May 11, 2013

RIDDLES, MYSTERIES, ENIGMAS: FINEST HOUR 142, SPRING 2009

ABSTRACT

Past It After 1945?

Q: I’d be interested in your opinion on the final years of Winston Churchill’s life, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1965. My British friends think little of them. —Arnold Foster, New York City

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A: Churchill was a hero and iconic figure ain America, but in Britain he remained a politician, and as such was not uniformly admired. David Stafford wrote about the relatively equable view of Churchill among British citizens in “True Humanity,” Finest Hour 140:50.

Douglas Hall in “Churchill the Great? Why the Vote will not be Unanimous” (Finest Hour 104) noted: “By transferring his allegiance from the Conservatives to the Liberals and back again he was successively at odds with all of the people for at least some of the time”.

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Many believe Churchill was “past it” after the war, or by his second administration (1951-55). But Sir Martin Gilbert has argued convincingly that WSC’s efforts to build a permanent peace were not those of a senile has-been.

Some think of Churchill’s last twenty years as a coda to his prior life: after World War II, anything would be. The last ten years were a sad time of aging and decline—but not 1945-55. Churchill began that decade as a scintillating Leader of the Opposition and the acclaimed author of The Second World War. But the main thing that engaged his interest was a quest for peace in a troubled age. The “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton in 1946 was a decisive moment; so were his speeches on European reunification at Zurich and The Hague. In the early 1950s, the irony of Eisenhower resisting his proposals for a meeting with Stalin’s successors, and then immediately meeting with them once WSC had resigned, is a sad story.

Recommended reading: Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America for the Eisenhower-and-Russians controversies; Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset for the personal side; Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer for the most thorough treatment of the 1951-55 premiership; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, “Never Despair” 1945-1965 for complete detail on everything.

Be careful of Lord Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival. Martin Gilbert found that much of what Moran wrote was not in his diary at the time. It could only have been made up later. Jock Colville said:”Lord Moran was never present when history was made, but he was sometimes invited to lunch afterward,” which is perhaps too harsh, but nevertheless succinct.

Speaking of Churchill’s health, a very good but often overlooked piece on his first stroke by Michael Wardell is “Churchill’s Dagger: A Memoir of La Capponcina”.

Q: I am an undergraduate composing a paper in my British literature class about the influences of Winston Churchill. I have found that he quoted Tennyson in a number of speeches and writings and am curious to know if any other authors come to mind when you think of Churchill. Namely when Churchill himself wrote in reference to particular styles or quotations of other authors.

—ALLISON HAY, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

A: You ask a good question. He had no University training and educated himself by devouring books his mother sent him when he was stationed in India in 1896-97: Tennyson and others including Malthus, Darwin and many more. You will find those books enumerated in Finest Hour’s “Action This Day” section. 

You can access many sources on our website “search” engine. As a boy, WSC read Walter Scott, George Alfred Henty and Robert Louis Stevenson. His chief inspirations were the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Macaulay, Plato, Darwin and Malthus. If you enter these words in “search,” on our home page, you will be led to numerous references.

Poets: right about Tennyson—there are seven “hits” on our site. Also try Clough, Milton, Keats, Byron, Burns, Blake, Thomas Moore, Emerson, Kipling.

Also enter “Kinglake” (Alexander William Kinglake, 1809–91). When asked how to excel at writing history, Churchill once replied, “Read Kinglake.” There are lines in Kinglake’s The Invasion of the Crimea (1863) which closely prefigure Churchill’s style. In an 1898 article on British frontier policy in India Churchill wrote: “I shall take refuge in Kinglake’s celebrated remark, that ‘a scrutiny so minute as to bring a subject under a false angle of vision is a poorer guide to a man’s judgment than the most rapid glance that sees things in their true proportions.'”

Churchill and the Art of the Statesman-Writer,” shows how he strung all this background together.

Check the new book of quotations, Churchill by Himself. Many quotes of these authors are included in Churchill’s remarks. Finally, Darrell Holley’s Churchill’s Literary Allusions (MacFarland, 1987) is an invaluable compendium of hundreds of Churchill’s sources, organized by subject, including Shakespeare, Romantic Literature, Victorian Poets, Macaulay, 19th and 20th century literature, etc. There are many copies on www.bookfinder.com: the cheapest are listed on Amazon. Although pricey, this is an important work.

Holley’s largest chapter is on the King James Bible, which he considers Churchill’s “primary source of interesting illustrations, descriptive images, and stirring phrase….For him it is the magnum opus of Western civilization.” This is an interesting point, because Winston Churchill was not a devout observer. Yet he admired the Bible for its eternal truths and literary quality.

Note: Miss Hay’s paper will shortly appear in Finest Hour. —Ed.

HILLSDALE’S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

Q: Why did volume IV of the new edition of Winston S. Churchill change its title from The Stricken World to World in Torment?

A: The titles of all volumes in the new edition, both narrative and document, are determined by Sir Martin Gilbert. It was also Martin’s idea to contrive a new and less confusing numbering system for the document volumes. —DOUGLAS JEFFREY, EDITOR, HILLSDALE COLLEGE PRESS, HILLSDALE, MICHIGAN

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