June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 116, Autumn 2002

Page 28

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

Leading Lives: Winston Churchill, by Fiona Richardson, Heinemann Library, 64 pages, $27.86, member price $23
Churchill: A Beginners Guide, by Nigel Rodgers, Hodder & Stoughton, 90 pages, paperback, £5.99, member price $10
Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist, by John Severance, Houghton Mifflin, 144 pages, $17.95, member price $12
Winston S Churchill: Man of the Twentieth Century, by Craig Read, Minerva, 290 pp.,pbk., $19.50, member price $17

A recent survey disclosed that one in six British schoolchildren could not identify Churchill as Britain’s wartime leader; an astonishing 4% thought it was Adolf Hitler. Similar shocking results obtain on the other side of the Atlantic, so it is superfluous to elaborate an argument in support of even the humblest attempt to “teach Churchill.” Unfortunately, most of these efforts are humble indeed.

The first Churchill “juveniles” were published in the late Fifties and with few exceptions were hagiographic potboilers. Some appeared after WSC’s death in 1965, another round during the 1974 centenary of his birth, but the pickings have been fairly slim since.

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Now, however, comes a change: two new juveniles from Heinemann Library and Hodder & Stoughton; a new printing of an outstanding Houghton Mifflin production, and a book on why Churchill was the “Man of the 20th Century.” We should be glad. Two of the four are great, one is good, and the other is…well.

Fiona Reynoldson’s Winston Churchill, for ages 8-15 in the American Heinemann Library’s “Leading Lives” series, is far and away the best juvenile ever published, anywhere, by anybody. It is part of a series that mixes Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Arafat (!) with Roosevelt, Kennedy and Gandhi. I don’t know a thing about the other titles, but Reynoldson’s Churchill is a masterpiece—so good it deserves a Churchill Center award. This is in fact my nominating argument.

One wouldn’t expect so much wisdom to be so attractively wedged into 64 pages: a quality sewn binding with a durable laminated photographic cover; color throughout, including some of the excellent photographs, cartoons, and posters. Churchill is discussed in 20 brief chapters, including a summary on “Churchill’s Legacy.” There is an events timeline, a list of key people from Churchill’s time, a page showing how British government works, sources for further research, a glossary and an index.

The glossary is one of this book’s great features. Every time a word or phrase crops up that might be unfamiliar to young eyes—Nobel Prize, allies, Boer, abdicate, Home Secretary, Nazi, VC, DSO, Bolshevik, peer, civil war, Gold Standard, Home Rule, etc.—it is bold faced and referenced in a threepage glossary. This is not haphazard: there are over 60 such items, and every explanation is simple and accurate. This is a fine technique. I wonder why more books don’t deploy it—and not just children’s books.

Reynoldson, who has written over 60 history and information books for young people, shares with Churchill and his official biographer a demand for good maps. All these are high quality— not too detailed but perfect for readers this age—and sprinkled at key junctures throughout.

The very best aspect of Reynoldson’s work is the collection of little sidebars that pace her story. They are gems. Carefully, precisely, in plain English, she explains exactly why Churchill did such and such a thing, or how he felt about it, and why it matters. And she is never wrong.

Take his speech impediment—almost always misrepresented by haphazard writers. Reynoldson’s sidebar reads: “Churchill came home on leave in 1897 and went to see a doctor in London about his lisp. He pronounced V as ‘sh.’ Nothing was found to be wrong, but the lisp never went away. Despite this, he made his first political speech during his leave and later became a great orator [glossary word] in the House of Commons.” Perfect.

Some sidebars deliver profound facts about Churchill’s character that are rarely found even in adult biographies. Take page 48, excerpted from Winston’s letter to Clementine in February 1945: “…my heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads…before the advancing armies…. The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.”

How much more satisfying and true is this little insight than the popular slander about how Churchill instituted and even enjoyed the fire bombing of civilians.

Throughout, the author delivers unadulterated information. As with any good journalist, you have no idea how she feels personally about an issue. She deals in facts: entertainingly, even eloquently. I could find only one mistake: she says Churchill won the Nobel Prize for The Second World War (it was for the totality of his work).

