April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03

Page 16

AN INTERVIEW BY MARTIN M. COOPER

“A History of Britain,” with Simon Schama. The History Channel, 2001-02.

It takes a certain amount of self-confidence to attempt to cover the history of Great Britain in fifteen hours: a daunting challenge that British historian and educator Simon Schama has met in “A History of Britain,” which concluded in November. Schama, who teaches art history at Columbia University and writes about art and culture for The New Yorker, sees Churchill as an immense figure with gigantic flaws and Promethean virtues (the foremost being his sense of history and unquenchable tenacity). Though born into the British aristocracy, Churchill somehow connected with people with whom he had little in common. His wife once told a friend, “Winston’s never been on a bus, and he’s only been on the Underground once.”

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Even as a small boy, playing with his huge collection of toy soldiers, Churchill was surrounded by the history he was to influence. As Schama sees it, “History became Churchill’s personal religion…reading it, writing it, making it.” As a young man in India and Africa, Churchill “knew how to make the headlines,” Schama says, “and how to milk them….Almost all his life he believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire…but he knew next to nothing about what made that empire tick—money.”

Churchill’s defection from Tories to Liberals in 1904, Schama says, was a product of his irrepressible activism. The Liberals were “joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England. You don’t usually think of Churchill as a radical, but all sorts of social reforms poured from his fertile mind…labor exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweat shops.” But Churchill’s youthful radicalism too often played second fiddle to grandstanding egotism. “As Home Secretary, he was a bit too eager to treat politics like battle, a bit too trigger happy…” As First Lord of the Admiralty, the 1915 Gallipoli campaign cost Churchill his proudest political office: “He went from being the shooting star of the War Government to its burntout meteor.”

Churchill’s inability to carry his colleagues in warning about Germany during the 1930s was partly because he was regarded as a posturing has-been, “embarrassingly devoted to lost causes, like keeping India.” But government leaders, Schama continues, saw Europe as a world of “unsavory continentals doing beastly things to each other; their business, not ours.” Appeasement, believes Schama, was “not just an act of cowardice, but the deepest stain on our long history.”

Once war broke out in September 1939, the swing in public opinion towards him was palpable: “Next to Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, although an old geezer himself, seemed like a red-hot volcano, a lava flow of plans and strategies.…Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short, famous speech, shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism, promising only ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat.’” Still, Halifax and others thought Churchill “would have to trade in his sentimental trash for hard reality; others thought of it as another theatrical performance.”

Schama’s discussion of the last two weeks of May follows that of John Lukacs: Halifax and Churchill “had very different ideas of how to save the country.” But Schama crystallizes this in a fresh way:

“Churchill wasn’t fighting for Britain at all, as a piece of geography; he was fighting for what he thought was the meaning of being British, an idea we’d given to the world, freedom, and the rule of law. Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Fuehrer, all we had was a mock Britain, unworthy of the name, let alone her long history. Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.

“When Churchill said all of this to the Cabinet, on the 28th of May, he was greeted not with polite nods but a thunder of fists on the table. There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment, he knew the people of Britain agreed.”

To Schama, the lion who roared alone before America and Russia joined the fray was the foe most feared by his enemies, foremost among them Hitler, and most admired by his allies: “Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence; he was drunk on words and he wanted everyone else to share the intoxication.”

By the end of the war, Schama believes “Churchill was drinking too much, his mind was wandering, he was not paying attention.…He came to Cabinet meetings from 1943 onwards scandalously unprepared.” Churchill’s death, in 1965 represented “the passing of a certainty of what it meant to be British. What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.”

Simon Schama believes that if Britain is to have a distinctive future in the modern age, “It had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history, a history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty. History ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It’s written not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living.

Mr. Cooper heads Cooper Communications in Los Angeles, and has written a book on the Academy Awards. This article is based an interview as well as the television series.