But Churchill’s pursuit of America is emblematic of a central fact of Britain’s history after the First World War. America was the foundation of British security, and the security of a world Britain had forged during its period as “top nation.” As Churchill wrote in May 1954, the Americans “are the only people who can defend the free world even though they bring Dulles to do it.” (“Dull, Duller, Dulles” was Churchill’s flippant summary of the American secretary of state.) American power had become a fact of life, and everyone was ultimately dependent upon it and, should America choose, subject to it. America could not help but expand its power, often into spheres where the British could no longer hold the line, even though the Americans might be content for them, in their junior role, to do so. The Truman Doctrine, for example, signaled America’s willingness to step into a region where Britain was simply unable to sustain the burden of responsibility, for its own purposes as well as those of the emerging Western alliance. While Churchill was the first to openly declare the Cold War, he was also the first to achieve some détente in the 1950s, convinced as he was that the fate of humanity rested upon attempting to do so. The opportunity for this increased after Stalin’s death in 1953, and Churchill played a unique role in preserving world peace.
Beyond Politics
In the postwar years, as in the 1930s, much of Churchill’s activity had little to do with Westminster politics or international affairs. He remained a hugely successful professional writer and a prolific and successful amateur painter. The construction of his massive memoir-history of the Second World War occupied a great deal of time, though work on it was interrupted in August 1949 when, staying on the Riviera, he had a stroke, from which he made a full recovery. The large advance payments for this work were invested in a trust fund for his family and helped sustain the cottage industry that attended his literary productions. In 1948, Life magazine and the Daily Telegraph began to serialize the book. The Telegraph paid £555,000, and the American book and serial rights sold for $1.4 million. The work was compiled by “the Syndicate,” a team of researchers and experts who conducted research and prepared essays that Churchill then incorporated into his narrative. Among them were Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, Commodore Gordon Allen, Air Chief Marshal Guy Garrod, Captain William Deakin, and General “Pug” Ismay. Along with his ensemble, Churchill produced what Roy Jenkins described as “the ultimate literary achievement of the outstanding author-politician of the twentieth century.”32 “This is not history, this is my case” was how Churchill described the resulting multivolume work. No one else was going to make Churchill’s case, certainly not as forcefully as he could, and he had occupied a unique position throughout the conflict.
As with any memoir or description of a sequence of related events, there was plenty of room for alternative focus and interpretation. But if Churchill wrote in order to vindicate his role, it was only because he thought what he had done had been, on the whole, right. He never claimed to be definitive or beyond question. As he put it, “The tale is told from the standpoint of the British prime minister, with special responsibility, as Minister of Defence, for military affairs. . . . It would be easier to produce a series of after-thoughts, when the answers to all the riddles were known, but I must leave this to the historians, who will in due course be able to pronounce their considered judgements.”33 In The Second World War, Churchill demonstrated his understanding of the nature of war and its relationship to international affairs. Britain, as in the days of Marlborough, was responsible for resisting continental tyranny and forming an effective alliance to overcome it. Critics said that too often in the book, wartime decisions and actions appear to be solely down to Churchill, rather than having been taken as part of a dialogue with other politicians and military leaders. Critics also took issue with the extent to which the errors of the Chamberlain government made it an “unnecessary war,” and Churchill’s failure to emphasize the strategic backdrop against which appeasement was set—the prospect of three militarized industrial states attacking the British Empire simultaneously.
