The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (40 page)

There are Churchill night clubs and bars and pubs—about twenty pubs in Britain bear his name and pug-like visage, far more than bear the name of any other contemporary figure.

Sometimes it is easy to understand the semiotic function of the name: you can see why a pub-owner might want to go for Churchill. He is the world’s greatest advertisement for the benefits of alcohol. But why is there a Churchill escort agency? And what do they offer, apart from blood, toil, tears and sweat?

The other day I was cycling through Harefield in the rural far west of London, and I came across Churchill’s Barbers. I looked inside, and saw a tattooed chap with an earring having the back of his neck shaved, and an oil painting of Churchill in a hat. Why, I asked myself, would you fill a little barbershop with pictures of Winston
Churchill? He had many outstandingly good points—but he was not exactly famous for his hairstyle; quite the reverse.

Then it occurred to me, of course, that there are millions of men who have a haircut not unlike Sir Winston’s. Oi Baldy! is the message of Churchill the Barbers: you can be a hero, too. Come inside and have a proper trim of what is left.

Whatever the Churchill brand is intended to signify—and it means all kinds of things—the associations are mainly positive; but they are not exclusively positive.

How many babies would be called Winston in Britain today? The value of his name and brand is strong, but it has perceptibly shifted, and that is because in the fifty years since he died there has been a more or less continuous assault on his reputation. One by one they have fired their missiles in his general direction.

Some of the artillery fire has been wielded by right-wingers like David Irving, who have accused him not just of unnecessarily waging war on Hitler, but of colluding in such crimes as the bombing of Coventry (untrue) and assassinating the Polish leader Władysław Sikorski (rubbish).

In recent years, however, the most damaging attacks have come from well-meaning people who object that Churchill’s speeches, letters and articles are riddled with ideas and language that today consign him to a leper colony of rank political incorrectness. He is accused of being a racist, a sexist, an imperialist, a Zionist, an Aryan and Anglo-Saxon supremacist and a believer in eugenics; and as he recedes from us in time the unpasteurised Churchill can seem a bit ripe for our delicate modern taste.

If his words are cleverly filleted, they can indeed be made to appear unacceptable (‘All my daughter’s friends think he is a racist’, one London mother told me); and there is enough truth in the charges against him to cause some embarrassment to the educational
establishment. When the Department of Education sent out a commemorative VE Day video to all schools in 1995, they managed to give Churchill only fourteen seconds in a thirty-five-minute history of the Second World War.

There are all sorts of defences against those who seek to apply modern standards to Churchill. He did have what is now considered to be a racist interpretation of the difference between one society and another; but he hated the mistreatment of anyone of any race. See his anger at Kitchener’s butchery of the Dervishes; remember his rage at the Lugards, and their disdainful and murderous treatment of the natives of West Africa. He didn’t believe that the white man should hold the whip hand, as if by genetic right. He believed in merit.

As Colonial Secretary in 1921 he announced that within the British Empire ‘
there should be no barrier of race, colour or creed which should prevent any man from reaching any station if he is fitted for it’. It must also be said that his views on racial distinctions—though widely attacked—were by no means exceptional for a man born in 1874; and there were plenty of others who consciously or unconsciously held the same sort of opinions.

Sometimes he delighted in skewering the hypocrisy of his opponents. In the middle of the war Roosevelt attempted to wind him up at a White House lunch, by seating him next to Mrs Ogden Reid, a publisher and fierce campaigner for the independence of India.

This woman duly asked him: ‘
What are you going to do about those wretched Indians?’

Churchill replied: ‘Before we proceed further let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?’

Churchill one, Mrs Ogden Reid nil, I feel.

Those who continue to bash him for being out of date on race might also remember that the USA continued with a system of active racial segregation, of a kind he would never have tolerated in Britain, until the late 1960s.

Yes, it is also true that he said some things that now sound very sinister about eugenics and the need to sterilise the feeble-minded. As a young minister in 1910 he wrote to Asquith warning that ‘
the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate’.

But again, he was by no means alone: Bills for the segregation of ‘morons’ were overwhelmingly passed in Parliament. It was an age when people were themselves feeble-minded on the subject of feeble-mindedness, and had a very poor understanding of psychology and genetics.

Perhaps it gives a flavour of the context if I point out that in 1927 the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes recorded a judgement agreeing with the sterilisation of a woman called Carrie Buck, who had been labelled feeble-minded, along with her mother and daughter. ‘
Three generations of imbeciles is enough,’ he said. Between 1907 and 1981 the USA forcibly sterilised 65,000 people.

Churchill may indeed have said such things, a decade or two previously: but—thankfully—he never actually put these whacky ideas into practice.

And yes, it was true that by today’s standards he was pretty much a male chauvinist pig—at least ideologically; no doubt of that.

Nancy Astor was the first woman to enter the House of Commons, and when in 1919 she asked him why he was so cold towards her, he gave this psychologically rich reply: ‘
I feel you have come into my
bathroom and I have only a sponge with which to defend myself.’ There speaks an alumnus of an all-male English public school.

There was a truly terrible moment in March 1944, when the House was debating Butler’s Education Bill, and a female Conservative MP called Thelma Cazalet-Keir had successfully moved an amendment calling for equal pay for women teachers. Churchill decided to use this as a pretext for humiliating his backbench critics. He turned the matter into a confidence vote—which few would want to oppose—and forced his MPs to overturn equal pay for women teachers by 425 votes to 23.

