April 5, 2013

DESPATCH BOX: FINEST HOUR 154, SPRING 2012

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STILL STAR QUALITY

The Daily Telegraph entitled a piece, “Winston Churchill made history— David Cameron never will.” Leaving aside their article, which is irrelevant to Churchillians, I had to take note that almost fifty years after his death, Churchill is still headline material. This may not be surprising but should be.

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Why should Churchill still be star quality after all this time? Yes, we know—but do we often reflect on the why, or consider what his enduring qualities were, and why we see them admired today? With modern problems, don’t ask “what Churchill would do,” as Lady Soames so trenchantly observes. Seek instead the principles he would act on. We may find that he was wrong on occasion, but never dishonorable. That is still a good guide today. JONATHAN HAYES, CORVALLIS, ORE.

FINEST HOUR’S NEW LOOK

The new layout of Finest Hour is great—easy to read even on a treadmill. DAVID DRUCKMAN, TUCSON, ARIZ.

Many congratulations on 153: it’s not only a fine read but the “new look” is excellent, enticing one to look beyond its cover. To my mind there is no doubting its “kerb appeal” which I am sure will prove a further help in the efforts of our Branch to attract a wider (if I may be so bold, younger?) audience. NIGEL GUEST, CHMN, CHARTWELL BRANCH, CHURCHILL CENTRE UNITED KINGDOM

Thanks for the excellent articles on timely subjects: currency manipulation and the Gold Standard—fascinating, with a lot of educational bang for the buck. The articles explain and correct many financial terms, like “sterilization,” which I’ve encountered but never understood. They also showed that the economics complex that the finest minds, with a life-time of experience, struggle with it. This kind of activity, though crucial in determining the policy of nations, goes on entirely behind the scenes, unappreciated by the general public. I’m now better prepared to understand these issues. STEVE GOLDFEIN MD, SAN FRANCISCO

I have a letter from a member saying he just finished Manchester’s The Last Lion volume II for the third time, asking if there is a book we could recommend that covers Churchill’s war years, “preferably in the Manchester style and with comprehensive research.”
DAN MYERS, CHURCHILL CENTRE, CHICAGO

• Editor’s response: He might start with the World War II sections of Roy Jenkins’ Churchill (which are substantial). Or try Geoffrey Best’s Churchill and War and John Lukacs’ Five Days in London, May 1940, which contain a lot of the drama of that time. Max Hastings’ Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord is also very well written. Please also refer him to the two excerpts of Manchester’s volume III in Finest Hour. Finally he should read Barbara Leaming’s Churchill Defiant for what happened after the war, because she packs a lot of style along with her understanding of the subject.

FH 153 was good. I always wanted more on Churchill and the Gold Standard, though I think the articles let WSC off a little lightly as just following the wishes of advisers. One small correction: Lynne Olson said, describing the early war years, that Life covers “during that period” (p. 54) influenced America positively towards Britain, and that “another more famous Life cover during that period influenced America positively towards Britain, and that “another more famous Life cover during that period [was] the famous Karsh portrait…” But the Life Karsh photo did not appear until the 21 May 1945 issue, not the early war years.
RICHARD J. MAHONEY, ST. LOUIS

• Editor’s response: I took “during that period” to mean World War II, as Ms. Olson was not referring to the first Life cover featuring Churchill (29 April 1940), which was not by Karsh, nor had the Blitz started when that cover ran. Americans look back on the amazing panoply of World War II like a Greek epic, forgetting how brief a time it really was, at least for the USA. The “Grand Alliance” polished off Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in less than four years. Nowadays we take longer than that to approve an oil pipeline.

FLYING AND NEAR-MISSES

To Randolph Churchill and the Editor:
I cannot thank you enough for sending me Churchill’s articles “In the Air” (1924) and “The Effect of Air Transport on Civilisation” (1938), both fascinating, prophetic and pure WSC: beautifully written, and, from a pilot’s point of view gripping, with a subtle sense of humour. But what shattered me was to learn how, on four occasions, Churchill so nearly lost his life in early airplane accidents. How different our history would have been had he done so. Thank God Clementine and his family persuaded him to stop learning to fly. I do not believe that the aviation community (I speak as a pilot of fifty-nine years) knows anything about these matters, so I must put my thinking cap on to consider how best to inform them. Any thoughts from your side? MARTIN BARRACLOUCH, ENGLAND, VIA EMAIL

• Editor’s response: Your expertise as a pilot provides you with the knowledge to inform readers of his near-misses. It would be fine if you would provide a commentary on Churchill’s “In the Air” for us to run alongside that article in Finest Hour. As for the what-ifs, at right is a thoughtful reflection from our 1995 Boston conference—words we have long remembered….

More Richard Burton on Churchill

Anent Lady Williams’ letter (FH 153:5), Robert Hardy mentioned the Burton-Churchill encounter over Hamlet whilst addressing the recent London Churchill conference. He confirmed that “the old man” was the expression Burton used to refer to WSC, and that Churchill came to the dressing room and addressed Burton as “my noble Prince”—although Burton himself remembers Churchill said, “My Lord Hamlet”—before asking if he could use the loo. Having done so, Churchill told Burton his soliloquy was magnificent and that, consequently, he was surprised it took him so long to get to it! RAFAL HEYDEL-MANKOO, LONDON

• Editor’s note: This was not WSC’s only theatrical meandering. During a performance of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, starring
Laurence Olivier, Churchill went “looking for a corner.” Returning to his seat he told his daughter Mary, “I was looking for a loo-loo, and who d’you think I ran into? Juloo.”

