Ashley Jackson - Churchill
Ashley Jackson - Churchill
Churchill
Ashley Jackson
London: Quercus, 2011, v + 424 pp., ISBN 978-1-84916-547-1. Hardback
Ideally, biographies would be three-dimensional. As we follow the surface life story from left to right, we might press buttons to be taken deep behind the scenes in thematic excursions: perhaps technology could rekindle the discursive footnote? In the page format of the traditional book, it is hard for the biographer to stop the narrative and roam profoundly. For one exhilarating chapter, I thought Ashley Jackson had mastered the trick in his new study of Churchill. Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, seat of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough. Of necessity, his biographies begin with a toccata of nativity, noting that he arrived suspiciously soon after his parents' wedding, before moving on through childhood. Jackson pauses to give us a fugue, "Landscape for a Lifetime", arguing that Oxfordshire "shaped him profoundly." (11) In fact, we do not hear much about Dark Blue County thereafter, not least because it did not really figure much in Churchill's life. (He spent a dozen weekends at a local mansion in 1940-42, not out of nostalgia but because he needed to be close to London but as far from the Luftwaffe as possible.)
Far from infusing Jackson's book with a new and insightful interpretation, the Oxfordshire theme "works" more by highlighting two negative elements. First, Churchill himself chose to live in Kent. He imbibed his enthusiasm for the Garden of England from his nurse and surrogate mother, Mrs Everest, who was a proud native of the county. The offspring of a couple with the parenting skills of codfish, he coped by creating a private universe of his own – as he would again when, as a young Tory MP, he rejected most of the policies the Conservatives stood for. Many of us create our own inner worlds; Churchill was unusual in going to live in his. The second point requires us to look beyond the schooldays legend of the dullard genius consigned to one of the less cerebral regiments of the Army, and focus on the fact that his weak Latin ruled out going to Oxford. (The door to Cambridge, where maths remained the core curriculum, was even more firmly bolted.) Churchill was a ferocious competitor, but only when he thought he could win. For neither his father nor his son did the Oxford experience operate as a charm school. Oxford, especially one of its gilded butterfly colleges, would have made Winston even more of the "social wastrel" that his father so roundly condemned. (37) One key to understanding Winston Churchill was not that Oxfordshire was in his blood but rather that Oxford was not on his CV.
There could be variations on that Blenheim toccata. Churchill's career was book-ended by lost dukedoms. Until the age of 22, he was heir presumptive to the dukedom of Marlborough, in succession to his cousin "Sunny". (The earldom of Sunderland was one the family's courtesy titles.) The American heiress imported to shore up the Marlborough fortunes was given stark birthing orders by her new mother-in-law: produce a male heir to block the odious Winston from inheriting. In the golden glow of his final years, many speculated that he should be rewarded with a ducal title of his own – perhaps London, or maybe Chartwell? Churchill's secretary, Jock Colville, established that the old man was against the idea: a title would not fit his son's (fading) hopes for a career in the House of Commons. (The obverse was also true: the most appropriate form of address for Randolph was surely "Your Disgrace".) Accordingly, the Queen was advised that the offer could be safely made during the resignation audience with confidence that it would be declined. Churchill's romantic monarchism almost wrecked the choreography, as he momentarily felt he could not disobey his young and beautiful monarch. Seeing Churchill as a duke manqué can make some sense of his constant postures of greatness. He saw the post-1945 world as dominated by three overlapping circles, the Anglo-American, the Empire-Commonwealth and the European, with Britain as the sole member of all three. But there is also a sense in which he personalised those three circles to place himself at the controlling heart of affairs. He once light-heartedly rebuked Field Marshal Slim for condemning a potential British-American weapons scheme as a "mongrel project" (350), but overall he took remarkably little interest in his half-Yankee identity, only seriously seeking to exploit it during the second world war. Rather, he redefined the Americans within his own construct of the English-speaking peoples. Similarly, as Jackson points out, he unquestioningly thought of the Empire as a prop to British power. It was not merely that he refused to buckle to Indian nationalism. Appointing his cabinet in 1951, he sought to reassemble his wartime team, even calling Earl Alexander of Tunis back from Ottawa to take on Defence. Canadians were no longer colonials, and summoning their governor-general was hardly tactful: Alexander would be the last British appointee. Churchill was a "European" in a sense of the term before it was hijacked by Brussels, but his Europe was very much a theatre for Winstonian greatness. Jackson gives us a splendid photograph of Churchill escorting the Kaiser at German army manoeuvres before the first world war – or is the other way around? The ducal context perhaps helps to explain Winston's insistent confidence in his own greatness. We are all worms, he told Asquith's daughter, but he was a glow-worm.
