The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (41 page)

But when your eye ranges over the room, you realise that this was no pose. He wasn’t fooling around, here. There are canvases running in rows round the room, from floor to ceiling—some of the 539 that he did in his lifetime.

Not even his most fanatical admirers would call him a technical virtuoso; he is no freehand master of the human form. To get a likeness he sometimes uses a peculiar device called an epidiascope, which beams a photograph on to the canvas—and he has employed this to do some slightly frozen studies of rugby players at a line-out, and A. J. Balfour and his wife looking a bit like capuchin monkeys. But there are plenty of others that express his personality, and sometimes they are lovely.

I am here with a couple of friends, and we soon work out what gets him going. He likes colour, the brighter and lusher the better—and
any excuse nature will give him to bring them together. He loves a pink palace wall, or a gorgeous ochre ruin, and then an azure sky and preferably a line of snow-capped mountains somewhere in the distance.

He can’t get enough of the shadows on the Pyramids, or the light on the waves as they crash on some Mediterranean shore. Anything involving dark green cypresses, lime-green lawns, bright blue skies, and pinky old buildings—Churchill is your man.

You can feel the release and the enthusiasm with which he has splodged that pigment on. One of my colleagues tries to sum up her response. ‘They are so light, and so optimistic,’ she says. That seems about right. He sets out to please and reward the viewer, and he succeeds. One Churchill landscape has just been sold for $1 million—as much as a Monet, for heaven’s sake.

People feel drawn to his works not because they are polished masterpieces, but precisely because they are not. He was willing to try it out, to court ridicule, to make mistakes—but the crucial point is that he is at least willing to throw himself into it and to run that risk.

Sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes it comes off triumphantly. That was the spirit that he took with him into that dark and tobacco-filled room in the early summer of 1940. Other hands dithered in front of the blank and terrifying canvas. Churchill took the plunge, loaded up his brush and applied his bright-hued and romantic version of events in broad and vigorous strokes. And that, amigos, is the final rejoinder to all his earnest doubters and critics.

—

B
RITAIN BY 1964
was in so many ways an incomparably better country than it had been when Churchill entered Parliament at the beginning of the century. There was less deference, less class-consciousness—of course there was, when you consider that the
pilots of the Battle of Britain had been state school boys. The few came from the ranks of the many.

The grinding poverty that Churchill had seen in his youth, the slums he had surveyed in Manchester as he strolled in his top hat—most of that had been wiped out. Women were in the process of emancipation, higher education was beginning its massive post-war expansion, a National Health Service had been created and a welfare state intended to help everyone in adversity.

People will differ as to Churchill’s role in this transformation, though it strikes me that the Labour government of 1945–50 owes a huge amount to him; not just to the work done by Churchill and Lloyd George in the first decades of the twentieth century, but also to Churchill’s own instincts in the wartime coalition government. He made a speech on 21 March 1943, called ‘After the War’, that more or less anticipated the big changes in health, pensions and social security. As Attlee was later to say, ‘
he had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world’.

He did not much rejoice in the prospect of mass immigration to Britain (he spoke of ‘Hottentots’, and so on). But as Andrew Roberts has rightly pointed out, that very immigration was partly the product of Churchill’s continuing and romantic vision—well into the 1950s—of Britain as the great imperial motherland.

That was why he and the Tory cabinet found it so hard to wrap their heads round the question, and to slam the door shut; and the paradox therefore is that in his imperialist conception of Britain he was actually one of the founders (if unwittingly and grudgingly) of the multiracial society of today.

Overall, a revolution had taken place in Britain—but a benign revolution in which the essentials of the constitution had been preserved. He had first met Queen Elizabeth II in 1928, when she was two years old. He remarked to Clementine that she was a
‘
character’ with an ‘air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant’.

You might think there was something a bit smarmy about detecting an air of authority in a two-year-old, but he lived to be Prime Minister when she was crowned, and it is almost certainly true to say that she was crowned only because he had lived to be Prime Minister. That is the point to send his critics into final confusion and rout: none of those changes and improvements—none of them—could have been taken for granted if Britain had folded in the face of the Nazi threat.

There would have been no great reforming Labour government, because there would have been no democracy to install it. There would have been no unions, because they would have been repressed, along with free speech and civil rights; and London would not have been emerging as the swinging capital of the world but as a dingy and put-upon satellite where the parents of pop stars—if there were any—were encouraged to christen their children Adolf rather than Winston.

If there is such a thing as the British character (and there probably is, more or less), then it has morphed around the features of Winston Churchill—broadly humorous but occasionally bellicose; irreverent but traditionalist; steadfast but sentimental; rejoicing in language and wordplay of all kinds; keen to a fault on drink and food.

He means something not just to the politicians who claim to espouse his ideals, but to a huge spread of humanity. He is there as a role model for anyone who wasn’t much good at school, anyone who never made it to university, anyone who wasn’t much cop at maths.

He speaks for all those who have worried about living up to the expectations of their parents, anyone who has felt that they are a failure, anyone who has struggled with depression, anyone who has
ever eaten or smoked or drunk more than was strictly good for them, anyone who feels that they must battle on against the odds.

Add those categories together, and you have a lot of human beings.

—

O
N 24
J
ANUARY
1965 Winston Churchill died, at the age of ninety. An estimated 300,000 people filed past his coffin as it lay in state in Westminster Hall—the first such lying-in-state to be accorded to a commoner since the Duke of Wellington. You can see them in the footage—the Britain of my parents’ generation: old men with sunken chaps and trilby hats, women with heavy coats and headscarves; but also young men in drainpipe trousers, and women with short skirts and mascara and peroxide hair and red lipstick; people crying, staring, holding up their primitive cameras.

