ARTICLES Hero or villain?
Alasdair McKillop
Appearing before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee to account for the length of time it had taken to compile and publish the report into the causes of the Iraq war, Sir John Chilcot took the opportunity to announce the death of a member of the panel that had been assisting him. Sir Martin Gilbert, the pre-eminent and hyper-prolific biographer of Winston Churchill, had died on 3 February. The news came less than two weeks after the 50th anniversary of the former prime minister’s death on 24 January, less than a week after his funeral on the last day of that month.
During his distinguished career, Sir Martin, an observant Jew whose grandparents had left Czarist Russia, wrote books about a number of subjects including the second world war, Israel and the Holocaust. Indeed, his death was covered extensively by Jewish and Israeli publications. But it was his titanic labours on the official biography of Churchill, particularly after the subject’s son died in 1968 with only two volumes published, for which he was renowned. The project eventually ran to eight volumes plus others containing primary documents. Each one was large enough to turn the act of reading into a legitimate form of exercise. He also published books on specific aspects of Churchill’s career, from his relationship with America to that with the Jews, thus bringing together the two main research preoccupations of Gilbert’s career.
His position as official biographer would have brought with it certain privileges in terms of access to documents and interview subjects but also potential expectations about tone and interpretation: the sense of indebtedness must be hard for the official biographer to escape from completely. A number of obituaries noted, however, that he was willing to present uncomfortable facts even if he seemed reluctant to embellish them with the damning analysis by which scholars such as John Charmley have made their name. This suggests he was well aware that it was the craft, not the subject, by which his career and living would be defined. Gilbert might have been considered fortunate, also, to be writing in the groove of popular opinion. Some no doubt viewed him as an assiduous compiler of information that in its totality did nothing to shift what they considered to be a damaging myth.
It is unsurprising that a school of Churchill revisionism should exist or that there are those who would chaffe at his continued valorisation despite a career littered with mistakes, some of which were made all the more terrible because they might have been avoided by a figure with a more even temperament. Churchill as a historical figure is big game and the hunters, some armed with little more than pea-shooters, are inevitably drawn in. More than that, history that is deemed to have a contemporary relevance is always liable to fall prey to political disputes. The writing of Irish history, for example, generated a notable revisionist school that sought to bend it to the demands of the nationalist project.
What we are dealing with, then, is as much a political issue as one of historical memory. Those who perceive there to be a great popular myth about Churchill typically start from the assumption that most people believe him to have existed in a vacuum of five years. But they often seem more concerned with what the myth says about the current state of the country. It is often implied that Britain is a place uniquely troubled in its future direction and equally uniquely obsessed with an imagined past that can be contrasted with present difficulties. The revisionists seem to contend that those who are allegedly in thrall to the myth are obsessed with history and ignorant of it at the same time.
It is onto the figure of Churchill that these deficiencies are somehow projected above all else. The impression given is that the revisionists are privileged to information about the real Churchill and the great majority need to be liberated from their false consciousness, with a little assistance.
Writing in a cover article for the New Statesman to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death, Simon Heffer, perhaps not an obvious iconoclast, put the stakes in these terms: ‘The myth keeps us from an honest interpretation of our history in the first half of the 20th century. The false and romanticised picture we have of him, created by his reputation from 1940-45, is a huge obstacle to true understanding’. This is an overcooked premise, as though half a century of history has to be viewed through the prism of a single individual.
He even went so far as to argue that the legend of Churchill in 1940, when the UK had the hand of peril around its throat, stifles an analysis of his conduct during the remainder of the war, never mind across the entirety of an impossibly mammoth career. But Heffer concluded, revisionist fervour tiring a little, by reaffirming Churchill’s ‘indisputable greatness’ which came in spite of his failings as man and politician. In doing so he echoed the conclusion of Roy Jenkins and, frankly, many others with even a passing acquaintance with Churchill’s long career. Ian Bell, writing in the Herald, was in a less charitable mood when he concluded: ‘Today, as 50 years ago, a reckless egotist is forgiven, the rest forgotten, his beloved empire above all. Now only yearning nostalgia, the most pernicious of his legacies, remains’. This is the sharp end of the revisionist case but the underlying political sympathies are barely concealed.
Yet the very idea of the myth is undermined by the sheer predictability of the charges read against it. There is Churchill’s eventual decision to deploy troops in Tonypandy (always his decision to deploy troops in Tonypandy) when he was home secretary; his attention-seeking intervention during the Sidney Street action in 1911; the lethal mishandling of the Dardanelles assault; his decision, when serving as chancellor of the exchequer, to return to the gold standard at the pre-war rate; his adulterous attitude towards party membership; his opposition to Indian independence; the leaky flotation device he grabbed in the 1930s when his career seemed to be sinking; and his support for Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. There are those on the right who blame him, through the compromises made during war, for the collapse of the British empire. Some on the left, meanwhile, regard admiration for Churchill as surrogate nostalgia for the British empire. On each side there are those who criticise the role he played in guiding the UK into the slipstream of the United States. The exact circumstances of these controversies might be debated to a greater or lesser extent; the point is that they are hardly unknown or confined merely to niche academic work.
In fact even the BBC got in on the act, running an article on the 10 greatest controversies of Churchill’s career in which commentary from John Charmley featured prominently. Jeremy Paxman, in his own programme about Churchill’s funeral, stirred the pot a little as well. One of the iconic sequences of the day was of the cranes on the banks of the Thames dipping their jibs in solemn tribute as the funeral barge passed. But Paxman interviewed one worker who recalled that the idea had provoked fierce disputes, with some operators refusing to pay tribute to a man they considered to be no friend of the working class. In the end, those dockers who took part did so only because they had been paid. This was a lesser known fact but it nevertheless suggested we weren’t dealing in myth that was to be upheld at all times for fear of undermining the natural order. When you can count Simon Heffer, Jeremy Paxman and the BBC among your ranks, it might be an indication that you’re not storming the ramparts of establishment myth in quite the way you think you are.
It is not necessary to undertake the work of Sir Martin Gilbert to grasp the point that Churchill was a flawed man, not a saintly bulldog. As a politician and a war leader he made mistakes. He held opinions that didn’t stand up to much scrutiny at the time, never mind in hindsight. But the defects of character and the sheer conventionality, perhaps under-achievement, of the career that preceded it make his rise to prominence at a time of ultimate crisis even more compelling. The irony of the revisionist position is that with every attack they only serve to further undermine their own objectives.
By Alasdair McKillop | March 2015