved greatness, or for the fact that those around him (particularly from within his own party) were not ambitious enough, ruthless enough, or clever enough to supplant him. One cannot blame the sun for shining if the night will not come, and Churchill’s longevity as a leader after 1945 owed much to the paucity of first-class challengers, as well as to his burnished reputation and his phenomenal array of talent.

  The 1945 general election demonstrated Churchill’s well-known limits as a party politician, as well as the gulf that had opened between his position as national leader and talisman during the crisis of war, and the position of the Conservative Party in the country. The landslide Labour victory should not have been a surprise. As Ross McKibbin notes, the war had overthrown the Tory hegemony that had emerged after the Wall Street Crash. The collapse of the Tory government in May 1940 led to the creation of a Conservative-Labour coalition in which Labour was overrepresented, leading to the government’s radicalization and pointing to a novel postwar political climate. While Churchill awoke on July 26, 1945, in almost physical pain, his wife considered defeat a blessing in disguise for her and her husband, though Winston’s great depression over the ensuing months gave substance to his retort that if it was a blessing in disguise, it was very well disguised. “What I shall miss is this,” Churchill told Lord Moran on July 27, pointing to red dispatch boxes full of papers. “It is a strange feeling, all power gone,” he mused. “I had made all my plans; I feel I could have dealt with things better than anyone else.”5 He had no illusions about the “problems of the aftermath” of war, telling the Commons in June 1946 that “the moral and physical exhaustion of the victorious nations, the miserable fate of the conquered, the vast confusion of Europe and Asia” together combine “to make a sum total of difficulty, which, even if the Allies had preserved their wartime comradeship, would have taxed their resources to the full. Even if we in this island had remained united, as we were in the years of peril, we should have found much to baffle our judgment, and many tasks that were beyond our strength.”6 Britain had been particularly hard hit. As he told the Commons in January 1945, “We have sacrificed everything in this war. We shall emerge from it, for the time being, more stricken and impoverished than any other victorious country.”7

  Electoral defeat did, however, save Churchill from the potential ignominy of a term in office in which his gilded wartime reputation as national savior and his place in the pantheon of great statesmen was eroded by the humdrum of peacetime politics and the severe economic plight of austerity Britain. Of course, this point is a retrospective one and tells us little about Churchill; for him, living life forward, it was a massive loss of the power he craved and the lifestyle to which he had become so accustomed. Already he found himself upon the precipice of old age and gentle but inevitable decline. Now, with the elixir of power gone, the risk was that there might be no pause in the descent. He was fully cognizant of the grim facts of life for postwar Britain: the war had weakened the country and strengthened Russia and America to an extent that no one had thought possible, and Lord Moran noted before the election that Churchill dreaded the “financial consequences of the war, and even the housing problem depresses him.”

  Defeat at the polls meant go
od-bye and thank you, Mr. Churchill. There was no ceremony to stand on; he was beaten and out, and that meant leaving his home of the past five years and finding somewhere new to live in London, the city of politics and power that held him like a moth to a flame. The incoming prime minister, Clement Attlee, offered the Churchills time to leave Downing Street. But they would not hear of it. On July 30, 1945, Winston and Clementine left Downing Street and began a period as vagrants, putting up at Claridge’s Hotel, then lodging at their son-in-law Duncan Sandys’ flat at Westminster Gardens and spending weekends at Chartwell, which had lain largely unoccupied for six years (on wartime visits, the family had used Orchard Cottage, where Churchill had had an Anderson air-raid shelter erected. Canadian troops billeted there had camouflaged the house and concealed the ponds).

  Soon there was a new house in Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, to decorate, then a long-overdue holiday, taken on Lake Como as a guest of General Alexander. Alexander knew how to please his erstwhile supremo. He painted alongside him and gave him a brace of young officers from his old regiment, the 4th Hussars, as aides-de-camp. Arriving at the Italian lakes just before the sixth anniversary of the start of the war, Churchill found space in which to contemplate his wartime memoirs. In the usual absence of his wife on such trips, he passed the time with his daughter Sarah. Churchill needed time to adjust from the unique atmosphere of war and ultimate political power. But he continued to brood on the future, especially given the Soviet threat and America’s apparent unwillingness to face it square on. Yet again, people who craved peace did not want to hear Churchill discoursing on war, though he “took no pleasure in hoisting storm signals” in these postwar years.8 Being overseas worked its magic; he found pleasure and absorption once more in painting, losing some of his interest in news from home. He was pleased as punch with his paintings, writing to Clementine to say that he hoped she could resist the temptation to open them when they arrived back at Chartwell, as he wanted to unveil them in person. After three weeks in Italy he spent two weeks on the French Riviera before going home, but this was to be a transient interlude, for Churchill had international obligations, including honors to accept in numerous European countries and an important appointment in America. He had been awarded the Order of Merit in the 1945 New Year’s Honours List (membership of this exclusive order is limited to twenty-four and is in the gift of the sovereign).

  In early 1946, Churchill traveled to Missouri to lecture at Westminster College in Fulton. President Truman and Churchill arrived in Missouri, the president’s home state, by train. Here, in a seminal speech on March 5, the British statesman erected a historic landmark by speaking openly of the undeclared Cold War already being waged. Churchill’s internationally reported speech called for the new United Nations to be granted genuine military capabilities, for Britain and America to keep the secret of atomic weaponry to themselves, and to continue a special relationship based on the ties established over the past five years. That Western powers needed to forge an effective alliance was the main burden of his message. In facing up to Russia, he argued for strength, unity, and military alliance and famously identified an “iron curtain” that had descended across the European continent. He had earlier used the term in a letter on September 24, 1945, in which he described the future as “full of darkness and menace.” Churchill’s warning about the intentions of the erstwhile Grand Alliance partner attracted criticism. The “warmonger” cap was dusted down once more, and he was accused of advocating a return to an old-fashioned, discredited form of alliance-based international politics in which one bloc sought to counterbalance the destructive power of another. Churchill the dinosaur, so they claimed, was lumbering across the plains once more.