Writing a compact book on a complicated subject is hard work. You must know what to highlight, what to jettison, what to gloss over. To choose the right subjects, to represent them deftly, is a great achievement. Fiona Reynoldson’s young readers will over time develop their own perceptions of Winston Churchill—thoroughly grounded in the education she has provided them.

We all need to buy five copies of this book and get them into the hands of schools, libraries and young people of promise.

Many are familiar with the growing line of yellow and black paperbacks in the famous “Dummies,” series: Football for Dummies.. .Chess, Computers, Religion, etc. Like those excellent books, Nigel Rodgers’s Churchill: A Beginner’s Guide attempts to acquaint people, mainly teenagers, with the subject. Churchill For Dummies is sorely needed. But this isn’t it.

Rodgers seems determined to make all the usual errors: Winston is a school dunce, ignored by his parents, Lord Randolph died of syphilis, etc., etc. Page 46 commits a half dozen clangers all by itself, and the next page tells us that Churchill’s novel was entitled Romola. Some of the gaffes are almost hilarious. Stalin’s suggestion, at Teheran in 1943, that 50,000 German officers should be shot (at which point Churchill walked out of the room) is said here to have been Stalin’s claim to have killed 50,000 Poles in the Katyn Massacre (which the Russians actually tried to cover up).

As such books should, the Beginner’s Guide provides suggestions for further reading, but the recommended books by Churchill “on his own life and career” are limited to only four (including A History of the English Speaking Peoples…T). The eight books about him include authors named “Martin Gilber” and “Rhodes James.” Roger Lewis’s and Lord Blake’s excellent Churchill: A Major New Assessment seems to have been published in 1933, when the only assessors of Churchill were writing him off as history. Which, sadly, is what we must do with this book.

The first we heard of John Severance was when Lady Soames remarked that someone had finally done her father justice in a book for teenagers. Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist was, she said, “intelligently written and beautifully printed.” Certainly the public must agree, for it has been in print now for nearly eight years, and was first reviewed in FH 90:33.

The target audience is 12-18, a bit older than Fiona Reynoldson’s. As in her book, there are no revelations. Severance sets out to explain Churchill and his times to young people who have not heard much about them in school. Again like Reynoldson, he takes pains to acquaint non-British readers with the working of British institutions. Tidy prose describes “great contemporaries”— Lloyd George, Stalin, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Hitler—and what they did.

Good writing is accompanied by Mrs. Severance’s elegant book design: fine type, artwork and photos that are not old chestnuts. Admirably there is an index, a bibliography and an appendix sampling of “Winston’s Wit.”

There are a few technical errors, mainly based on too literal an interpretation of Churchill’s exaggerations in My Early Life; but they are not engendered by malice, ignorance, or conspiracy theories. The book is too short to give much attention to episodic excitements like the Charge at Omdurman, the escape from the Boers, Armistice Day, or 10 May 1940. Severance has a different tactic in mind.

What he does extremely well is to focus on and demolish numerous myths floated by more pretentious biographies. For example, he notes that Churchill sent policemen, not troops, to pacify the strikers in Tonypandy; that WSC inspired but did not invent the tank; that the Dardanelles campaign was conceptually sound but ruined by incompetent execution; that while Churchill fought against the India Act, he sent Gandhi encouragement when it passed; that WSC clung to office in the Fifties only because he thought he might be able to save the peace.

On the wartime “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin, over which Churchill’s detractors consistently fulminate, Severance has a point that is worth considering, and not only by young people: “Perhaps Churchill thought this was the only sort of plan Stalin would understand and accept.” Exactly.

Some day we may have a Prime Minister or a President who as a youth was inspired by Fiona Reynoldson or John Severance. They have done history as well as Winston Churchill a favor, and everyone who appreciates the great man is in their debt.

Craig Read’s Winiston S Churchill: Man of the Twentieth Century, while not specifically for the young, is included here because it is a useful educational text. By no means as brief as the above books, it casts Churchill’s life against the history of the 20th century, and suggests why Churchill’s example points the way to progress in the 21st.

