The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (11 page)

There are two final ways in which his literary exertions made Churchill the only man for 1940. As even Plumb admits, in his study of Marlborough, there is something orchestral about Churchill’s ability to deploy and coordinate his material: switching from Holland to Paris to London and to the Seven Seas. He knew instinctively which subject needed attention and when, while driving the central narrative along. Which was more or less how he ran the war.

Finally, let us go back to that figure in the study in Chartwell, pacing up and down and dictating to Mrs Pearman or Eddie Marsh. It takes prodigious mental effort to assemble the right words in your head, and then ensure that they are loaded on to the conveyor belt of the tongue so as to emerge in an order fit for printing.

Surely it was that endlessly repeated oral discipline which improved him not just as a writer but as a speaker. We may not read enough of his books today, but it was his speeches which galvanised the nation.

As we shall now see, the greatest orator of the modern era did not always speak fluently or well.

CHAPTER 7

HE MOBILISED THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

W
e join our hero on his feet in the House of Commons. He’s rhythmically thumping out a speech he will never forget. It’s an occasion that will be imprinted in his memory—the time he found a new way to leave his listeners breathless and stunned.

It is 22 April 1904, and the young thruster is at the top of his game. He is twenty-nine, pink in the cheek, with a downy corona of gingery-brown hair still adhering to his head. He almost bursts with brio. This year alone he has spoken dozens of times, yo-yoing up and down to catch the eye of the Speaker on debates ranging from the Army Estimates to the Brussels Sugar Convention to Chinese Indentured Labour; and he is starting to get a bit of a name.

His portrait has been regularly published in the papers, complete with admiring captions. He is seen pounding his fist into his palm, or with hands on hips, or making his famous double-handed chopping motion—and with his impudent attacks on his own party, and with the Tories seemingly swirling towards the electoral oubliette, he is a
man on the up. The Liberals are about to find him a seat; he scents the prospect of office . . .

So he slashes away at the Tories on the benches in front of him—as an energetic rambler might thwack a row of thistles gone to seed. The Tories are a ‘sham’, he says. They have forgotten the precepts of Tory Democracy, he tells Balfour, who has already spoken in the debate—and one can imagine Balfour listening and looking inscrutable from beneath his vulturine eyelids.

Around him the Tories are hissing and scratching and fitfully trying to put him off his stroke. It is the Labour benches which are cheering him—and not surprisingly, in view of the kind of thing he is saying.

This isn’t anything a Tory would today recognise as Conservatism. It would send Margaret Thatcher wild. In fact there isn’t even a modern Labour government that would agree to the kind of thing that Churchill seems to be advocating. He is making a case to allow big groups of striking workers to go to the homes of those who are not on strike—and effectively to bully them into joining in. He wants unions to be protected from legal action, so that they can’t be fined even if their members break the law in the course of their agitations.

It’s not so much socialism as neo-anarcho-syndicalism—though before any of today’s Tories get too upset, they should remember the context: Churchill was speaking when poverty was far deeper, and when the working man could still suffer oppression at the hands of the bosses, of a kind that is unknown today. Churchill has been going for forty-five minutes, and going well.

He comes to the climax of his remarks, and lambasts the entire House of Commons for its flagrant lack of proper class representation. Where are the working men? demands this scion of Blenheim. Look at the influence of the company directors, the learned professions, the service members, the railway, landed and liquor interests,
he says—and we can imagine his ducal arm sweeping round to take in the balefully staring Tories.

It must be admitted, he says, that the influence of the labouring classes is ludicrously small. ‘And it rests with those who . . .’ he says; and then he stops.

A few eyes turn enquiringly his way. With whom does it rest? What is it that rests? What rests on whom? The House waits.

A whole second elapses. Churchill tries again. ‘It rests with those who . . .’ But by now it is clear that something is up.

It seems he is the victim, ironically, of some kind of mental sabotage—a sudden wildcat industrial action in his memory.

