May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 20

The Special Relationship – Hands Across the Atlantic

How Edward R. Murrow promoted television and film sales for Churchill’s last great work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

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By Fred Glueckstein

Mr. Glueckstein is a Maryland writer and Finest Hour contributor. His previous articles were “Winston Churchill and Colonist II” (FH 125), “The Statesman John Kennedy Admired Most” (FH 129), “Churchill’s Feline Menagerie” (FH 139), and “Ed Murrow’s Churchill Experience” (FH 144).

In Churchill: A Life, Martin Gilbert wrote that by the end of October 1932, Churchill had completed half of the first of his Marlborough volumes and had begun to think about his next literary work, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.¹

On 22 February 1933, The New York Times published details about the new project: Churchill had contracted with the English publisher Cassell to write a 400,000-word history, and would receive £20,000 (then $68,000, equivalent to $1.75 million today)—an amount believed to be the highest sum paid for the rights to any book in the previous twenty years.²

During the summer of 1938, Churchill finished his final volume of Marlborough and completed the first chapter of his new History. On August 20th, as the Munich crisis was building, he wrote to Lord Halifax that “he was horribly entangled with the Ancient Britons, the Romans, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes all of whom I thought I had escaped for ever when I left School.”³

On the first of December, the day after his sixty-fourth birthday, Churchill completed his first volume, ultimately subtitled, The Birth of Britain.

Writing to his former research assistant Maurice Ashley in April 1939, Churchill spoke of his proposed theme: “…the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community. Of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions. Thus I condemn tyranny in whatever guise and from whatever quarter it presents itself. All this of course has a current application.”⁴

But this last great multi-volume work would not be published until 1956, long after the coming war, as Churchill would ultimately explain in his preface:

It is nearly twenty years ago that I made the arrangements which resulted in this book. At the outbreak of the war about half a million words were duly delivered. Of course, there was still much to be done in proof-reading when I went to the Admiralty on September 3, 1939. All of this was set aside. During six years of war, and an even longer period in which I was occupied with my war memoirs, the book slumbered peacefully. It is only now when things have quietened down that I present [it] to the public….⁵

Of The Birth of Britain, Harold Nicolson wrote in The New York Times: “This book is intensely, entrancingly personal. We have the author’s simple faith, his romanticism, his irony, his deep compassion, his scorn, his boyishness and his pugnacity…a memorable history, illuminated by flashes of genius, character and style, and one that is bound to prove an ever-enduring record of our common race.” In the Manchester Guardian Geoffrey Barraclough added: “The story of men’s efforts at all times to grapple with the problems and challenges of their own day—that story plain and unembellished stirs and exalts us too.” Churchill’s further volumes, which followed in 1956, 1957 and 1958, were The New World, The Age of Revolution and The Great Democracies.

Inevitably the author was interested in the sale of the television rights of the book in the United Kingdom and United States. To determine the American market, he turned to the American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, whom he had met in London after Murrow was appointed chief of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s European Bureau in 1935. Murrow had asked Churchill, who had been warning of Germany’s remilitarization, for a broadcast interview to the United States. In 1940, when Air Ministry censors tried to deny Murrow permission to send live broadcasts to the U.S. from London rooftops during the Blitz, Churchill as prime minister interceded and approved the request. The two men’s professional and personal relationship was cemented when their wives, Janet Murrow and Clementine Churchill, became close friends while working on relief efforts in war-torn London.

On 20 May 1958, Anthony Montague Browne, Sir Winston’s private secretary, wrote Murrow:

I discussed with Sir Winston the matter of the sale of the television rights of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples which came up at luncheon. He quite agrees that it would be very helpful if you could take discreet soundings and let him know if there is any market for it. Sir Winston himself could not, of course, appear to assist in any way—it would be merely a straight sale of the television and/or film rights.

Two weeks later Churchill himself cabled Murrow at CBS with one of his legendary “prayers”: “Pray inform me if you have been able to ascertain whether any market exists.”⁶

Murrow, who had by no means been inactive after Montague Browne’s letter, responded next day, saying there was “no active interest,” and that the general impression “seems to be it’s more suitable for large screen cinema.” Churchill quickly thanked his friend and for “the trouble you are taking.”⁷

Murrow, thinking Hollywood, now turned to his friend Samuel Goldwyn, writing on July 21st:

I think I mentioned to you that when I talked to Sir Winston Churchill in London last May he asked me, in his usual gracious fashion, to enquire whether there might be any interest in this country in the television or movie rights to his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples.” I have pretty well determined that there is no interest in television and I am wondering what you would think of the possibility of developing any interest in the movie world.⁸

Alas a week later Goldwyn said he would not be interested.⁹ It is unknown who else Murrow may have approached in Hollywood, but certainly he had started at the top. He must have been disappointed to advise Sir Winston on September 8th: “My friends in Hollywood are of course lavish in their praise of the literary merit of the work but seem to feel that they lack either the skill or the financial resources to turn it into a movie. I think they are wrong, but then I am not a producer.”¹⁰

Murrow’s efforts were extraordinary on the face of it, and Sir Winston clearly appreciated it. On 17 November, after Churchill returned from a holiday at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa La Capponcina at Cap d’Ail in the South of France, Anthony Montague-Browne wrote Murrow a letter expressing Sir Winston’s “very warm thanks for the trouble you have taken,” adding, “It was most useful to us to have the views of someone of your standing on this matter.”¹¹

Although Churchill was unsuccessful in having the book made into a television series or film in America, he had better luck in England. At considerable expense, the BBC developed and filmed an epic titled Churchill’s People, which consisted of twenty-six fifty-minute episodes based on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Endnotes

1. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000; first published 1991), 509.

2. “Churchill to Write Book,” The New York Times, 22 February 1933, 22.

3. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 605.

4. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3, The Coming of War 1936-1939 (London: Heinemann, 1982), 1445.

5. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. I, The Birth of Britain (London: Cassell, 1956), vii.

6-11. Collections and Archives, The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts.