September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 12

By MAX HASTINGS

Martin Gilbert Has Devoted Two-thirds of His Life to Winston Churchill

It was the Labour politician and author Anthony Crosland, I once read, who harboured a certain disdain for the literary achievements of his colleague Roy Jenkins, because Mr. Jenkins was a biographer. Biography, Crosland thought, was not real man’s work: writing about chaps did not present the same creative challenges as seizing upon a theme and pursuing it.

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Yet even the likes of Crosland should scarce forbear to cheer the extraordinary performance of Martin Gilbert. In 1988 he celebrated the publication of the eighth and final volume of the monumental biography of Winston Churchill that he inherited on the death of Randolph Churchill in 1968. The last volume alone was a book that you would be ill-advised to allow to fall upon your tame tortoise—four inches thick, 1348 pages long, detailing Churchill’s every public and private act between 1945 and his death in 1965. Those eight volumes, with their battalion ultimately of twenty-three companion volumes and documents, has to rank as the largest work of British biography.

Gilbert, who is now 78 (in 2014), has been living with Winston Churchill for two-thirds of his own life, since the day that he began as Randolph’s researcher, in 1962. His deep affection for his subject has remained undimmed. “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me,” says Gilbert. “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.’

“I was told when I started that I should expect to take ten years on the project. I was so confident in my own abilities that I thought: ‘I’ll do it in eight; maybe in six.’ Then I saw what was in the archives, the huge weight of new material released under the Thirty-Year Rule. I was frightened at one time that the constraints of reasonable publishing would prevent me from doing Churchill justice. I feared that I would have to cheat both him and the reader. I am very relieved, in the event, to have had space to do justice to every aspect of the man.”

Gilbert’s quick, jolly, relaxed manner masks one of the most energetic and prolific historians of his generation. Yet the vast weight of words he has expended upon Churchill earned him very little money. “The biography has been a financial burden to me,” he agrees. “But it’s been so fascinating—more than fascinating! It has provided me with a golden thread through British history.

“Churchill was such an open book, such an open personality, that one never has to guess anything about him. It’s all there. But there is an enormous difference between the amount of material available about the periods when he was with his wife, and when he was not. When they were together, that immensely valuable, almost daily diary of his doings, in the letters that he wrote to her, simply disappears.” Among the most moving documents in Volume 8 are the love letters—for that is what much of this correspondence was—between Winston and Clementine after half a century of marriage.

“My darling One,” he scrawled, on April 8th, 1963, “This is only to give you my fondest love and kisses a hundred times repeated. I am a pretty dull & paltry scribbler; but my stick as I write carries my heart along with it. Yours ever & always, W.” He was approaching ninety as he wrote, yet still he often scratched the little drawing at the foot of the page: “your pig,” whose shape and mood depicted his own. This remains one of the great love affairs of the age.

It is in the nature of the last period of Churchill’s life that Never Despair contains much of sadness. In the postwar period, both in government and opposition, the Conservative Party’s record on domestic affairs was unimpressive, to put it politely. In considerable measure, this reflected Churchill’s personal obsession—Gilbert disputes the word obsession—with foreign affairs, with Britain’s place in the world, and his lack of interest—here again, Gilbert disagrees with me on this—in domestic issues. He played more and more Bezique, read more and more widely, yet paid less and less heed to government.

Churchill was incomparably Britain’s most cultured Prime Minister of the 20th century. Lack of culture, lack of time for culture, makes many contemporary politicians much smaller men and women than their predecessors. Yet it is pathetic to read of Churchill in his last phase, his grasp of issues fading, prevaricating year after year about his own resignation; driving Eden, the chosen successor, almost literally mad.

“The end of the premiership was very sad. An element of pettiness came in all round,” says his biographer. Gilbert remarks that even during the now notorious period when the Prime Minister’s personal entourage concealed from the world that he was incapable, following a stroke, “the government machine continued to function pretty effectively.” This seems a dubious compliment, for it reflects the extent to which the entire administration was already functioning on automatic pilot, so to speak. But when I remarked upon the strain that this manner of doing business must have imposed upon Churchill’s colleagues, Gilbert said: “Yes, but one should emphasise one central fact—how enormously they all enjoyed his leadership. His presence. His company. His support when they needed it—for instance for Macmillan on housing and defence. Even some of those most eager to remove him shared this feeling for him.”

Many pages of Gilbert’s book are taken up with the account of this writing of Churchill’s six-volume memoir, The Second World War. As a war chronicler, Churchill was seriously hampered by the fact that he remained a practising politician, with vital interests to protect at home and abroad. I put to Gilbert some of the flaws and major omissions. “The book was still,” Gilbert argues, “a superb monument to history, as it could be told in the 1940s and 1950s. Churchill was conscious of the shortcoming. But the book gave him a vehicle to write certain reflective pieces—perhaps one of the most powerful being his description of the prewar appeasement years. He was determined that the story of Chamberlain’s great failure should be told.”

The Second World War is a much inferior work to Churchill’s parallel work a generation earlier, The World Crisis. Yet it contains passages that coruscate down the years. And heavens, what a lot of money it made for him. He needed a huge income, though, to sustain the life of a grandee in the age of the common man. Gilbert tells us that such arrangements as allowing Time-Life to finance sybaritic expeditions to Morocco—again, Gilbert disputes my use of the adjective “sybaritic”—did not contravene the draconian currency regulations then afflicting most Britons. But bailing Randolph out of his endless money troubles was a serious business.

What pain the old man’s family must have caused him. As he approached forty, Randolph was still making the sorts of promises to his father to mend his ways and read for the bar that Trollopian reprobates grew out of by twenty-five. Yet when I put this to Gilbert, he pointed out the happiness and support Churchill’s children also brought him. There was that wonderfully memorable note from his daughter Mary Soames in 1964: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father,” she wrote, “I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does—Liberty itself.”

Martin Gilbert’s central connection with the biography began one day in 1962, when he was a young historian doing research on Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. He drove down to East Bergholt in Suffolk to find that he had already been preceded by a wholly characteristic note from Lady Diana Cooper:

“Darling Randy, Here is Martin Gilbert, an interesting young researching man. Do see him. He is full of zeal to set history right.” From that grew Randolph’s invitation to become his junior researcher, and the offer to take over the huge task on Randolph’s death.

Gilbert, the son of a London jeweller, went to Highgate School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He has since inspired more than his share of pique from fellow historians, jealous of his energy, capacity to control material and privileged access to the Churchill papers: though no one who asked to see and to use the papers was ever refused, including A.J.P. Taylor for his life of Beaverbrook and Robert Rhodes James for his life of Eden.

Through the years he was writing, Gilbert took a break of six to nine months between finishing work on one volume and beginning the next: “I was very worried about becoming stale, and producing books which were much of a muchness.” In the intervals he made notable contributions to Jewish history, above all by his studies of the Holocaust. For a Jewish author, Churchill’s passionate support for Israel is deeply sympathetic. Gilbert himself, a companionable companion whose generosity sets him apart from some academic rivals, is always game to take up the cudgels for causes that mean much to him, such as that of the Russian Jewish refuseniks. He lived in unpretentious confusion in Hampstead, amid a predictably vast collection of Churchill books and papers.

My own admiration for Martin Gilbert’s scholarship is tinged with regret that he has not tempered his narrative with some critical assessments. Yet he always seeks to set the debates around Churchill in perspective. He passes no judgment in Volume 8, for instance, upon the achievements and failures of Churchill’s last administration. I turned to the final chapter, expecting him to mark Churchill’s passing with an essay upon his place in history. It is not there. Gilbert says that he does not regard it as his business to pass judgments: “By what you select, you make plain your views. I deal with the arguments for Churchill, and against him. But then it is for the reader to make up his own mind. People’s own historical perspectives are changing all the time—they have changed a great deal over the many years I have been writing.” This huge work is history written largely as Churchill would have wished it, charting his course through the history of the 20th century.

Martin Gilbert’s collected volumes, together with those by Randolph Churchill, form an extraordinary memorial. They are never dull, because their subject was never dull. Churchill’s huge generosity of spirit, his wit, his humanity, his breadth of interests, his capacity for love, sparkle through the pages. Gilbert makes the point that no man who reads this last volume can put it down believing that Churchill was a man who loved war. His last years of power were dominated by a personal struggle to bring together the leaders of East and West to avert it. “Never despair,” he told his countrymen amid the great surge of dismay that followed the test of the first hydrogen bomb.

If Churchill’s efforts to bring together the leaders of the world did not succeed, neither did their pursuit of peace fail. When this article was written, Martin Gilbert was still gathering his papers in the overcrowded working room of the house in Hampstead, not yet quite finished with Churchill. He had ten companion volumes of papers still to edit; then a single-volume edition of the biography to prepare. Five more years, he thought; it has turned out to be many more than that. By 1989, he had been on a twenty-one-year sabbatical from his old Oxford College, Merton. They would have to wait a little longer for his return.

Sir Max Hastings is a journalist, editor, author and historian. This article, part of our tribute twenty-five years ago, was first published in Finest Hour 65, Winter 1989-90, by kind permission of the Daily Telegraph. Cartoon by Richard Willson.