In the vast cargo hold of his brain the baggage handlers have gone on strike. The conveyor belt of his tongue flaps vacantly. No words come out. He tries again, but it is no use. He can’t for the life of him remember what he was going to say next.

For three whole minutes he stands there, while the Tories cachinnate, and the opposition benches try to make noises of sympathy. Three minutes! The House of Commons at the best of times is an unforgiving ecosystem: lose your way for just a few seconds, and you will feel the scorn of the Chamber. By now Churchill has been unable to pronounce a word for longer than you have been reading this chapter.

This is disaster, a living death. People are starting to whisper and look at the floor. This is what happened to Randolph, they say; poor young chap, going the way of his father—overwhelmed by a horrible premature senility. At last he sits down. ‘
I thank the House for having listened to me,’ he says in despair, and covers his head with his hands.

The following day the papers are full of Mr Churchill’s shipwreck, and a famous nerve specialist is called upon to diagnose the cause. It is a case, says the doctor, of ‘
defective cerebration’. Well, there can’t
be a person in the world who hasn’t at some time suffered from defective cerebration—a useful-sounding disorder—but that wasn’t really the problem with Winston Churchill that day.

If we have one unshakeable and instinctive conviction about him, it is that he was the greatest public speaker of the last hundred years; definitely the greatest orator Britain has produced, and perhaps even knocking Martin Luther King off the global number-one spot. He is the only politician whose speeches and speaking style can still be parodied by people of all ages.

Ah, Churchill! we say, and we jut our chins and recite something, in that familiar sing-song growl, about fighting them on the beaches. He stands in relation to oratory as Shakespeare stands to the writing of plays: the top performer, a mixture of Pericles and Abraham Lincoln with a small but irrefutable dash of Les Dawson.

We think of him as somehow supernaturally gifted, as if he had sprung from a union of Zeus and Polyhymnia the very Muse of Rhetoric. I am afraid we are only partly right.

The truth is that he was a genius in his own way, but he wasn’t really a natural. He was no Lloyd George; he was no Luther King, at least in the sense that he could not improvise as some born speakers can; and when he spoke it certainly did not pour from his full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Churchill’s speeches were a triumph of effort, and preparation, in which phrases were revised and licked into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs. Dancing before him like a will-o’-the-wisp was always the ghostly luminescence of his father’s reputation, and as he grows up we can feel him straining and yearning in emulation.

We catch him at Harrow, speaking up noisily in a debate with senior boys. As a Sandhurst subaltern, he makes a passionate defence of the right of some prostitutes to frequent the bar of the Empire in
Leicester Square. ‘
Ladies of the Empire,’ says the nineteen-year-old virgin, rising on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, ‘I stand for liberty!’

It is not immediately obvious why this subject—the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade—should have prompted the first public speech by Britain’s greatest statesman.

There is no evidence of any reward for his intervention, carnal or otherwise. The answer is surely that it was a jape. He wanted to draw attention to himself—and he succeeded. The speech was reported in the papers.

By the age of twenty-three he thought himself a sufficiently experienced orator to write an essay on the subject called ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’. This is a splendidly portentous and self-confident document—never published in his lifetime—in which he seems to be analysing what he obviously considers to be his own success. ‘
Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience,’ he says—a point that may not be unconnected with his lisp, and what he claimed was an obstructive ligament in his tongue, unknown to the anatomy of any other human being.

He goes on to describe the effects of his prescribed methods on the human herd: ‘
The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned all direction.’ That is certainly a trick that some orators have been able to perform. That was the skill that fate had given his greatest adversary—the German dictator against whom he would have to wage rhetorical war in 1940 and beyond.

But was it really Churchill’s skill? Did his audience quiver like aspens? Were they convulsed by emotions they were unable to control? His maiden speech in the Commons is generally held to have
been a success; and yet at least one observer thought he looked a bit weedy—‘
scholarly and limp’. People inevitably drew comparisons with Randolph, and they were not always kind.

