The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (9 page)

As it happens, I think he erred in this self-criticism. He wasn’t a coward as a young schoolboy. He was hellish brave. He was first sent away to school at the age of seven, to the care of a sadistic whacker called Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley. This man was a High Anglican old perv who used to give the boys twenty strokes of the cane—drawing blood after the third—for the slightest infraction.

Though he was miserably unhappy at the school, Churchill never complained about this barbarism, and indeed it wouldn’t have been exposed had not the family doctor noticed the weals. But you know what young Churchill did?

One day Sneyd-Kynnersley had given him a thrashing for taking some sugar, and Churchill went and got the old boy’s straw hat—and kicked it to pieces. I love him for that. He wasn’t really anything like a coward at school: he may not have been much good at muddy team games, but he was the inter-schools fencing champion. He famously pushed older boys into the swimming pool, and if you want a final proof of his sheer raw courage, as a teenager, I give you the famous
occasion when he was playing hare and hounds with his brother and cousin in Dorset.

They trapped him on a bridge, one at either end, and beneath the bridge was a chasm. Then Churchill noticed a fir tree whose top came up to the level of the bridge, and in a second his ingenious mind had conceived a project.

He would leap on to the tree, and slide down, using the branches to slow his descent. Nice idea in theory, disastrous in execution. It was three days before he regained consciousness and three months before he was out of bed.

In that episode we see so many elements of his character—the imagination, the bravado, and the ability to take a decision in a flash. Churchill’s bravery wasn’t something he just put on. It wasn’t a mask he struggled with. He was made like that. The spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on.

Nothing could stop him, not even that accident in Croydon, where we have rejoined the plane as it fell fast towards the ground. Now it went smack into the runway at 50 mph. The left wing went in first, smashed to pieces, while the propeller was buried in the earth.

Churchill was whacked forward. He was crushed. The pressure seemed unendurable. Streams of petrol shot past him and he thought—again—that he was going to die. But it turned out that the good Captain Scott had turned off the electric current, shortly before he was knocked out.

Churchill got out and vowed that he would never pilot himself in the air again—a vow he kept, more or less, until the middle of the Second World War, when he needed, again, to show what he was made of; and when his general willingness to take the risk of getting in a plane became vital to British resistance.

—

O
F COURSE
he enjoyed showing off—not just to his mother, or to the press, or to the public, but above all to the person who chronicled his deeds most lovingly and faithfully: himself. Whatever Churchill said or did, he had an eye, like Julius Caesar, to the way he would report it.

But that didn’t make him any less lion hearted. And it was precisely because he was so unambiguously and irrefutably brave that he was able, from 1940, to demand so much bravery from others. Others—Attlee, Eden—had certainly fought in the war; but their reputations were not quite the same.

There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.

And then Churchill had one further advantage over the others. He not only inspired by his personal example and career. He had the gift of language to put heart into people, and to breathe some of his own courage into others.

CHAPTER 6

THE GREAT DICTATOR

A
ha, I am thinking, as I stand at last in Winston Churchill’s study. So this is how he did it. By special leave of the staff at Chartwell I have come right up to the desk—beyond the rope barrier. I am looking at the very same pair of round black John Lennon-ish Bond Street spectacles that he used; and there are his hole-punches. There is the bust of Napoleon, rather bigger than the bust of Nelson, and there are the paperweights that you see in some of the photographs.

As I stoop to examine the deep scuffing in the right arm of his desk chair—a reminder of the odd way Churchill used to clutch it, perhaps because of his dislocated shoulder—I am politely asked to step back. I think they are worried I am going to test the chair with my weight.

I comply unhesitatingly. I have seen enough.

This is not just an English country house, with a stunning view of the weald of Kent, with fish ponds and croquet lawn and a cinema and painting studio and every civilised amenity that could be devised
by a gentleman of leisure. No, no: this much-amended Elizabethan manor is no scene of repose. This is a machine.

It is no wonder that the design of this house proceeded from the same teeming brain that helped invent the tank and the seaplane and which foresaw the atom bomb. Chartwell Manor, Westerham, Kent, was one of the world’s first word processors. The whole house is a gigantic engine for the generation of text.

Downstairs there is a room with green lamps hanging from the ceiling, and maps on the wall, and a telephone exchange: and here he kept his researchers—about six of them at once, junior Oxford dons, research fellows, some of them destined for high academic honours. There they were, filleting, devilling, rootling around in books and documents in search of stuff that might be of use.

They were his Nibelung, his elves, the tinkling dwarves in the smithy of Hephaestus. Or, to compare them with their modern equivalent, they were Winston Churchill’s personal search engine—his Google. When they needed more books, they would pad down the corridor to the library—with its 60,000 mainly leather-bound volumes. This was his data bank. When he needed some fact or text, he would figuratively hit the ‘execute’ key, and summon them; and up they would go—only one at any time. They would go into the study, and there they would find him in the act of composition.

One of the many reasons for feeling overawed by Churchill is that he could not only discharge his duties as a minister of the Crown by day. He would then have a slap-up dinner, with champagne, wine and brandy. Only then, at 10 p.m., refreshed and very jovial, would he begin to write.

—

I
KNOW THAT
I speak for many journalists—and many others—when I say that it is perfectly possible to write after lunch, even if, or
particularly if, you have had a bottle of wine. It is simply not possible to do this after dinner; not after booze. I don’t know anybody else who is capable of knocking out first-class copy after a long day and a drunken dinner.

There must have been something unique in his metabolic pathways; and what makes it even more astonishing is that most of the time he didn’t even write. He dictated. He would gather his thoughts and then, wreathed in tobacco and alcohol—and perhaps wearing his monogrammed slippers and the peculiar mauve velvet siren suit made for him by Turnbull and Asser—he would walk the wooden floorboards and growl out his massively excogitated sentences. And that was barely the beginning of the word-processing system.