The work did not exist in a vacuum, because many other leading figures were beginning to write their own accounts. Published diaries and memoirs sometimes took Churchill to task over specific issues—not giving enough prominence to the role played by the chiefs of staff; emphasizing Montgomery’s victory at “second” Alamein while downplaying Auchinleck’s earlier defensive battle; underplaying the role of the Red Army; or slighting a particular commander-in-chief or divisional commander. Churchill’s six-volume history of the war, like any other, has to be treated with critical caution. He wrote history in order to generate tomorrow’s account of today, as well as to make the money that fueled his career as a politician. As he once said to Stanley Baldwin in the Commons, “History will say that the Right Honourable gentleman was wrong in this matter. I know it will, because I shall write that history.” Churchill’s account of the global drama in which he was a central actor reveals his personal sense of how the war unfolded, and how it was to be remembered to have unfolded. As a measure of his success in doing this, subsequent works of history and the received public version of the war in Britain reflect in large measure Churchill’s periodization of the conflict: the view of the 1930s as a decade marred by the West’s lack of resolve in the face of the dictators; the concept of the phony war (ending, unsurprisingly, soon after Churchill became prime minister); the glorious months of the “finest hour” when Britain stood defiant; the post-Alamein turning of the tide—all are familiar chapter breaks in the memory of the war, just as Churchill intended them to be.
Churchill was extremely quick off the mark in producing his history of the war, aware of the fact that the public history of the conflict would take time to set firm. He intended to be the principal architect when that historical edifice emerged, and he was determined to build on a global scale. Churchill’s history was heavily marked by his desire to “set the record straight,” and to account for policies that turned out to be less than successful (or to justify his position on issues like the “second front” in Europe). Churchill pursued into the postwar world and onto the written page his differences with certain politicians and servicemen while continuing to burnish the reputation of his favorites. Lauding Montgomery, for example, Churchill pursued his beef with Auchinleck to the point that Eric Dorman O’Gowan (Dorman-Smith during the war), Auchinleck’s deputy chief of staff in the summer of 1942, launched proceedings for libel.
Elsewhere, Churchill’s account of the war was colored by the shadow cast by subsequent political events. In the 1950s, for example, as he acted on a global political stage dominated by the Cold War while simultaneously penning his Nobel-prize-winning book, Churchill was not averse to casting himself in the role of lone wartime prophet of the perils of Soviet Russia (just as he had cast himself as the interwar seer pointing to the menace of Nazi Germany). His treatment of certain issues in his war history was affected by the political milieu of the postwar decade. He would, for example, write sensitively on an issue that might cast Stalin in a bad light for the sake of current, postwar relations or approach subjects like the wartime politics of atomic weapons in a way calculated to buttress his postwar attempts to revive the transatlantic alliance. The “I told you so” perspective on the causes of the war, and also the causes of the Cold War, mingled with Churchill’s basic human instinct to seek to augment or restore his own reputation and to present an account of how things had appeared to him.
Churchill’s extraordinary historical feat was achieved on the back of privileged access to highly confidential government documents, the bedrock of the entire project. Access to these documents required some planning on Churchill’s part, and his intention to write a book influenced his production of minutes and telegrams during the war, as well as his recorded comments upon those produced by other people. It became a standing joke in Whitehall that Churchill penned minutes and telegrams with one eye on using them in his future memoir. Shortly before le
aving office after the Labour landslide in 1945, he arranged it so that Cabinet ministers could take with them copies of War Cabinet memorandums and other documents they had written, could have access to Cabinet documents issued to them, and could quote from such documents, a gift to the historian. In August 1945, Churchill had sixty-eight monthly volumes of minutes and directives and understandably had some confidence in his ability to write a history of the war. In August 1945, the Cabinet secretary, no less, wrote “our general doctrine is that Mr. Churchill, and those who are helping him with his book, should be given all possible facilities and assistance.”34
As well as his writing, in the postwar years, Churchill was able to resume his love affair with brush and easel that war had interrupted. His talent was considerable in this field; a brace of paintings, one showing the River Loup in the Maritime Alps, were submitted under the pseudonym David Winter and accepted by the Royal Academy in 1947, three more under his own name in 1948. He was appointed honorary academician extraordinary. A number of his paintings appeared in color in Life magazine (though he turned down $75,000 to write three articles for it).
