Abstract
During his ‘wilderness years’ Churchill had been subjected to criticism, scorn and, at times, quite barbed derision in the Commons.1 Six weeks after the outbreak of war, and having returned to the Admiralty, Churchill received a letter of apology from Colin Thornton-Kemsley (the Conservative MP for Kincardine and West Aberdeenshire), who expressed regret at having opposed Churchill for as long and as hard as he had, and for not having listened to his repeated warnings about the ‘German danger’.2 With typical magnanimity, Churchill replied how ‘Englishmen ought to start fair with one another from the outset in so grievous a struggle’, and that for him, ‘the past’ was ‘dead’.3 As far as personal animosity was concerned, this was certainly so, but in another sense the past was never really dead for Churchill. At the same time as he sent his reply, Churchill was being approached by publishers who were vying for his attention (and signature) over what they expected would be a great piece of writing.4 Churchill may have been 65 years old and unsure as to whether he would survive the war, and no one was sure whether he would retain his position in the Admiralty for the duration, but what was certain was that he would write about his role in the fight — and he would write it well. This chapter contextualises Churchill’s literary empire, outlines the interplay between memoir and history in relation to his Second World War, and illustrates how his six volumes moved from memoir to history.5
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Notes
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume I, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 527.
Colin Thornton-Kemsley to Churchill, 17 September 1939 in Martin Gilbert (ed.), The Churchill War Papers: Volume I: At the Admiralty, September 1939–May 1940 (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 51–2.
See David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 5–22.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volumes I–VI (London: Cassell, 1948–54).
Sir William Deakin in conversation with Martin Gilbert, 15 March 1975 in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965: Volume 8, Never Despair (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 315; Churchill’s speech on the death of Neville Chamberlain, Hansard, HC (series 5) vol. 365, col. 1617 (12 November 1940).
Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Black Swan, 1999), Clementine to Churchill, 23 November 1943, p. 486.
See David Reynolds, ‘Churchill’s Writing of History: Appeasement, Autobiography and “The Gathering Storm”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 11 (2001), p. 221; and In Command of History, pp. 13–22.
Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 170.
Churchill to his mother Lady Jennie Churchill, 19 May 1891, in Randolph S. Churchill (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume I, Part 1: 1874–1896 (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 234.
Robert Blake, ‘Winston Churchill as Historian’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 44. See also Martin Gilbert, Churchill: The Power of Words (London: Bantam, 2012), pp. vii–ix.
Churchill’s historical knowledge sometimes proved quite remarkable. For example he ‘startled’ MPs on 12 October 1943 when he ‘invoked the oldest active treaty in the world’ (the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1373) and used it to illustrate the point he was making: that alliances, no matter how little thought of, were always useful—especially in wartime. See Fred Glueckstein, ‘The Leader as Historian’, Finest Hour, 158 (2013), pp. 28–30.
Maurice Ashley, Churchill as Historian (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 18.
Winston S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill: Volumes I–II (London: Macmillan, 1906).
Edward Porritt, ‘Review: Lord Randolph Churchill by Winston Spencer Churchill’, The American Historical Review, 11/3 (1906), p. 675.
John Lukacs, Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 109.
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: Volumes I–V (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923–31).
Robin Prior, Churchill’s World Crisis as History (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 283.
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: Volume IV, The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929; Folio edition, 2007), p. xi.
In the preface to his third volume of The World Crisis, Churchill wrote that the ‘material had been assembled, the work studied and planned, and the greater part actually finished’ when he had been invited back to government as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924. The ‘weight’ of his official duties, so Churchill continued, ‘forced’ him to put his ‘literary projects indefinitely aside’ until mid 1926. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: Volume III, 1916–1918 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927; Folio edition, 2007), p. xi.
CCAC, CHAR 20/3/94: ‘Mr. Churchill as a Writer’, script of broadcast to India by Leo Amery, 6 December 1940; Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Volumes I–IV (London: Harrap, 1933–8).
Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Volume I (London: Harrap, 1933; Folio Society edition, 1991), p. 5.
Morton J. Frisch, ‘The Intention of Churchill’s “Marlborough”’, Polity, 12/4 (1980), p. 562.
Ashley Jackson, Churchill (London: Quercus, 2011), p. 232; CCAC, DEKE 5: ‘Churchill as Historian, Lecture given by Denis Kelly to the Middle Temple History Society, London, 13 January 1982, p. 14.
Violet Barbour, ‘Review: Marlborough: His Life and Times’, The American Historical Review, 44/4 (1939), p. 886.
