September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 08

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

An issue in honor of Sir Martin Gilbert hasn’t been published for twenty-five years. So when Allen Packwood suggested one, the fit was perfect. This is my last issue of Finest Hour. There is no better way to complete my work of forty years than with these tributes from some of Martin’s many admirers. I am grateful to them all for highlighting an extraordinary career in words full of love, respect, humor, and above all of the character and humanity of a great man.


“Stop that!” Seated beside him at his first appearance before the Churchill Society—the second Churchill Tour on 17 September 1985—I had caught Martin Gilbert riffling through a briefcase which was crammed with sheets of yellow foolscap, tossing some out as the minutes ticked by before his lecture, “Churchill’s London: Spinning Top of Memories” (http://bit.ly/RibfUu). It was the first time I was to hear a Gilbert speech, and here he was, culling it already!  

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“This is my ‘Speech Form,’” he explained, referring to the term Winston Churchill used for speech notes. Unlike Churchill, whose typed notes included every word, the lines picked out like verses of the Psalms, Martin’s sheets each contained only a few handwritten words. When he began, he would pull one out, glance at the line, toss it aside and ad-lib flawlessly for five or ten minutes. Then he’d pull out another and the process was repeated. Before he started, he would self-edit himself by omitting sheets he thought might run too long.

“A bore is somebody who tells everything,” my best editor once told me. But here at this time, at the Waldorf Hotel in London, I wanted Martin to leave nothing out. We were Churchillians. We would hang on every word. But Martin kept culling, sympathetic to his audience, determined to fit his talk into what he thought was the right amount of time.

I have never heard as riveting a speech. As Ambassador Matthew Gould writes herein, it was a mix of “humility with humour and extraordinary command of detail, without grand flourishes or great cadences, keeping his audiences rapt in attention….an understated and diffident style which often left me feeling he was on the verge of running dry, only to answer every question with a great depth of knowledge and understanding.”

His written work is much the same. Critics might complain that he is too methodical, too “stuck” on chronology. But for Martin, as Andrew Roberts observes, chronology is the key. It was his job in the “Great Work” to place the reader on Churchill’s burly shoulder, personally observing the march of events—to explain what happened when, and what stemmed from it. Let others make broad pronouncements about whether Churchill was wise or foolish; Martin Gilbert makes his views plain from his selection of material. And few ever challenged the validity of that selection. The only times I saw him disgruntled were when later writers treated as a revelation some fact or anecdote he’d published decades before.

I marveled at Martin’s spontaneity. His public voice was the same as his private one: conversational, with vast recall, and a studious disregard for “revisionist” nonsense. He knew the story so well, you see. He knew it having sifted through more papers, documents, interviews and transcripts than anyone else on the planet.  

His words simply flowed, fact upon fact, with irrefutable logic. Always he would portray the same Churchill, a character with human faults and frailties, driven by a love of liberty and his fellow man. “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me,” Max Hastings quotes Martin as saying. “I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”

Asked once to describe Churchill in a single sentence, Martin Gilbert said nothing about blood, toil, tears and sweat: Churchill, he said, “was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction, rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.” That illuminates Martin’s Churchillian optimism, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes in these pages, that somehow, in the end “all will come right.”

Many authors, like Douglas Russell, here record how honored they were by a Gilbert foreword to or approval of their own books. In my own book of quotations, Churchill in His Own Words, he not only wrote the Introduction, but coined the best promotion line the publisher could hope to have: “unputdownable.”

His generosity was unending. A devout Jew, he never failed to wish his Gentile friends a Happy Easter—even those who were not particularly religious. With me at a Boston bookshop he pulled book after book of his off the shelves, paid for them and inscribed them on the spot. I wondered how many authors could visit a shop and find four of his books on the racks (or what the shop owner thought of this stranger scribbling in his stock!)

A devoted and constant friend, Martin has always been there for this organization, producing scholarly articles, traveling to lecture at conferences as distant as Alaska, guiding tour parties from London to Suffolk, where he showed up at Randolph Churchill’s old home shedding tears of memory. His phenomenal recall rarely missed a reference. When I offered him the toast, “Roselipt maidens…lightfoot lads,” Martin exclaimed: “Housman! From Out of Africa” (the great film with Streep and Redford, based on Isak Dineson’s book).

Martin always downplayed and offered no details of his work for successive prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Gordon Brown, but he did once share an amusing anecdote. In the Middle East to meet with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Prime Minister John Major introduced Martin as “my guru.” Consternation and a buzz of hasty chatter arose in the Arab delegation. It finally emerged that they weren’t sure what a guru was! Yet the Prime Minister had exactly described Martin’s role. On the next page Prime Minister Major (and further on, Martin’s wife Esther) describe what it is like to travel with this keen historian.

The main problem with a Festschrift issue of Finest Hour honoring Martin Gilbert is not finding enough material, but restricting the volume of it—since so many people would wish to pay him tribute. And here I am, introducing twenty articles from prime ministers to acquaintances, on every aspect of Sir Martin Gilbert’s life and work. Above all, the impression you will get from each is Martin’s devotion to history, and to us.

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
A Shropshire Lad, Housman

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