The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (45 page)

1924
‘Re-rats’ to the Tory Party

Appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer

1925
Returns Britain to the Gold Standard

1926
General Strike

1929
Churchill returns to the USA on a tour

1931
Not invited to join the cabinet because of his views on Indian independence

Hit by motor car in New York

1932
Enters political wilderness

Nearly meets Adolf Hitler in Germany

1933
Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany

1935
Stanley Baldwin appointed Prime Minister

1936
Abdication crisis

1937
Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister

1938
Munich Agreement

1939
‘Churchill is Back!’ He is named First Lord of the Admiralty

Molotov–Ribbentrop pact signed, 23 August

Hitler invades Poland starting the Second World War, 1 September

1940
Churchill is named Prime Minister, 10 May

Churchill convinces the cabinet to fight on, 28 May

Dunkirk evacuation, May/June

Fall of Paris, June

Establishment of Vichy France, 22 June

Churchill orders attack on French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, 3 July

Battle of Britain begins, 10 July

1941
British troops evacuate Greece, 30 April

Hitler breaks the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and unleashes Operation Barbarossa, 22 June

Atlantic Charter signed, 14 August

Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, bringing the USA into the war, 7 December

1942
Fall of Singapore, February

Beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad, 22 August

Battle of El Alamein, November

1943
First Quebec Conference, August

Invasion of the Italian mainland, 3 September

Teheran Conference, November

1944
D-Day invasion of Normandy, 6 June

Second Quebec Conference, September

1945
Yalta Conference, February

Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 12 April

Hitler commits suicide, 30 April

VE Day, 8 May

Potsdam Conference, July

Conservatives lose general election and Churchill loses his premiership, July

End of the Second World War, 2 September

1946
Describes the ‘Iron Curtain’ in ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, 5 March

Gives the ‘United States of Europe’ speech in Zurich, 19 September

1951
Tories win the 1951 general election and Churchill returns as Prime Minister, 25 October

1953
Churchill suffers significant stroke, June

1955
Retires as Prime Minister, 6 April

1961
Visits the USA for the last time on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht
Christina

1963
Named first honorary citizen of the United States by John F. Kennedy

1964
Stands down as MP for Woodford, 15 October

1965
Dies seventy years to the day after his father’s death, 24 January

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was the brainchild of my superb editor, Rupert Lancaster at Hodder. A few years ago he approached the Churchill Estate and suggested that there should be a new appreciation to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Sir Winston’s death. The Churchill Estate was keen, and somehow I was fingered as the man for the job—so I am grateful both to Rupert and to Gordon Wise and everyone else at the Churchill Estate; and of course to my wonderful agent, Natasha Fairweather.

It has been a privilege to labour in the Churchill vineyard, as Martin Gilbert once put it. I should record my prime debt to the omniscient Dr Allen Packwood of the Churchill Archives, who was willing to take calls at the most inconvenient times—trying to take his children swimming, and so on—and who pointed me in the direction of all sorts of extraordinary documents.

I was given unstinting guidance by the magnificent staff and curators at Chartwell, the Cabinet War Rooms and Blenheim Palace.

Andrew Roberts gave me two long and alcohol-fuelled tutorials at 5 Hertford Street.

David Cameron did some invaluable devilling into the exact locations of the pivotal meetings in May 1940—not at all clear in Lukacs, for instance.

Of the Churchill family, Nicholas Soames and Celia Sandys were very helpful in discussing their grandfather, and I wrote one chapter in the Greek home of Churchill’s great-grandson Hugo Dixon.

Above all, this book could not have been written without the dynamic researches and encouragement of the great Warren Dockter (or Doctor Dockter, as he is inevitably known in our family) of Tennessee and Cambridge. Together we explored everything from Churchill’s bunker to his bedroom to his bivouac in the First World War, and as we bandied our theories, the whole exercise was given colour and excitement by Warren’s inexhaustible knowledge.

Churchill famously said: ‘Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public’.

He’s right about servitude. So I particularly want to thank my wife, Marina, for putting up with the tyrant Churchill—occupying our house and making constant demands like some giant inflatable lodger—and for all her excellent suggestions.

PUBLISHERS’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publishers would like to acknowledge the support and advice of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and the members of the Churchill Alliance in the publishing of this book. Thanks also to Cecelia Mackay for her picture research and Natalie Adams and Sarah Lewery for their help with images from the collections at the Churchill Archives Centre.

To find out more about Winston Churchill, the plans for Churchill 2015 and the organisations that form his living legacy, go to www.churchill.com.

NOTES ON SOURCES

1.
T
HE
O
FFER FROM
H
ITLER

‘The Prime Minister said
 . . . into this position’
Cabinet meeting minutes, 28 May 1940, confidential annex; CAB 65/13. See also John Lukacs,
Five Days in London, May 1940
(New Haven, Conn.: 1999).

‘The gist
 . . . destroyed our aircraft factories’
Cabinet meeting minutes, 28 May 1940, confidential annex; CAB 65/13.

‘tender to the Nazis’
Lady Nelly Cecil; Lynne Olson,
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
(London: 2008), p. 66.

Hitler was a ‘born leader’
Lloyd George,
The Daily Express,
17 September 1936.

‘a man of his supreme quality
 . . . today’
Lloyd George to T. Phillip Cornwell-Evans, 1937; William Manchester,
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone: 1932–1940
(London: 1988), p. 82.

‘If Hitler did not exist
 . . . champion’
Ward Price,
Daily Mail
, 21 September 1936; also see Olson,
Troublesome Young Men,
p. 123.

‘frightful rot’
Lord Halifax Diary, 27 May 1940; see Andrew Roberts,
‘The
Holy Fox’: The Life of Lord Halifax
(London: 2011), p. 221.

‘I have thought
 . . . immense reserves and advantages’
Hugh Dalton,
Memoirs: The Fateful Years, 1931–1945
(London: 1957), pp. 335–36.

‘Holy Fox’
See Roberts,
‘The Holy Fox.’

2.
T
HE
N
ON-
C
HURCHILL
U
NIVERSE

‘like to see as the culmination
 . . . English people’
Lord Halifax, July 1938 (date unconfirmed); John Lukacs,
Five Days in London, May 1940
(New Haven, Conn.: 1999), p. 64.

‘Democracy is finished in England’
Joe Kennedy,
Boston Globe,
10 November 1940.

nightmarish structure
 . . .had been expelled Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
(London: 1970).

deportation meant liquidation
See Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(London: 1963);
David Cesarani,
Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”
(Boston: 2006).

‘the abyss of a new Dark Age
 . . . perverted science’
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 18 June 1940;
Hansard,
HC Deb, vol. 362, cc51–64; http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/jun/18/war-situation.

the worst system
 . . . except for all the others
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947; Robert Rhodes James, ed.,
Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963,
vol. 7
(1974)
,
p. 7566.

Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion
 . . . British population
Otto Brautigam,
So hat es sich zugetragen: Ein Leben als Soldat und Diplomat
(Wurzburg: 1968), p. 590.