“Genius has many outlets” was Churchill’s saucy reply to someone who marveled that he had time to paint and to do it so well. He did not lack for suitable subject matter, by virtue of his access to the best country houses in England and the choicest European locations. After the war, Churchill was often to be found, along with other members of the elite, at rest or play in eye-catching continental locations, usually in southern Europe. His hosts included the Duke of Westminster, Lord Beaverbrook, Consuelo Balsan, and Maxine Elliot. The venues for his postwar peregrinations, and the subjects for his canvases, included Aix-en-Provence, Antibes, Cannes, Madeira, Marrakech, and Lakes Carezza, Como, Garda, and Lugano. The Atlas Mountains, the Dolomites, and the pyramids were all subject to the Churchillian brush, as were vistas discovered in Bruges, Genoa, Jamaica, Miami, Monte Carlo, Sicily, Strasbourg, Switzerland, and Venice. He wrote to Clementine from Marrakech in December 1947, saying that he was painting better than ever and making immense progress on his war memoirs. But he was still a politician and leader of a political party, and Clementine, as well as some of his colleagues, felt that he wasn’t putting enough into it. It was the subject of one of Clementine’s periodic stinkers: in a letter on March 5, 1949, she outlined the work that she did on her husband’s behalf in his constituency. “But now & then I have felt chilled & discouraged by the creeping knowledge that you do only just as much as will keep you in Power. But that much is not enough in these hard anxious times.”
Churchill also took up horse racing in this period, largely under the influence of his son-in-law Christopher Soames. One of his horses, a French gray colt called Colonist II, won him thirteen races and nearly £12,000, its jockeys wearing Lord Randolph’s racing colors. (When it was suggested he be put to stud, Churchill said, “And have it said that the prime minister of Great Britain is living off the immoral earnings of a horse?”)35 Churchill invested in thirty-seven horses. Despite his vintage years and a life of achievement, money remained an issue for the Churchills, and writing continued to be the main solution. In the postwar years, the “abyss of debt” had opened up once more, but matters were considerably eased when Lord Camrose established the Chartwell Trust to manage the property and other Churchill assets.36 A group of Churchill’s friends bought the house in 1946, charging Churchill a nominal rent, and with the intention of giving the house to the nation via the National Trust when its famous occupants died. This guaranteed Chartwell as the Churchills’ home for the rest of their lives and also created a literary trust for the profits from the lucrative publication of Churchill’s war memoirs, intended to benefit Clementine and their descendants.
Clementine remained Churchill’s lodestar in these postwar decades, as she had been for half a century. But her general physical and mental health continued to be fragile, a condition not helped by worry about her husband and his exertions. In the summer of 1955, for example, Clementine “was in a thoroughly exhausted and depressed state.”38 Their daughter Mary wrote candidly of Clementine’s “neuritis” and recorded that in Churchill’s final spell as prime minister, Clementine was “touchy and difficult” and fundamentally opposed to his remaining in office. “Winston himself could be maddening,” Mary wrote, “and on occasions behaved like a spoilt child.” But Clementine and Winston’s love and partnership was rock solid, even if, as had been the case throughout their life, it was often at a distance, Churchill perhaps on the Riviera or Clementine on one of her occasional trips to such places as Ceylon. They still fussed over each other; in the mid-1950s, Clementine was battling with Churchill’s weight, a battle in which Churchill proved an ineffectual ally. In May 1954, he wrote to say that he weighed “15 stone [210 pounds] exactly on your machine.” A week later, however, he detected a loophole that potentially offered a relief from dietary tyranny: he reported that a new set of scales were saying
I’m 14 stone and a half compared to the previous version of 15 stone on your machine and 15 stone and a half on the broken down one at Chartwell. The two in London are to be tested on Tuesday next and if your machine is proved to be wrong you will have to review your conclusions, and I hope abandon your regime. I have no grievance against a tomato, but I think one should eat other things as well.