  But Churchill was simply developing themes that had become clear to him during the war, and his fear of the dangers posed by Stalin’s westward march and the Soviet system of rule were sound, and no less correct because of the unpopularity of his message. His Fulton speech was “a message about the fragility of peace,”9 from a statesman not seeking renewed war but instead calling for a lasting peace built upon a realistic assessment of the lie of the international landscape as it existed rather than as it might exist in an ideal world. Furthermore, though his views attracted criticism, many in government in Britain and America knew the truth of them and welcomed his advocacy, as Baldwin had welcomed it in the face of the German menace in the 1930s. The speech exhorted America to accept the responsibility thrust upon it: “The United States stands alone at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with the primacy of power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.”10 Preventing war and forging a global political organization “will not be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”11

  Churchill outlined other key postwar themes. Further developing his ideas on international politics and the balance of power in the new postwar world, he expounded the cause of a united states of Europe that would prevent another such devastating conflict ever occurring, while enabling the West to better stand up to the growing Russian threat. As his support for the emergence of a strong France from the Second World War demonstrated, Churchill believed in the continuing need for strong European states (Britain and France foremost among them) to maintain the balance of power in Europe. The rise of America and Russia might have transformed the old European order, but this did not mean that the European states they had eclipsed could abnegate responsibility for their own security and the fate of the continent. A speech in Zurich on September 19, 1946, opened his campaign for a united Europe, blazing a trail that others would follow. Like many other leading politicians and commentators of the time, Churchill was easily able to reconcile this Europeanism with a fundamental attachment to the transatlantic alliance and commitment to the empire-Commonwealth. He desired Britain to be as involved in Europe as possible, without detriment to Britain’s unique global role and its “special relationship” with America. At the time, when it was still by no means apparent that Britain’s ambitions to remain a major international power were unrealistic, this attitude was natural.

  The Russian threat to European security and liberty was underlined by the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the developing crisis in Berlin in the same year, which required the famous Berlin Airlift to keep Allied zones supplied once the Russians had severed the ground links. When Russia became an atomic power in 1949, the problems of peace (even of the survival of the human race) became central to Churchill’s conception of his role. He was preoccupied in these years with the Cold War and the need to perform, both personally and nationally, an international role in the name of peace. Released from party politics and occupying a position of international renown shared by no one else, he became a symbol of resistance to communism and the search for peace through strength. Churchill’s willingness to contemplate nuclear weapons was born of a conviction that there was a line in the sand that the Russians must not be permitted to cross, and that ultimately they would respond appropriately to this threat and the evolving politics of deterrence, of which Churchill was an early and prominent advocate. This meant nuclear weapons, with all of the associated risks. But there was no choice, even if, as he told the Commons in March 1952, “moralists may find it a melancholy thought that peace can find no nobler foundations than mutual terror.”12

  Despite its electoral defeat in 1945, there was overwhelming backing within the Conservative Party for Churchill’s continuation as leader. He had long since become a talisman who transcended national and party politics. In June 1948, he told Moran: “A short time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully. Now I’m going to stay and have them [the Labour Party] out.”13 For Churchill, 1946 had been a “Year of Recovery” as he farmed, painted, and wrote at Chartwell. During these years of opposition, Churchill appeared infrequently in the
House of Commons, leaving the lion’s share of the business to his understudy, Anthony Eden. As his parliamentary enemy, the “squalid nuisance” Aneurin Bevan, put it, “Though he loved a big fight, the ceaseless skirmish of party conflict bored him.”14 Churchill’s position was understandable, as he had become something much more than a domestic politician and had, in fact, always seen himself as a great statesman. He now occupied the stage he’d always dreamed of. His lack of interest in domestic affairs had been apparent since leaving the Treasury and finding his mark in the realms of defense and foreign affairs in the 1930s. Now, in the second half of the 1940s, he was the unchallenged leader of his party. There was no chance of the Labour government calling a general election until it had to, and that was a good five years away. Yet reverence for Churchill was never universal, and some Labour MPs even dared to mock him. His elevated position and continued leadership of the Conservative Party also came at a cost, because it encouraged party inactivity, and while Churchill retained ultimate authority and responsibility for the party, those left to run its day-to-day affairs were unable to shape it according to their will. Churchill retained the power but shirked much of the responsibility and work.

  During Labour’s period in office between 1945 and 1951, Churchill criticized Indian independence and lamented Mountbatten’s influence, watching—“with deep grief,” as he put it—“the clattering down of the British Empire.” He criticized Labour for not being more robust in the face of the Iranian government’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s installation at Ibadan. He bemoaned the fact that it now seemed as if anyone could take a pop at Britain without expecting retaliation and worried about Britain’s declining power in the world. “Her great Indian Empire has gone down one drain,” he said in 1948, and the “Home Fleet down another. Can you wonder, with these weapons, that you are checked by Chile, abused by the Argentine and girded at by Guatemala?”15 There was a desperate need, he said in July 1951, to renew “the glory of our island home.”16 As he told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November, “I hope to see a revival of her former influence and initiative among the Allied powers, and indeed with all powers.” He was determined to overcome what he perceived to be a growing sense that Britain was on the slide. “There is hardly any country in the world where it is not believed that you have only to kick an Englishman hard enough to make him evacuate, bolt or clear out.” Naturally, much of the blame for this sorry state of affairs, Churchill claimed, could be laid squarely at the Labour Party’s door: “Six years of Socialists have hit us harder in our finance and economics than Hitler was able to do.”