Read is an optimist, believing that “the world is on the verge of a liberalising order.” We need only leaders with Churchillian qualities to produce “a cadre of leading men and women, and all society will benefit from the reduction of intrigue and pettiness.”

This is not only a tall order but an argumentative position. Books have been written suggesting that Churchill’s whole career was one of political intrigue and pettiness. But as Martin Gilbert and others have proved, Churchill was indeed a noble spirit, ever placing principle above party and self, and Mr. Read is on the right side.

Preliminary chapters discuss 20th century history and its leaders, starting with the two Roosevelts, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. I never understand why writers on leadership feel obliged to include mass murderers, and some of these accounts are a little wide-eyed.

Stalin, “paranoid and threatened,” who killed more people than Hitler, somehow “galvanised the nation” to resist German aggression. Did he? When the Wehrmacht marched into Riga, Latvians threw flowers in its path. Russians may have fought bravely for the regime, after they had seen their villages razed and their families slain or enslaved; but the initial progress of the German assault was breathtaking.

Mr. Read also mentions social leaders (Gandhi, Mandela, King, Schwietzer, Mother Teresa) and “Innovators and Inventors” (the Wrights, Freud, Ford, Keynes, the Watsons of IBM, Einstein, Fleming, Watson and Crick (isolators of DNA) and (ready for it?) Bill Gates. What do they have in common? Each contributed to the “dynamics of change,” to the “democratisation of information, and, in essence, the democratisation of living.”

This book should set young and maybe older minds thinking. Churchill called the “century of the common man” the century that saw “more common men killing each other than all the others”; yet its inventions led to more people commanding their own destiny than ever before. Why? Great leaders, starting with Churchill.

Craig Read’s account of Churchill’s life is well summarized: “His extreme ambition, bordering at times on foolhardiness but always driven by an abnormal energy, galvanised all around him. Churchill was always a contrarian thinker…but he was not a Machiavellian posturer. His success rested on energy, innovation and positive thinking…” But some myths are perpetuated: Lord Randolph dies of syphilis (again); Lady Randolph is “affair-ridden” (if she had as many affairs as writers claim she would not have had time to eat); they do not provide a “stable home life” for Winston and Jack. In fact it was the rock of stability, thanks to Nanny Everest and Jennie’s unrecorded attentions.

Despite these early errors the story picks up and moves along well, though there are odd patches. Lend-Lease, by which Churchill got 50 old destroyers to preserve Britain’s lifelines, is deplored because the British “could not sell any parts” and this “contributed directly to British economic decline.” I venture to say Lend-Lease had nothing to do with it, but Mr. Read might have made his point by examining the effects of American monetary policy, specifically the 1944 Bretton Woods conference.

Read dates Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech as 1948 instead of 1946 and precedes it with a strange assertion: “Churchill told American officials that now [1948] was the time to tell the Soviets promptly that if they did not retire from Berlin and abandon Eastern Germany, withdrawing to the Polish frontier, ‘we will raze their cities.'” His footnote to this is Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life, pp. 865-66, but that reference contains nothing of the kind.

Mr. Read is entitled to a few mistakes when he can zero in on such important references to Churchill as T. E. Lawrence’s: “The man is as brave as six, as good-humoured, shrewd, self-confident and considerate as a statesman can be and several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanship course and do the honest thing instead”; or Churchill’s own remark in 1951, so relevant at this very moment:

“All the time the two great party machines are grinding up against each other with the utmost energy, dividing every village, every street, every town and city….Each party argues that it is the fault of the other. What is certain is that to prolong the process indefinitely is the loss of all….”

What was needed then is what Read says we need now: seasoned leaders willing to trade a little temporary popularity by sticking to what they believe, who have thought long enough to make their beliefs worth considering.

Read’s summary of “Churchill’s trajectory to statesmanship” is apposite: “First, accumulate a reputation for outspoken, principled action. Second, accumulate power via alliances, learning and public positioning. Then state a vision resplendent with clear principles, meanings and images….Lastly [devise] solutions in a national and international context. [Embed all this in] character, skills (verbal and technical), vision and power accumulation and recognition [and] a clear and clean sense of duty and morality….”

Surely there are leaders of this nature among the great democracies, today.