Typists would struggle to keep up, but on he jawed, even into the small hours of the night, licking and champing his unlit cigar. Sometimes he would take them with him into his tiny and austere bedroom, and then while they blushed and squeaked he would disrobe and submerge himself in his sunken Shanks bath and continue to prose on, while they sat on the floor and pitter-pattered away on the specially muffled keyboards that he preferred.

The sheaves of typewritten paper he would then correct and amend by hand—and we have innumerable examples of his cursive blue-inked marginalia—and then the results would be typeset as they would appear on the page; and even that was not the end.

Now I pace across the room to an upright sloping bureau that is set against the wall, like a newspaper-reading slab in a club. It was here that he engaged in the final exercise of word-processing, a ritual that we would now perform effortlessly with our Microsoft programmes. He would fiddle with the text. He would switch clauses around for emphasis, he would swap one epithet for another and in general he would take the utmost delight in the process of polishing his efforts; and then he would send the whole lot off to be typeset again.

It was a fantastically expensive method of working, and yet it enabled Churchill to produce not just more words than Dickens, or more words than Shakespeare—but more words than Dickens and Shakespeare combined. Go into so many respectable middle-class English homes, especially of the older generation, and you will see them there, bulking out the bookshelves next to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
:
The World Crisis
;
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
;
The Second World War
;
Marlborough—His Life and Times
, and many others—and then ask yourself which ones have actually been read.

There are some people—faced with this vast quantity of text—who may be tempted to dismiss or downplay the virtuosity of Churchill as a writer. Indeed, he has always had his detractors. Evelyn Waugh, that inveterate Churchill-basher, said he was a ‘
master of sham-Augustan prose’, with ‘
no specific literary talent but a gift of lucid self-expression’. After reading Churchill’s life of his father Randolph, Waugh dismissed it as a ‘
shifty barrister’s case, not a work of literature’.

By the late 1960s his historical gifts were being pummelled by the likes of J. H. Plumb, the Cambridge University pioneer of ‘social history’. ‘There is no discussion of the labouring classes and industrial technology,’ complained Plumb of
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. ‘
He had an ignorance of economic, social and intellectual history of staggering proportions.’ His prose style was ‘
curiously old-fashioned and somewhat out of place, like St Patrick’s cathedral on 5th avenue’.

As for his amazing achievement in winning the Nobel prize for literature, it is conventional to treat this as a joke—an embarrassing attempt by the Swedes to make up for their neutrality in the war. Even relatively sympathetic historians, such as Peter Clarke, have dismissed the possibility that there was any merit involved. ‘
Rarely can
an author’s writings have received less attention than those of the winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1953,’ he says. This is not just a little bit snooty, but surely untrue.

Look at the list of Nobel winners in the last century. Avant-garde Japanese playwrights. Marxist-feminist Latin Americans. Polish exponents of the concrete poem. All of them are no doubt meritorious in their way, but many of them are much less read than Churchill.

Why did Evelyn Waugh sneer at Churchill’s writings? Notice that he—Waugh—had actually tried to emulate Churchill in the 1930s, and got himself sent out to cover a war in Abyssinia. He produced
Scoop
, of course, one of the great stylistic landmarks of the twentieth century. But his reporting had nothing like the same journalistic impact as Churchill’s.

Is it that Waugh was a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and the reason was not just that Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty-five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that, for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point of comparison.

By 1900 he had not only written five books—some of which had been best-sellers—but he had become just about the highest-paid journalist in Britain. For his Boer War coverage he was paid £250 per month—the equivalent of £10,000 a month today. He was commissioned to write the life of his father in 1903, and given a staggering payment of £8,000. To give you the scale of those riches, consider that there were then only a million people in the country who had the privilege of paying income tax, and that was because they earned £160 per year.

These publishers didn’t pay him this kind of money because they liked his blue eyes. They paid him handsomely because he was popular with the public, and helped boost circulation, and the
reason he was popular was that he wrote so well, with a rich and rollicking readability. He was a superb reporter. Try this account from the
Morning Post
of April 1900.

We take up the story as Churchill and his fellow mounted scouts are trying to beat the Boers to secure a kopje, a rocky outcrop in the South African plain.

It was from the very beginning a race, and recognised as such by both sides. As we converged I saw the five leading Boers, better mounted than their comrades, outpacing the others in a desperate resolve to secure the coign of vantage. I said, ‘We cannot do it’; but no one would admit defeat or leave the matter undecided. The rest is exceedingly simple.

We arrived at a wire fence 100 yards—to be accurate 120 yards—from the crest of the kopje, dismounted, and, cutting the wire, were about to seize the precious rocks when—as I had seen them in the railway cutting at Frere, grim, hairy and terrible—the heads and shoulders of a dozen Boers appeared; and how many more must be close behind them?

There was a queer, almost inexplicable, pause, or perhaps there was no pause at all; but I seem to remember much happening. First the Boers—one fellow with a long, drooping, black beard, and a chocolate-coloured coat, another with a red scarf round his neck. Two scouts cutting the wire fence stupidly. One man taking aim across his horse, and McNeill’s voice, quite steady: ‘Too late; back to the other kopje. Gallop!’

Then the musketry crashed out, and the ‘swish’ and ‘whirr’ of the bullets filled the air. I put my foot in the stirrup. The horse, terrified at the firing, plunged wildly. I tried to spring into the saddle; it turned under the animal’s belly. He broke
away, and galloped madly off. Most of the scouts were already 200 yards off. I was alone, dismounted, within the closest range, and a mile at least from cover of any kind.