April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 121, Winter 2003-04

Page 41

By Richard M. Langworth


The blistering volume of Churchill publishing—print, digital, and video—continues apace, straining our resources to keep up. Among the offerings this season are a fine new catalogue of Churchill paintings produced by the literary marriage of David Coombs and Minnie Churchill; another attempt at marrying Winston Churchill to the “brief life” treatment; and a three-hour television opus which might have better served as an obituary, except for its length. Together these productions remind me of the title of a 1994 Hugh Grant film. Let’s take the funeral first.

Very Nice, and. Very Dull

Churchill, a three-hour documentary produced by TWI (UK) and PBS (USA). Narrated by Sir Ian McKellen.

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No runs, no hits, no errors,” the American baseball expression for an inning in which nothing happens, well summarizes this three-hour lullaby. In Britain it runs in three separate parts, which may keep more people watching.

To its credit, this latest attempt to capture Winston Churchill for a TV audience avoids perpetuating myths popularized by chic writers for The Atlantic and other arbiters of what passes for reality. Churchill’s father does not die of syphilis; his mother does not sleep with 400 men; WSC himself is not an alcoholic. There are a few minor clangers: Lord Randolph at forty was not “losing his marbles”; Churchill never said naval traditions were “rum, sodomy and the lash” (a remarkable gaffe, since Sir Anthony Montague Browne, part of this production, who asked WSC about that quote and got a denial, was apparently not consulted on the script). The producers don’t try to tell us that Churchill sent troops to quell the striking miners at Tonypandy—they tell us he sent troops to battle the anarchists at Sidney Street. (Neither is true.)

All the more regrettably, the raw material was there. The producers found some very interesting people: the grandson of WSC’s great colleague, David Lloyd George; the son of Andrew Dewar Gibb, who wrote about Churchill in the trenches of Flanders; the grandson of WSC’s longtime colleague Archibald Sinclair; telephone censor Ruth Ive; and George Elsey, who ran FDR’s White House Map Room. Former secretaries Elizabeth Nel and Patrick Kinna, and Sir Winston’s daughter and grandchildren, always provide keen insights. (Lady Soames pointedly wonders: what if Clementine Churchill had been bored by politics?) But the rest mainly recite platitudes and appear stiff, as The New York Times put it, “as if they have recited their Churchill-related memories One too many times.”

The right props were there too. The portrayal of young Winston at Harrow, alone and neglected, ranged against imposing school walls and the haunting Harrow song “Five Hundred Faces,” is superb. But the scenes soon degenerate to lengthy, repeated pans of still-life photos, half-full whisky glasses, and empty benches in the House of Commons, while Sir Ian McKellen manfully struggles to capture history’s flickering flame against a script in which even “Fight on the Beaches” sounds hollow.

The story is mainly all there, but bumps along with some clumsy transitions. In 1929 Churchill sets out for North America to earn money on the lecture circuit; in the midst of this we jump two years to his 1931 lecture tour, skipping the Wall Street crash, his financial collapse, and the onset of his political wilderness. His warnings about Nazi Germany begin…then the India Act intrudes, as if the producers suddenly realized they’ve skipped it. In the Munich era, Churchill’s true finest hour, many think, all the best perorations are absent. Throughout, there is next to nothing about his painting, or his books except My Early Life.

And the plot crawls. “To say it is slow moving is a gross understatement,” writes one of our members. “It is hard to conceive of the fall of France, the attack on the French fleet at Oran, or the Battle of Britain as boring, but they are….If the producers intended a pictorial synopsis of a World Book encyclopedia, I suppose it succeeds. If the intent was to do more than that, it fails dismally. Over and over I found myself saying to the television, ‘you missed the point,’ or, ‘you failed to do justice to that.’ It is hard to appreciate what this man accomplished without some statement about what was going on around him. A sense of urgency or desperation is missing….The program could not have gained Churchill many new fans.”

Fragments of the great war speeches do emerge briefly, but are poorly selected and even altered: in the “Mighty Mississippi” speech about Anglo-American cooperation, “benignant” becomes “benign,” which destroys the rhythm—Churchill would have furiously blue-lined that one. Since they cover 1874-1940 in the first hour, they had plenty of time to lead into and cover World War II, so there’s really no excuse for not getting it right. One wishes such producers would come to The Churchill Centre, or some other source of expertise, to vet these productions ahead of time. Oh for plenary powers and a willing scriptwriter!

*****

Celestial Delights

Sir Winston Churchill’s Life Through His Paintings, by David Coombs with Minnie Churchill. Levenger Press, 256 pages, 600+ illustrations, limited edition of 1500 is now sold out. A UK trade edition by Pegasus is now published and a U.S. edition will follow.

David Coombs’s 1967 catalogue, Churchill: His Paintings, has long been the “bible” for everyone interested in tracking and authenticating Winston Churchill’s more than 500 oil paintings—and has long been out of print, and out of date. To rectify the situation Coombs teamed with Minnie Churchill, Director of Churchill Heritage Ltd., who supervises the reproduction rights to the paintings and is herself an expert on them. Their labors have given us a superb new catalogue based on volumes of new information: a wonderful, albeit expensive, limited edition by Levenger. (A trade edition is planned but is not yet published.)

In the interest of full disclosure this writer assisted in very minor ways over the years. I recall conveying to David Coombs the news that a painting of the Italian Dolomites in the 1967 book was actually Lake Louise, Canada: Derek Lukin Johnston of the Vancouver Churchill Society, had recognized the sand traps Churchill painted in the distant golf course, “having spent a lot of time in them!” More recently, thanks to John Kops and Bill Benjamin in Florida and Celia Sandys in England, we published one of the few photos of Churchill painting with his wife observing (FH 116, Autumn 2002), which forms a lovely double-page frontispiece to the new book. The list of those who helped in far more significant ways is long, and testifies to the years of research Minnie Churchill and David Coombs put in before they were ready to publish.