The more specific Blenheim connection lies in Winston's relations with his father, the ducal younger son Lord Randolph Churchill, whose meteoric and mercurial political career crashed when he backed his demand for budget cuts by resigning from the Treasury. "Grandolph", as Punch called him, was a demanding and aloof father, a biographical element that Jackson deftly handles. Winston himself believed that they had only four close and amicable conversations, and his father's illness and early death left him with a lifelong feeling of deprivation. This was illustrated by a fantasy that he penned in 1947, and locked away, in which Lord Randolph appeared to him and they discussed the way the world had evolved through the previous half century. The death of his father, when Winston was just twenty, compounded his sense of loss, since Churchill persuaded himself that in a few more years he could have emerged from immaturity to become Grandolph's political Sancho Panza. We now think of Lord Randolph as Winston's father, but for much of Churchill's life the emphasis was the other way around. An elderly lady once told me a story from her mother, who had been a skivvy at Harrow School. On the day he arrived, young Winston had adopted a theatrical pose at the head of a staircase, proclaiming to the other boys, "I am young Randy!" They threw him down the stairs. But if Lord Randolph remained an unattainable void in Churchill's emotional life, he also represented a convenient policy vacuum which Winston could fill as he chose. In 1904, Churchill persuaded himself that his father's trajectory would have carried him beyond his quarrel with the Tory leadership and out of the party altogether, thereby validating his own decision to defect to the Liberals. Twenty years later, the inheritance eased his way back into the party. Baldwin needed an orthodox finance minister to provide reassurance after his brief fling with Protection. Winston returned to the Conservatives as a prodigal son, but Lord Randolph's son would not be prodigal Chancellor – and Churchill could even garb himself in his father's official robes. Did he ever fully return to the Tories? Recalling Sir John A. Macdonald's leadership of a Liberal-Conservative party in Canada, he had dreamed of a centre party, and campaigned as a Constitutionalist in 1924. His wife definitely clung to her Radical roots. "I hate Tories," Clementine told the astonished junior minister Henry Willink in 1940.
Each of the eight volumes of the exhaustively official Churchill biography is double the length of Jackson's book, so the challenges here are of selection and highlighting. The right buttons are generally touched, but the understandable temptation to omit the boring stuff can unwittingly distort the story. Jackson passes over Churchill's tinkering with the local government rating system (modern governments please note, not all changes are "reforms") which landed many voters with increased bills on the eve of the 1929 election, and himself with blame for the party's defeat at the polls. Selection can sometimes create confusion. Did Churchill run Britain's war or not? "Churchill's impact on the conduct of the war was immense," Jackson tells us (260), even though many of his "harebrained schemes ... were stinkers" (239). Yet we are told, on Ismay's authority, that Churchill never overrode a purely military decision (312). What are we to believe? Oddly precise detail can sometimes be puzzling too. In the summer of 1940, Britain produced "almost 352 new fighters" each month. (270) What on earth was the use of half a fighter?