He was rightly pilloried at the time; and yet no one could accuse him of being a misogynist—he loved clever women (Pamela, Violet); and he got there in the end. He redeemed himself when one of his last parliamentary measures, announced at the beginning of 1955, was equal pay for women in teaching, the civil service and local government. As he said to Jock Colville in 1958, when proposing that women should be admitted on equal terms to Churchill College, Cambridge, ‘
When I think of what women did in the war, I feel sure they deserve to be treated equally.’ (The college eventually admitted women in 1972.)

You can criticise Churchill for being an imperialist and a Zionist—as he certainly was, both—but a fair-minded person would have to admit that he supported both these projects because he conceived that they entailed the advance of civilisation. His language on India sometimes seems unhinged (‘
Gandhi ought to be bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant . . .’); but you have to bear in mind that he saw the Raj as a restraint on barbarous practices—suttee, bride-price, the shunning of the Untouchables, and so on.

Those who despise the empire have to ask themselves whether they hate it more than they hate, say, slavery, or female genital
mutilation. In Churchill’s imperialism there was much more than just the extended egotism of the super-patriot. He was unlike so many other politicians, of every age, in that I think he was at heart a genuine idealist. He believed in the greatness of Britain and her civilising mission, and that led him to say some things that seem quite bonkers today.

All these embarrassing quotations have been picked over for years by the anti-Churchillians. Their bones lie bleached and shocking in the corner of the picture. But they are only a part of a vast and glorious landscape; and they have done nothing to put off politicians from every part of the spectrum, who have tried to ape him, to invoke him or somehow to channel his genius—from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher to Kwame Nkrumah to Fidel Castro to Nelson Mandela.

That is because the story of Churchill is bigger and more inspiring than a mere political creed. It is about the indomitability of the human spirit. He may seem horribly unfashionable in his views to us today, but in his essential character he is a source of eternal—and perhaps growing—inspiration.

Look at the hordes of visitors tramping through the gardens of Chartwell: 212,769 of them in 2013—a record. With the greatest respect to that famous house, it is not an architectural masterpiece. If you were being mean, you might say it was rather dumpy in style, and heavy on the red brick. The grounds are rolling and pleasant enough, but not a patch on those of most stately homes.

People go to Chartwell because it is redolent of the spirit of Churchill; and that is why they go to the underground Churchill war rooms by the Cabinet Office—a record half a million last year, 38 per cent more than the previous year. They go to feel the almost physical presence of the former Prime Minister: to see the camp bed he used for
his power naps, the map of Britain’s coastal defences in front of him, the cigar like a strange brown coprolite in the ashtray beside him.

They feel his greatness and his bravery in that moment of desperation; and that is why not a single one of the revisionists has really got a shot on target. Year after year the little puffs of their gunfire explode around him, and he sails through it all on his white pony, waving his hat in the air, as serene and unscathed as when he came through the musketfire of Malakand.

—

I
WAS THINKING
about this quality of Churchill’s—this megalopsychia, greatness of heart—when I remembered that there was an aspect of his creative life that we haven’t properly discussed. So one hot afternoon I decided to drive down to Chartwell again, to join the crowds of pilgrims.

As I sat in the South London traffic I remembered a story about how he would leave London at 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday, and he would collect the typist and Rufus the poodle, and every week he would stop to buy the
Evening Standard
at the same place by Crystal Palace. Every time the vendor would step forward and salute, and he would refuse to accept any payment; so every time Churchill would give him the remains of whatever cigar he happened to be smoking (you will recall that another beneficiary of his stubs was the gardener at Chartwell; the poor fellow died of cancer). Is there any politician in the world today who could pay someone in half-chewed cigars?

When we arrived at Chartwell we went straight through the grounds, past his vast round swimming pool, to the studio by the ponds.

Churchill got into painting in 1915, in his state of post-Gallipoli gloom, at a rented house called Hoe Farm near Godalming. He later
described how he took it up, in a passage that shows his journalistic flair for making something wonderful out of not very much . . .

Some experiments one Sunday on the country with the children’s paint-box led me to procure the next morning a complete outfit for painting in oils.

Having bought the colours, an easel, and a canvas, the next step was
to begin.
But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto. But after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. There could be no doubt that blue paint mixed with white should be put on the top part of the canvas. One really does not need to have had an artist’s training to see that. It is a starting-point open to all.

So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint in the palette with a very small brush, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a bean upon the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response. At that moment the loud approaching sound of a motor car was heard in the drive. From this chariot there stepped swiftly and lightly none other than the gifted wife of Sir John Lavery. ‘Painting! But what are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush, the big one.’

Splash into the turpentine, wallop into the blue and the white, frantic flourish on the palette, clean no longer, and then several large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas. Anyone could see that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas
grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken. The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.

The studio takes up the entire interior of an old cottage, with high windows and his easel facing the fireplace. There next to it is the painting of Randolph, looking prawn-eyed and haughty, with the rent still in the canvas: the one that he was meant to be repairing when he had ‘The Dream’.

A tall open-shelved chest rests against the wall, once a vast cigar collection from the people of Havana, now containing hundreds of tubes of paint, squeezed and streaked and laid out in rows. One has a sense of the energy with which he threw himself into his art: the military-style planning of the stools and easels and palettes and umbrellas and smocks and turps and linseed oil—all the paraphernalia of the artist with which he equipped himself before assaulting the canvas.