The genesis of their project was described by Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison in the previous issue of Finest Hour. Compared to the original, the scope of the new book is vast. The majority of paintings are now reproduced in faultless color—some are regrettably small, but there’s none of the brassy color often seen in cheaper books. Here are celestial delights from Churchill’s palette that only private owners had glimpsed before. Included are some of the sketches he made or the photographs he used as aids: even pictures of the canvasmaker’s labels that help identify a genuine work.

The text consists of an erudite foreword by Lady Soames, an introduction by David Coombs, five thick chapters, a bibliography, catalogue and index. The chapters combine descriptions of Churchill’s artistry with a year-by-year background of world events, allowing the reader to compare WSC’s subjects and techniques with what might have been on his mind while he worked—although Churchill himself claimed that painting largely released him from worldly cares.

A bibliographic masterpiece, the chapter entitled “Painting as a Pastime” describes Churchill’s essays on his avocation, from their original periodical appearances through his stand-alone book, providing both a textual history and the full text. Another fascinating chapter is “Discoveries and Mysteries.” Here we learn how David Coombs authenticates a Churchill: what he looks for and what disqualifies a contender. And there are thirty-odd new paintings which have never before been seen or credited to Churchill. Fabulous.

The rear catalogue lists every known Churchill painting. Original “Coombs numbers” have been retained; new numbers were assigned to the new discoveries. The catalogue is printed in eye-straining small type, one of the book’s few flaws. (Could they have spared another spread and two larger point sizes?) Since the original “C” numbers were not chronological, these are not either —another minor fault. But they were wise to retain the original numbers to avoid confusion, and the new catalogue is painstakingly complete, detailing the ownership where known of each painting through the years.

It remains only to pronounce the Life Through His Paintings as one of the “must-have” books every Churchillian needs on the proverbial desert island— along with such classics as Lady Soames’s Clementine Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert’s In Search of Churchill, Urquhart’s Cartoon Biography, and Colville’s Fringes of Power. Granted, it’s not cheap—but you have to expect to pay for all those color separations. It’s not about politics, war, biography or history; Churchill was not renowned for his art, and always held himself an amateur artist. But arguably he cannot be understood without considering his paintings. This book is the last word you will ever need on the subject.

*****

Brier Lire Bonanza

Winston Churchill, Statesman of the Century, by Robin H. Neillands 216 pp., $19.95 Member price $15.

How many “brief lives” of Winston Churchill have there been? At a guess, at least a hundred fifty. They began with hagiographic World War II potboilers, continued with postwar valedictories and non-English works, moved through more balanced treatments in the Sixties and Seventies and, lately, a ration of juveniles and whingy biographies from the Feet-of-Clay-School. They are legion!

The brief life has peaked again over the past few years. We have had adult-market ones by Humes, Keegan, Haffner, Lukacs, Best, Wood, and Blake; juveniles by Reynoldson, Ashworth, Rodgers, and Severance; even a student textbook by Heywood. While there are enormous qualitative differences, all have the same proclaimed goal: marrying all you need to know about Winston Churchill with a short page count so you won’t be bored to tears or kept up late. Yet it almost seems that every one of these books has proclaimed itself an end-all and be-all: the latest and greatest.

Take Robin Neillands, whose Statesman of the Century informs us on his jacket: “All books on Churchill make the point that he was a great man. This book explains the course of events and the quirks of character that made him a great man.. .and why his life therefore provides useful lessons for later generations.”

Reading this in a vacuum, one might be forgiven for thinking that nobody had ever done that before. But 600 books exist about Churchill, and most of them try to explain in one way or another made WSC a great man. What then does this book add?

Some canny observations, at least. “One of the most curious aspects of Winston Churchill’s early career is how short these various, dramatic episodes that marked his life actually were,” Neillands writes. That gets you thinking. He spent only a few months each in the Malakand, the Sudan, and South Africa. Given the delay in communications in those days, it is all the more amazing that he crammed so much into the experiences.

Neillands gets most of his facts right, for which we must be grateful. He notes, for instance, that Churchill never sent troops to put down striking miners, as lightweight writers and socialists always insist. But he also gives evidence of too little steeping in the literature—too facile an acceptance of cant and popular misconception.

For instance, Neillands swallows whole Churchill’s proven fanciful account of his Harrow entrance exam (not even Lord Randolph’s son could have got in merely with an ink blot on an exam paper). His treatment of the Dardanelles/Gallipoli episode lacks interpretation or perspective; his view of Churchill’s defense of Antwerp in World War I is cliche-ridden and without substance; he somehow attributes the 1915 shell shortage on the Western Front as a factor in Churchill’s dismissal, “protesting wildly,” from the Admiralty. Where is all the interpretation showing how WSC became great, and the lessons for future generations?

And Lord Randolph dies of syphilis again—for the 173rd time in popular mythology. I sometimes think the depth of any Churchill biography might be judged at a glance from how it treats the death of Lord Randolph.

There are some niggling little typos and minor errors: “Lady Jenny” for Lady Randolph, “taxicab” for “car” when Churchill is knocked down in New York in 1931, “Mary Soames” for David Rose as author of Churchill: An Unruly Life. And curiously, Neillands seems to think Germany lost East Prussia at the Versailles conference.

The errors are few and far between, and the book is well written. The point is that there’s nothing here either to fulfill the promise of the dust jacket or to make this brief life stand out above the pile. It is modestly priced, and certainly should be acquired for those who pride themselves on an extensive library. But there are better short texts than this: Blake, Severance, Keegan, Reynoldson. This book is not in their league and can j hardly be deemed essential reading.

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