‘
Mr Churchill does not inherit his father’s voice—save for the slight lisp—or his father’s manner. Accent, address, appearance do not help him,’ said one review. Another journalist noted, in an essentially friendly piece, that ‘
Mr Churchill and oratory are not neighbours yet. Nor do I think it likely they ever will be.’

This kind of criticism was perhaps frustrating for Churchill. He took enormous pride in his speeches, and in his novel
Savrola
—written when he was in India—he paints a gloriously self-aggrandising picture of his (aka Savrola’s) methods of composition.

What was there to say? Successive cigarettes had been mechanically consumed. Amid the smoke he saw a peroration, which would cut deep into the hearts of a crowd; a high thought, a fine simile, expressed in that correct diction which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate, and appeals to the most simple; something to lift their minds from the material cares of life and to awake sentiment. His ideas began to take the form of words, to group themselves into sentences; he murmured to himself; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated. Ideas succeeded one another, as a stream flows swiftly by and the light changes on its waters. He seized a piece of paper and began hurriedly to pencil notes. That was a point; could not tautology accentuate it? He scribbled down a rough sentence, scratched it out, polished it, and wrote it again. The sound would please their ears, the sense improve and stimulate their minds. What a game it was! His brain contained the cards he had to play, the world the stakes he played for.

As he worked, the hours passed away. The housekeeper
entering with his luncheon found him silent and busy; she had seen him thus before and did not venture to interrupt him. The untasted food grew cold upon the table, as the hands of the clock moved slowly round marking the measured tread of time. Presently he rose, and, completely under the influence of his own thoughts and language, began to pace the room with short rapid strides, speaking to himself in a low voice and with great emphasis. Suddenly he stopped, and with a strange violence his hand descended on the table. It was the end of the speech. . . .

A dozen sheets of note paper, covered with phrases, facts, and figures, were the result of the morning’s work. They lay pinned together on the table, harmless insignificant pieces of paper; and yet Antonio Molara, President of the Republic of Laurania, would have feared a bombshell less. Nor would he have been either a fool or a coward.

I like this sketch, because I am sure it shows his early speech-making methods; and it shows the absolute primacy of his interest in language. It is the words which count, and the pleasure of assembling them to get the rhythm he wants, and the effect that he wants.

It’s all about the music of the speech, more than the logic or the substance. It’s the sizzle not the sausage.

And that was the charge against him—the fatal suggestion that he did not quite believe what he was saying. There is a very simple reason why he crashed and burned that day in April 1904. He was not speaking from the heart; he was not speaking from profound and intimate knowledge of the matter acquired over years of dealing with trade unions.

He was speaking from memory. He had written the speech in the
Savrola
manner, and then he had learned it parrot fashion, word for
word. And after forty-five minutes of sledging from the Tories he just forgot what came next—or possibly succumbed to some subconscious repulsion at the socialist sentiments he was expressing.

He never made that mistake again. He kept his sheaf of typewritten notes, pinned together, and had no shame whatever in peering down at them through his black horn-rims. Churchill’s speeches were Ciceronian in their essentially literary nature: they were declamations of text.

He had great triumphs in the Commons—see his speeches as Chancellor, compendious and lucid expositions of economics as he understood it—and yet for most of his career his listeners would report that there was something missing. Yes, he was good at the verbal pyrotechnics: but where was the feeling, where was the truth, where was the authenticity? Lloyd George said in 1936 that Churchill was ‘a
rhetorician and not an orator. He thought only of how a phrase sounded and not how it might influence crowds’. In 1909 the Liberal MP Edwin Montagu wrote to Asquith: ‘
Winston is not yet Prime Minister, and even if he were he carries no guns. He delights and tickles, he even enthuses the audience he addresses—but when he has gone, so also has the memory of what he has said.’