In July 1953, he told his doctor that he was trying to cut down on alcohol. “I have knocked off Brandy and take Cointreau instead,” he reported mischievously.38 Churchill remained keen on drink as well as food. Bob Boothby described a scorching-hot day with the Churchills in Provence in 1948:
“I find alcohol a great support in life,” he said. . . . “If I become prime minister again, I shall give up cigars. For there will be no more smoking. We cannot afford it.” “What,” I said, “None at all?” “Well, only a small ration for everyone” . . . [In a bistro, the trio were served beer.] “It is cool, but not cold,” Winston said with truth. Two pails of ice immediately appeared. Clemmie ordered a lemonade, and peace was gradually restored. “I hate the taste of beer,” Clemmie said. “So do most people, to begin with,” he answered. “It is, however, a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome.”39
It was with immense reluctance that Churchill stood down as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party. He made his last major speech in March 1955, devoted to the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over the world. It was a great finale. Churchill was determined to produce an exceptional speech, and to prove that, although he was finally standing down as leader, he remained fully capable. He said that disarmament all around the world would be the best way to guarantee world peace, but that that wasn’t going to happen. Therefore, nuclear deterrence was the only option, and it was incumbent upon Britain to pull its weight and “make a contribution of our own to the West’s nuclear security”; it couldn’t all be left to the Americans. “Our moral and military support of the United States,” he said, “and our possession of nuclear weapons of the highest quality and on an appreciable scale, together with their means of delivery, will greatly reinforce the deterrent power of the free world, and will strengthen our influence within the free world.”41 Deterrence was the key; even though atomic and hydrogen bombs were appalling, Britain had to possess them in order to wield influence in order to prevent conflict. For Churchill, this was part of a long, ongoing narrative of Britain trying to save itself and Europe from tyranny and act as a force for good in the world. In striving to retain Britain’s Great Power status and exert influence in Washington and Moscow, Churchill earnestly believed that he was serving the cause of world peace and the avoidance of nuclear conflict.
Above all others, it was no surprise that Clementine best understood her husband’s awful dilemma as age finally forced him to give up the premiership. As she said a couple of weeks after his triumphant valedictory Commons speech, “It’s the first death—and for him, a death in life.”
9
Symbol of the Nation
> Churchill having finally relinquished power and left government for the last time, his family, his estate, bezique, and painting at long last were to have a fair chance of absorbing his energies. Holidays abroad could be arranged without reference to parliamentary timetables: a week after presiding over his final Cabinet meeting on April 5, 1955, Winston and Clementine set off for a holiday in Syracuse, and from January to April 1956 he was on the Riviera. He continued to be feted by those grateful for his role in defending the world from extremism: in May 1956, he received a prize in West Germany for his contribution to European peace and unity, and in 1963, Congress conferred honorary American citizenship upon him.
It was, of course, completely in character for Churchill to eschew sedentary retirement. While his mind and body held out, he refused to be inactive. Even at eighty, he remained surprisingly busy and peripatetic. Though supposedly retired, Churchill continued to act as an orator, writer, and painter at a tempo few manage at the height of their careers. The first volume of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples was published in 1956. This grand work was designed to demonstrate the common heritage and destiny of Britain and America and was well received on both sides of the Atlantic. Churchill’s unique conception of history suffused this work, and F. W. Deakin, one of his long-term literary assistants, said that he had gained more of a sense of history while at Chartwell than while at university. This is not difficult to understand, for Churchill was a historical figure even before the Second World War elevated him to unparalleled celebrity status. It wasn’t just his age; it was also the fact that he had been involved in so many famous historical events—the Battle of Omdurman, the People’s Budget, the First World War, the General Strike—had known so many famous people, stretching back to the likes of Rosebery and Kitchener, and had occupied high office for half a century. Listening to him expatiate at dinner one night, talking about the Boer War, Lord Moran remarked upon the power of the man and how, even to a group of men themselves at an advanced age, it was “like listening to living history” because of his status as “a figure out of history.”1
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