BURTON’S CHURCHILL ANTIPATHY

Pursuant to the above, and Lady Williams asking our reasons for believing that Burton disliked WSC, from John Ramsden, Man of the Century (London, 2002), 231-33:

In 1953 [Churchill] visited the Old Vic theatre to see Burton play Hamlet, complimenting him on the virility of his characterisation. During the interval he visited Burton in his dressing room (asking “My Lord Hamlet” if he might make use of his lavatory) and then met the cast and shook hands with them on stage after the performance. Burton later recalled the extreme difficulty of performing in front of “this religion, this flag, this insignia,” especially since the great man was sitting near the front of the stalls and muttering “To be or not to be?” and much of the rest of the play along with the eponymous hero.

A few years later, Richard Burton earned $100,000 for recording Churchill’s own words for the sound track of the television series The Valiant Years, based on Churchill’s World War II memoirs, and was apparently chosen for the part by Churchill himself (“Get that boy from the Old Vic…”), arguably one of the best things he ever did. He managed to convey the inner feel of that gravelly Churchillian voice without actually mimicking it, and he was thereafter much in demand for sound tracks requiring Churchill’s words…much as Robert Hardy would in the next generation.

Even then, Burton was fairly defensive about just what he was doing, claiming that he had based his Churchill voice “slightly on a Peter Sellers imitation I once heard of an upper class Englishman, dropping aitches and changing Rs into Ws.” By making such claims, as he did from time to time on television chat shows (usually reminding audiences that this was a long way from the real Burton, for “I’m the son of a Welsh miner”), he was implicitly undermining the idea of Churchill as an epic figure, though that was certainly what his Churchill voice actually sounded like. And anyway the famous Sellers impersonation that he was surely referring to, “Party Political Broadcast,” was based on Anthony Eden and did not sound remotely like either Churchill himself or Burton’s version of him.

The problem was, as Burton told Kenneth Tynan in 1967, “I am the son of a Welsh miner and one would expect me to be at my happiest playing peasants, people of the earth. But in actual fact I am happier playing princes and kings….” He was in fact unhappy being Churchill partly because he had found in himself a tyrannical, domineering person—quite right for the part but hard to live with and not the way he liked to think of himself.

This inner dichotomy came suddenly and damagingly to the surface when in 1974 he was cast as Churchill [in The Gathering Storm]. Actually appearing as Churchill rather than merely providing a voice for his words clearly upset Burton greatly, though by this stage of his life his drinking problem was beginning to overwhelm him anyway and his processes of thought were at times affected by it.

Just a few days before the programme was to be shown on both British and American television, interviews with Burton appeared in the American press in which he confessed that “to play Churchill is to hate him” and asked himself what the son of a Welsh miner was doing in a celebration of a man who was the enemy of his class and his nation, a “toy soldier child” who had never grown up and (thought Burton the actor) was himself always playing a role. He now recalled that meeting Churchill had been “like a blow under the heart,” so overwhelming was his presence. “I cannot pretend otherwise, though my class and his hate each other to the seething point.”

A few days later, by which stage he was under severe attack in both countries, receiving shoals of (unanswered) letters of complaint from friends like Robert Hardy, and had been banned from BBC Drama for life, he went even further: “Churchill has fascinated me since childhood—a bogeyman who hated us, the mining class, motivelessly. He ordered a few of us to be shot, you know, and the orders were carried out.” So even in the week of his centenary, the myth of Tonypandy was still around to haunt Churchill’s memory.

Burton too was of course playing a part here, for his lifestyle was now way beyond the comprehension of Welsh miners. Jack Le Vien was quick to point out that Burton’s new views had nothing in common with the admiration for Churchill that he had expressed in all their previous conversations, the most recent only a month earlier, that Burton had a Churchill bust which was one of his “most treasured possessions,” and that he had recently met both Clementine Churchill and Churchill’s grandson and told both of them how much he admired “the old man.”

In the Commons, Conservative MPs were outraged. Norman Tebbit, just then gearing up for his life’s work as the polecat of parliamentary and tabloid invective, observed that this was “merely an actor past his peak indulging in a fit of pique, jealousy and ignorant comment.” Neville Trotter spoke for rather more of the silent majority with the measured avowal that “if there were more Churchills and fewer Burtons we would be in a very much better country.”

As his career and life deteriorated around him and the fog of alcohol descended, Burton was trying desperately to play the man he had been long ago, and he at least knew what young Welshmen had been expected to believe about Winston Churchill. He was not asked to play either part again. (Ramsden refers to the Burton biographies by Ferris and Bragg.)

WHY DID BURTON DO IT?

From FH 32, Winter 1974-75, p. 3:

Richard Burton has just given two of the oddest, most contradictory performances of his career. Both involved his portrayal of Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm….The prologue consisted of two articles by the actor in TV Guide and The New York Times.

Mr. Burton put on a good show as Winston Churchill, a bad show as Richard Burton. His intemperately anti-Churchill articles appeared on the weekend prior to the November 29th NBC broadcast in the United States. As a result of their publication, Mr. Burton has been banned from the BBC. The Times article was the more vitriolic. Headlined simply, “To Play Churchill Is To Hate Him,” it unleashed Mr. Burton’s petulant storm of spleen.

—Quoted from “Viewing Things,” by John Beaufort, The Christian Science Monitor, 9 December 1974. Burton’s New York Times article appeared on Sunday, 24 November 1974. A .pdf file (along with rejoinders by Sir Robert Rhodes James, Sir Anthony Montague Browne and Jack LeVien) is available from the editor by email.