With so many lives of Churchill on the shelves, the revisionist biographer must guard against the suspicion that he is proposing novelty by being merely perverse: we have always believed that episode X was a failure, far from it, it was a resounding success, trust me, I'm a biographer. Jackson makes large claims for two periods of Churchill's life that are generally regarded as barren territory. The first relates to the so-called wilderness years, the decade after 1929 when he was out of office and out of favour. Not so, we are told. His warnings against Hitler made his country home, Chartwell, "a major centre of resistance to the Nazis." (233) Churchill himself "remained an important national figure in touch with official circles, not a spurned soothsayer". (225) This not only seems overstated, but it is divorced from context. Jackson sees the Churchill of the 1930s as "a beacon of resistance and reason" – resistance, certainly, but contemporaries assessed the rationality of his warnings about Germany in the context of his diehard campaign against devolution in India. Even Jackson, in a deplorable lapse into homeliness, recognises that there were "moments when it seemed he'd done a Lord Randolph and shot himself in the foot", such as his support for Edward VIII in 1936. (221)
Although in recent years, historians have generally repudiated the slur that Churchill was gaga by 1951 and that his second period as prime minister, to 1955, was merely a joke, it is hard to dismiss the impression that he clung on for too long and to no good purpose. However, Jackson insists that his "laissez faire" leadership (355) was justified by his attempts to strike a deal with Russia: "Churchill played a unique role in preserving world peace." (356) To claim this is to assume, first, that the United Kingdom was still able to play a determining role on the global stage and, second, that no other British politician was willing or able to pursue détente. The real point here is that Churchill's frenetic activity misled him into exaggerating the influence of his personal diplomacy. Few recall Churchill's visit to Ankara in 1943 to plead with the Turks to enter the war. Leaving aside the small matter of Gallipoli, which did not make Churchill the ideal envoy, the simple fact that the second most important personality in the Western Alliance had come to beg their help naturally encouraged his hosts to submit a large equipment wish-list and a promise to think about it all. Flying off to placate the Russian Bear was simply a mug's game, giving Stalin first-hand opportunities to abuse Britain for allegedly failing to provide enough support, while bypassing his British visitor to negotiate with the Americans. Churchill's attempts at summitry in 1953-4 were primarily a continuation of his wartime self-delusion.
As I sometimes commit inexactitudes, to use a Churchillian term, in my own writing, I tread carefully with Jackson's occasional errors of date or fact. What does it matter that Christ Church was not Lord Randolph's Oxford college, or that he did not join the cabinet in 1883? However, I take issue with his statement that Churchill remained "a member of parliament until 1959" (367), since he was re-elected that May. Indeed, I saw the member for Woodford from the gallery of the House of Commons as he took his seat on 30 November 1959, coincidentally his 85th birthday. He was unexpectedly small, a bent beetle of an old man in morning dress. And I also recall the anguish of a Woodford woman in the early 'sixties. Her daughter suffered from an endemic health problem, and Authority determined to take the child into care (yes, it happened then too). My parents counselled resistance: go to your MP, they urged. Her eyes filled with tears as she shrugged and replied, "My MP is Churchill." Perhaps a rubber-stamped signature on a letter drafted by a constituency helper might have put a firework under some broad bureaucratic backside, but I cannot forget a terrified woman who felt she paid too high a price for the honour of being represented by the Greatest Living Englishman.
Jackson's achievement is to have written a book that conveys Churchill's personality, gives us a sense of what it was like to work with him – and against him. Of the traditional biographical duality of "Life and Times", this study earns its points for the former. Jackson is refreshingly provocative even when his enthusiasm does not completely persuade. Rightly he rejects those who carelessly dismiss Churchill as a stranded Victorian. Few people embraced change so eagerly as the Victorians; few endured it so stoically as the post-Victorians. As Churchill himself wrote, almost all the immutable shibboleths of his early life were swept away, while the improbable fantasies became horrid realities. Jackson set himself the target of looking beyond the rival caricatures of Pooh Bear and Mr Toad, of avoiding the simplistic censure of a dynastic dinosaur. I do not foresee a new triptych of Englishness – Elgar Malverns, Housman Shropshire, Churchill Oxon, but this is, above all, an enjoyable book to read.
Ged Martin
National University of Ireland Galway