After the funeral in St Paul’s, his body was taken on a launch called the
Havengore
from Tower Pier to Waterloo, and as she passed the docks of the Pool of London, the cranes bowed in salute. A special train took him to Bladon in Oxfordshire, where he was buried in the grounds of the church—the church whose spire can be seen from the window of the room where he was born.

There is quite properly no particular sign in the village that this is his resting-place, certainly no advertisement on the roads. I go through the lychgate and stand over the grave. Already lichen and other natural changes have started slightly to blur the inscription on the great slab.

He lies with his wife and his mother and his father and his brother and his children. It is time to meditate, for one last time, on the greatness of that spirit: not what he did, or how he did it, but where that vast energy came from.

CHAPTER 23

THE CHURCHILL FACTOR

T
he truth is that though I love writing and thinking about Winston Churchill, the old boy can sometimes be faintly intimidating. I hasten to say that he is always brilliant fun—but as you try to do justice to his life you are acutely conscious of being chained to a genius, and a genius of unbelievable energy and fecundity.

For those of us who have tried feebly to do just some of the things he did, it can be a little bit crushing. If you have ever wanted to be a politician or a journalist or a historian—or even a painter—you end up wondering where on earth he got it all from.

By now my long lunch with Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames is coming to an end. The Savoy Grill produces the bill—fairly Churchillian in scale; and I try to tackle this last big question. His grandfather was the man who changed history by putting oil instead of coal into the superdreadnoughts. What sort of fuel did Churchill run on? What made him go?

Soames broods, and then surprises me by saying that his grandfather was an ordinary sort of chap. He did what other Englishmen like
doing: mucking about at home, hobbies and so forth. ‘You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man,’ he says.

Yes, I say, but no normal family man produces more published words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars. I am trying to grapple with the ultimate source of all this psychic energy.

What, indeed, do we mean by mental energy? Is it something psychological or something physiological? Was he genetically or hormonally endowed with some superior process of internal combustion, or did it arise out of childhood psychological conditioning? Or perhaps it was a mixture of the two. Who knows—depends on your answer to the mind–body problem, I suppose.

‘Some burn damp faggots,’ says William Butler Yeats at his vatic best. ‘Others may consume/ The entire combustible world in one small room.’ If ever you wanted a 12-cylinder, 6-litre entire combustible world consumer, that man is Churchill. I remember when I was about fifteen reading
an essay by the psychologist Anthony Storr, in which he postulated that Churchill’s biggest and most important victory was over himself.

What he meant was that Churchill was always conscious of being small and runty and cowardly at school—remember the episode when they throw cricket balls at him, and he runs away. So by an act of will he decided to defeat his cowardice and his stammer, and to be the 80-pound weakling who uses dumb-bells to acquire the body of Charles Atlas. Having vanquished his own cowardice, goes the argument, it was easy to vanquish everything else.

I always thought this analysis was all very well, but vulnerable to charges of circularity. I mean: why did he decide to master his fear?
Was he really a coward? Does a cowardly schoolboy kick the awful headmaster’s straw hat to pieces? By now I expect most readers will have picked up quite enough of the data they need to form a pretty good idea of Churchill’s psychology, and perhaps we don’t need to push all the points much farther.

What have we got in the mix? There was the father, no doubt about it: the pain of Randolph’s rejections and criticism, the terror of not living up to him; the need after his timely death (from Winston’s point of view) both to avenge and excel him. Then there is the mother—boy, what a woman. Jennie is obviously crucial in the way she pushed and helped Churchill, his glory being at least partly her glory, after all. We can only wonder to what extent it spurred his derring-do and heroics at Malakand, to think his mother had probably slept with Bindon Blood to get him there.

There was the general historical context in which he emerged. He was born not just when Britain was at her peak, but when his generation understood that it would require superhuman efforts and energies to sustain that empire. The sheer strain of that exertion helped make the Victorians somehow bigger than we are now, constructed on a grander scale.

‘They were harder, tougher people,’ says Soames. ‘Mind you, my grandfather always had someone to look after him, wherever he went.’

And then there was the natural egotism that is shared to a greater or lesser extent by every human being, and the desire for prestige and esteem. I have always thought Churchill had a secret syllogism in his head:

Britain = greatest empire on earth

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man on earth

Andrew Roberts says this is right, but too modest. The correct syllogism should be:

Britain = greatest empire the world has ever seen

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man in the history of the world.

This is in one sense true, but it is also in a way unfair on Churchill. He did possess a titanic ego, but one that was tempered by humour, and irony, and by deep humanity and sympathy for other people, and by a commitment to public service and a belief in the democratic right of people to kick him out—as they did—at elections. Remember his instant forgiveness both at Dundee in 1922 and after the humiliation of 1945.

That is what I mean by his greatness of heart. Just before we go, Soames tells me a last story, to make the point about his sentimentality and generosity.

One evening during the war a lady who was a cleaner at the Ministry of Defence came down to go home, and as she was going for her bus she spotted something in the gutter. It was a file covered with pink ribbon and notices saying ‘Top Secret’.

So she quickly picked it out of the puddle and tucked it under her raincoat, and took it home. She showed it to her son, and he immediately realised it was terribly secret and important. Without opening it he went straight back to the MOD.

By the time he got there it was quite late at night, and everyone had gone—and this young fellow was treated pretty insolently by the people on the door.