April 7, 2015

Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07

Page 40

By John Ramsden

Churchill Remembered. Two-CD set, narrated by Tim PigottSmith. BBC Audio, available from Amazon.co.uk for £6-12. Also downloadable for £9 at http://xrl.us/syii.

Few radio archives have deeper resources than the BBC, with many of its recordings going back to the earliest broadcasting days in the 1920s. The Corporation recently realised the immense value of its recordings by launching a successful series of musical and then spoken-word publications. One of Britain’s finest classical actors, Tim Pigott-Smith (Brendan Bracken in BBC’s The Wilderness Years TV series) narrates the latter, linking voices from the time on events that they witnessed. The 1940s volume of that series is in itself of great interest to FH readers.

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As a spin-off from that successful oral history, and again with Pigott-Smith as narrator, the BBC has produced an oral life of Churchill told at considerable length, mainly through the reminiscences of people who knew him. Written and researched by Mark Jones, it provides a sensible, informed and detached view of Churchill’s life through 1955; I noted only a couple of trivial factual errors (such as the date of the election in 1906—a very common student error, since unusually the government changed a month before the election, rather than afterwards as more usual). But these are slips which don’t seriously detract from the piece as a whole. The CDs’ real strength is, on the other hand, a quite fascinating array of personal reminiscences, ranging from the army sergeant who tells how as a young cavalryman Winston looked after his horse in India in 1897 (recorded 1955), to staff members like John Colville, Ian Jacob and Anthony Montague Browne describing WSC’s working methods during and after his finest hour.

There are a few over-familiar pieces which Churchillians would not have needed in the anthology—Neville Chamberlain declaring war in 1939 and Churchill himself talking about the Iron Curtain in 1946, for instance—but that is more than balanced by the rare opportunity to hear the actual voices of Leo Amery, Sam Hoare, Lady Astor and many others, as well as their actual memories. There are trenchant, and often critical, remarks from Lord Boothby; especially interesting memories from Oswald Mosley (far more favorable to Churchill than might have been expected); and several extracts from one of Churchill’s closest friends, Violent Bonham Carter (ne’e Asquith), with whose Winston Churchill As I Knew Him most readers are familiar.

Less expected highlights include the BBC’s star war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, on Churchill visiting the Normandy beaches in 1944; prophetic contemporary contributions from Ed Murrow on the significance of Churchill becoming Prime Minister in 1940; Harold Wilson’s father recalling the experience of being Churchill’s Liberal agent in Manchester in 1906; and the historian Alan Bullock (an early postwar biographer of Hitler) on Churchill’s historical importance.

Many of these recordings were broadcast only on the BBC’s overseas services, and the collection now published seems never to have been broadcast as a whole. It’s a rich, varied, sometimes humorous and always stimulating account of a great man’s life. At not much over $10 for 160 minutes of recordings, it is a quite amazing bargain. I listened to it over the course of a lengthy car journey to the North of England, and two hundred miles flew by in the wink of an eye. Every Churchillian should buy one!

Note: The BBC also offer another CD pair, “Never Give In!, Winston Churchill’s Greatest Speeches” (again £6-12 on Amazon.co.uk). There are other collections already available, but none that are anything like so cheap. Finally, Amazon are offering these two CDs plus the paperback of Churchill speeches, Never Give In!, edited by his grandson, for only £14.69.

• Professor Ramsden is Vice-chairman of The Churchill Centre’s Board of Academic Advisers and Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London.