June 24, 2015

Finest Hour 120, Autumn 2003

Page 34

By CONRAD Z. RISHER

Churchill as Historian, by Maurice Ashley. London: Seeker & Warburg; New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1968, 246 pp., illus. Frequency on the secondhand market: uncommon.

Most people think of Winston Churchill as a statesman and Prime Minister. But it was his writing that first brought Churchill fame, and the remuneration from his writing enabled him to leave the army and enter and remain in politics. So important an aspect of his life deserves serious attention, and thirty-five years ago, Maurice Ashley attempted to provide it with Churchill as Historian: the first of what are now several works devoted to that subject.

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If the book delivered on its promise of being the first study of how and why Churchill wrote history, and an assessment of what he wrote, this would be a valuable work. Unfortunately, Ashley spends too much time retelling the stories contained in Churchill’s own books and too little time analyzing them, or the man behind them. As a result, the book is a decent primer to those first learning about Churchill’s writing, but provides little insight to the moderately wellinformed Churchillian.

Ashley opens with three chapters introducing himself and his subject. Hired by Churchill out of Oxford to act as research assistant on Marlborough, he had ample opportunity to observe Churchill at work and leisure. As with so many biographies, especially those about so idiosyncratic a personality, this is the most interesting part of his book.

Ashley’s focus on literary pursuits provides an unusual angle of attack and a good sense of what is to follow. But, gifted more as a researcher than a writer, Ashley seems loath to exclude any fact, even if it does not fit smoothly into his narrative. Thus much of the introduction reads like a string of anecdotes lacking a central thread.

The fourth chapter is entitled “Early Works” but examines only the Malakand Field Force and The River War. (Ashley excludes London to Ladysmith and Ian Hamilton’s March as ahistorical journalism and Savrola because it is fiction.) Opening with a summary of both works, we move on to consider the insight they provide of Churchill the man. He treats Churchill’s second-guessing of commanders in both campaigns with great delicacy. The examination of the changes made—or not made—in the abridged editions of The River War elaborate on this point.

Such changes illuminate two other factors which Ashley thinks tainted much of Churchill’s work. The first is an excessive love of the wellwritten phrase. Churchill, he says, could not be prevailed upon to excise sections he had written in praise of General Gordon, even after he learned they were false, because he could not bring himself to waste such beautiful language. The irony is that Ashley doesn’t recognize his own tendency to hang on to every fact.

The second is Churchill’s magnanimity, or, less generously, the anticipation that his subjects might figure in his future career, which tended to obscure his objectivity. If Churchill’s criticism of Kitchener in The River War had not been tempered by the revised editions, Ashley argues, their relationship during the Great War might have been untenable.

For the remainder of his study Ashley examines each of Churchill’s books individually, generally dedicating a chapter to every two volumes. While he begins strongly with Lord Randolph Churchill, which he considers Churchill’s second-greatest book after Marlborough, the value of the text fades quickly. Beginning with The World Crisis, the book reads more like “Ashley as Historian.” While summaries of the topics Churchill covers may help new readers to decide what to read, they provide little insight.

Moreover, many of Ashley’s conclusions appear jarringly unfounded— and undefended. For example, he criticizes Churchill for blaming the naval defeat at Coronel in 1914 on “faulty wording of naval messages.” (78) Wasn’t Churchill himself “a master of words,” who “had been installed in the Admiralty in 1911 to overhaul the naval staff”? That a man as prolix as Churchill, not to mention as intelligent and fond of “good” words, would be expected to be a “master” of telegramming—which he may not have personally drafted—is a claim hardly worth crediting, and Ashley takes no time to defend this point.

The strong examination of Churchill’s motives behind writing Lord Randolph and the contrast of his take in The Eastern Front from that of other historians are the exceptions which ought to have been Ashley’s rule. With Marlborough, the author’s bias is too strong to go without defense or comment. Ashley slights his reader by breezing quickly through the few examples he gives of the research failures which marred that work.

At 246 pages, Churchill as Historian is certainly not an overly long read, and the neophyte looking to gain a sense of what Churchill wrote or how he went about writing will benefit from it. The serious Churchillian is likely to regret the time he has spent. Even the scholar, however, can gain some benefit from a cursory glance. By skipping sections where Ashley is the only subject, one may glean value from sections devoted to his far more interesting subject.

Mr. Risher is “a petulant, pedantic and curmudgeonly private citizen” of Washington, D. C.