Only recently Reynolds’s In Command of History has once again been lauded as required reading alongside Churchill’s Second World War. See David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011), fn. 1, p. 303. Raymond Callahan wrote that Reynolds’s In Command of History is ‘one of the most important books yet produced about Churchill’. See Raymond Callahan, ‘In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War’, Journal of Modern History, 70/2(2006), p.551.
John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory: A political biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), p. 647.
Labour won 393 seats, the Conservatives and their supporters 210, and the Liberals 12 seats. Labour made 203 gains and had a majority of 159 seats overall other parties. Kenneth O. Morgan, Labourin Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 41.
See John Ramsden, Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend Since 1945 (2nd edition, London: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 154–62; and Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 41–8.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), p. 583. See also LHCMA, ISMAY 5//2: ‘Meditating the result of the election the Boss delivered himself of this superb saying — “it may well be a concealed blessing, though I’m bound to admit it is very well concealed”’, Brendan Bracken to Ismay, 7 August 1945.
Kathleen Hill to Emery Reves, 2 August 1945, in Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937–1964 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 250–51.
See Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travellingbetween the Wars (Oxford: OUP, 1980; 2nd edition, 1982).
Keith Alldritt, Churchill The Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters (London: Hutchinson, 1992); Ashley, Churchill as Historian; Lukacs, Churchill; Prior, Churchill’s World Crisis; Manfred Weidhorn, Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974); and Frederick Woods, Artillery of Words: The Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Leo Cooper, 1992).
Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 69. There are several examples of Churchill’s dictated reminiscences before starting any of which he could easily have uttered to one of his secretaries, ‘My dear, I shall require you to stay extremely late. I am feeling very fertile tonight’. Lord Boyd of Merton to David Dilks, cited by Richard M. Langworth (ed.), Churchill’s Wit: The Definitive Collection (London: Ebury, 2009), p. 85.
Whilst published in the mid to late 1950s, Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volumes I–IV (London: Cassell, 1956–8) was researched and mainly written during the 1930s when Churchill was in his political wilderness.
On introducing Kelly to his papers, Churchill said ‘Your task, my boy, is to make cosmos out of chaos’: see Allen Packwood (ed.), Cosmos out of Chaos: Introducing the Churchill Archives Centre (Cambridge: Churchill College, 2009), p. 4.
Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘Churchill the Biographer and Historian’, in Charles Eade (ed.), Churchill: By His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953; repr. Reprint Society, 1955), p. 237.
Robert Blake, Winston Churchill (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998;repr., 2002), p. 95.
David Reynolds, ‘Official History: how Churchill and the Cabinet wrote the Second World War’, Historical Research, 78/201 (2005), pp. 400–422.
Herbert Morrison, ‘Churchill’s Crazy Broadcast’, Daily Herald, 5 June 1945. For a wider interpretation of the effect of Churchill’s broadcast see Richard Toye, ‘Winston Churchill’s “Crazy Broadcast”: Party, Nation, and the 1945 Gestapo Speech’, Journal of British Studies, 49/3 (2010), pp. 655–80. See also Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (Oxford: OUP, 2013), in which Churchill’s ‘Gestapo’ broadcast is declared to be an error as far as its domestic reception went, yet had little impact internationally (apart from a negative impact in Australia), p. 229.
John Thompson suggested that an author’s platform be defined as ‘the position from which an author speaks, a combination of their credentials, visibility and promotability, especially through the media’. In the mid to late 1940s, however, Churchill had no need to manufacture such a platform. John Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 203.
Colin Gordon (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); and Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 301–06.
John Tosh, ‘History for Citizens: Towards a Critical Public History’, Keynote address, HistFest, Lancaster University, 10 June 2011.
John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. viii.
Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 33.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: OUP, 1975; 25th anniversary edition, 2000), p. 310.
David Green, Blenheim (Oxford: Alden Press, 1950; reprinted 1970), p. 36.
A question that Paul Bookbinder asked of post-war Germany and Japan, see Paul Bookbinder, ‘“Wie es eigentlich gewesen” or Manufactured Historical Memory’, The Journal of The Historical Society, 10/4 (2010), pp. 475–506.
Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory, 1/1 (1989), pp. 5–26.
Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945 (London: Cape, 1969); Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British under Attack (London: HarperCollins, 2010); Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2000); and Philip Ziegler, London at War, 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2002).
Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the memory of the Holocaust’, History and Memory, 15/1 (2003), pp. 49–84.
Randolph S. Churchill (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: Post-War Speeches, The Sinews of Peace (London: Cassell, 1948), ‘The Sinews of Peace’, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946, p. 94.
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© 2014 Catherine A.V. Wilson
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Wilson, C. (2014). From Memoir to History. In: Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_2
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