June 24, 2015

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 38

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

Churchill, by Celia Sandys. Contender, 160 pp., member price $35.
Never Surrender, by Michael Dobbs. HarperCollins, 344 pp., member price $37.
Neither book is published or officially sold in the United States.


Two authors responsible for the recent avalanche of books about Churchill are the great man’s granddaughter, Celia Sandys (her fifth), and the popular English political novelist, Michael Dobbs (his second, but more are coming). They take entirely different approaches, but each makes a useful contribution to our understanding.

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Ms. Sandys, a self-confessed “non-revisionist,” presents positive though not hagiographic views, sometimes following well-trod paths but other times delivering new and different information. Her Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive retold her grandfather’s Boer War adventures, bringing in the perspectives of descendants of those who knew or met WSC during his South African days; her Chasing Churchill told much that we know about his travels, while providing insights into people and places the author herself revisited in his footsteps.

Imagine then my surprise at her latest, which is about the two hundred and fiftieth “brief life,” a field thickly populated with the good, the bad and the potboilers—and finding that it is one of the best short biographies ever published about Churchill, and in my opinion Celia Sandys’ best book yet.

Unfortunately it was not published in North America, but New York’s Chartwell Booksellers laid in a large supply, from which the Churchill Centre Book Club offers the work to CC members. Its absence among American publishers seems odd, because Churchill was written to accompany the recent ITV/PBS television documentary (FH 120), which was well received in the United States even before it was aired in Great Britain. At any rate, if you are reading this journal you can—and should— own a copy. Here is the ideal “Churchill 101” for those who want to know a lot quickly—it is not, by the way, a “juvenile,” though literate young people will find it good.

Like most books written to support a TV production, Churchill is profusely illustrated in color and black and white. The author tends to avoid the “old chestnuts” and provides some uncommon and interesting photos. It gets harder all the time to find any new artwork on Churchill, so this alone is worth the price of the volume.

The text is admirable. Aside from a genealogy chart reiterating the claim that Churchill was descended from an Iroquois Indian (soundly refuted in FH 104), the book offers studied accuracy. It even goes out of its way to correct a lot of hoary but widely believed fish-tales. Lord Randolph, for once, does not die of syphilis. (High marks!) Winston was not a dunce at school. (Still higher!) Young WSC learns his oratorical skills and absorbs much of his political philosophy at the hands of an American, Congressman Bourke Cockran (called “Senator” here, but high marks again). Churchill as Home Secretary does not send troops to quell the striking miners at Tonypandy (ultimate and superior marks!). These are correctives we rarely get, even from high-minded historians who rush over Churchill’s early life to get to World War II. Celia Sandys has clearly read the right sources, including Finest Hour. We are of course very chuffed at this.

The author says she reads FH reviews with trepidation, waiting for the shoe to drop! So as not to disappoint her, here are a few minor clangers. “Puffing his cigar, he had acquired the taste while at Sandhurst, he declared that he was giving up the army for politics.” (24) Didn’t he acquire the cigar taste in Cuba? “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults” was said by Violet Asquith not Pamela Plowden, who continued that you spend the rest of your life seeing his virtues. WSC’s first book was entitled The Story of the Malakand Field Force 1897 (26). The “Hughligans” was a name bestowed on young Parliamentary rabble rousers led by Hugh Cecil by their colleagues, not themselves (37). Arthur Balfour is slightly misquoted over the Sidney Street incident. (47) Very minor stuff.

More to the good, and more important, are such features as an insightful and sensitive sidebar on Churchill’s youth by Lady Soames; and the author’s point that the Armoured Train incident marked the turning point in Churchill’s life. From that point onward, she writes, he was no longer Lord Randolph’s (allegedly wayward) son, but a force in his own right, and soon that force grew beyond the imaginings of Lord Randolph, for his son or himself.

By mistake, I left Churchill at home before departing for warmer climes in December, and have not completed it. But I am anxious to do so—which is a very rare thing for someone who regards reading every new book about Churchill as a contractual duty (which probably explains my often jaundiced reviews). If I were to tell you that I am actually looking forward to finishing this one, would you take it as a serious recommendation? Good! Order your copy today.

Michael Dobbs is already at work on the third book in his Churchill series, in which Never Surrender follows his melodramatic Winston’s War (reviewed FH 116). I read N.S. in two gulps in two nights. Unlike Winston’s War, I found nothing about Churchill that seemed out of character and only one misstatement of fact (he won the Nobel Prize in 1953 not 1956). I believe Never Surrender is technically better than Winston’s War because the latter however entertaining seems improbable; whereas this story—involving the defeat in France and the rescue of the Army at Dunkirk—may well have happened as Dobbs says.

The story turns on a young, anti-war Briton named Don Chichester, the son of a clergyman, who goes to France as a medical orderly and is soon subject to the same Blitzkrieg that routs the rest of the army. He rescues a Frenchman who is initially antagonistic, but they build comradeship in misfortune. The scenes they go through, in escaping to the coast and to Dover, tell us what it must have been like. Churchill’s fight to stay in the war, no matter what happens, seems also accurate; yet Dobbs doesn’t accept every facet of the battle as WSC described it.

For instance, we all know Churchill’s story of the “little ships” of 1940: “Everyone who owned a boat of any kind, steam or sail, put out for Dunkirk.” According to Dobbs, most of the crews have to be whipped into sailing—into what was clearly a maelstrom. “This is much more likely..than a spontaneous epidemic of bravery among the yacht-owning class of south-east England,” wrote a reviewer who couldn’t resist a little class warfare. Who knows? Maybe those yachtsmen were brave, but aside from a few individuals, we’ve not read much one way or the other. Dobbs offers food for thought.

The sketches of real-life villains, as in Winston’s War, are so painfully convincing that I am sure they will enter into the non-fiction lexicon. Dobbs’ Rab Butler is a snake; I’ve read little elsewhere to dispute him. Joe Kennedy is worse, and Edward Halifax almost pulls a cease-fire with Hitler, which some historians now incredibly tell us was the right course. All this is realistically recounted.

As with the previous work, the novel hinges on certain fictitious relationships, in this case an anti-Hitler German named Ruth Mueller, with whom Churchill converses. She is the fictional replacement for the real-life Guy Burgess, with whom Churchill exchanged doubts and fears in Winston’s War. This may be the major weakness of the novel: seasoned Churchillians will find it hard to imagine the PM being so chummy with such a relative outsider. It just wasn’t in him to unburden himself to those he knew less than thoroughly.

The improbable dialogue is accompanied by improbable consumption of brandy. As someone recently remarked, Churchill “could not have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could drink that much”—as much at least as Dobbs has him drinking!

I don’t care. I liked Never Surrender. It is after all only a novel. But there have been a handful of Churchill novels, and none of them get you to think about war and politics the way Dobbs’s books do, which makes them quite singular among the genre. Better than any other fiction, they convey the desperation of those times, which we today six decades removed cannot possibly imagine. I await the next in the series.

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