by Alan Watson
As this book has sought to demonstrate, Churchill’s ultimate motivation and objective was the defence of liberty against tyranny. Clearly he was not the loser for had he lost in 1940, his country’s freedom and that of Western Europe would have been extinguished – perhaps for centuries. What he achieved in 1946 was also critical for the defence of liberty against tyranny. So against his own measure, Churchill was a winner.
Yet the balance of success and failure is – in his case – a drama of light and dark. At his funeral in 1965, the mood was of loss – not only of the man but also of the power and position of Britain itself. He had pledged that as the king’s First Minister he would never preside over the dissolution of the Empire. By the time of his death, India had long been independent and the rest of the Empire would vanish in the decades to follow. His motivation was the defence of freedom but in his mind and heart Britain’s freedom critically depended on the denial of independence to India and other parts of the Empire. Churchill the democrat and parliamentarian was also Churchill the imperialist. Far from conceding any contradiction in this, Churchill saw them as complementary. Roosevelt’s enmity towards British imperialism irritated and frustrated Churchill almost as much as the president’s naivety in dealing with Stalin.
Other paradoxes abound. Back on form, Churchill went on to win the general election. In October 1951 he again became prime minister, this time having beaten his opponents in an election. His majority in the House of Commons was thin – a mere seventeen MPs, but at the age of nearly seventy-seven it was a triumph, wiping out the bitter electoral defeat of 1945. Back then as one of the ‘Big Three’, Churchill at Potsdam still believed that if the West was strong and resolute, there could be peace within the USSR. His wartime summits persuaded him of the worth of summitry. Brought back from Potsdam by the voters, he now wanted to use his electoral mandate and his office as prime minister to persuade the Russians and Americans to return to the table. The risk of nuclear war – in his view – laid this obligation on the leaders of the USA, the USSR and the UK.
In this he would be frustrated – in part by a paradox. He and Truman had alerted the American public to the exterior threat posed to the USA by the communists. Fear of communism had by the time he was back in Number 10 swept the USA. Joe McCarthy whipped up a frenzy against communism as an internal enemy. Daily he denounced supposed communist sympathisers who would betray their country. As prime minister, Churchill arrived back in the USA to visit Truman in January 1952. He found ‘an embittered and angry country’.11 The Korean War and Stalin’s role in it blighted any hope of a summit. Stalin’s death seemed to Churchill to offer a chance – a fresh hope. Then Eisenhower won the American election and with John Foster Dulles in the State Department, East–West relations entered ‘a dead winter’.12 Britain’s waning strength and Churchill’s declining health meant that any return to the top table as one of the ‘Big Three’ had become impossible. The leadership of the West had passed irreversibly to Washington.
There was another, for him, happier paradox that became evident during this later part of his life. On his visit to see Truman in 1952, he was invited to address Congress. He had perhaps thought to use the occasion to advocate summitry but he read the American mood correctly and focused on the Anglo-American alliance and, above all, on the language that bound the two nations together, ‘working for the same high cause’. He put his case dramatically with these words:
Bismarck once said that the supreme fact of the nineteenth century was that Britain and the US spoke the same language. Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the twentieth century is that they tread the same path.13
It was his command of that language that he deployed so effectively in 1940 but also in 1946. He had indeed armed the language and sent it into battle. He had given the lion’s roar. The global reach of the language of which he was so accomplished a master was foreseen by him during the war.
In September 1943 he had received an honorary degree at Harvard University. He spoke of ‘the priceless inheritance’ of a common tongue shared by both nations. Looking forward to the war’s end, he reflected on the unique role of English. It would be, he said, ‘a grand convenience for us all to move freely about the world and be able to find everywhere a medium of intercourse and understanding’. That medium was English. Despite the end of empire and Britain’s relative weakness, her language would become the world’s second language. Its success was for him a source of pride and pleasure. One of the tributes paid to him at his death came from the first master of the Cambridge college founded in his honour. Sir John Cockcroft, Master of Churchill, wrote: ‘So long as English is spoken and history studied, men will marvel at the greatness of Sir Winston Churchill and wonder that there could be such diversity in one man.’14
A winner or a loser? Of course the balance is clear and the beneficiary was the world. At Churchill’s funeral in St Paul’s, the then Archbishop of Canterbury thanked God ‘for giving the world a man so great – a leader in conflict, in reconciliation, in humanity’.15 The nature of his leadership during and after the war ensured that what the world could honour was not the end of an empire but the shape of a new world.
That had been the purpose of these two great speeches in Fulton and Zurich. Of him it was true – as T. S. Eliot expressed it in his poem ‘East Coker’ – ‘In my end is my beginning.’
Afterword
While writing this book, the status of the speeches that are its subject has changed. In November 2015 the United Nations heritage body – UNESCO – determined that the Churchill Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge, including the drafts of his speeches, rank alongside the Magna Carta in the register of pivotal documents of world history.
They are recognised as a legacy left to mankind and in a special way to the English language and to the English-speaking peoples. This is of great importance to the Churchill Archives. They conserve our heritage, they illuminate and pass on Churchill’s legacy to democracy itself.
Allen Packwood, the curator of the archives, has contributed a powerful appendix to this book explaining the significance of the archives and I testify to the invaluable contribution he and they have made to this work.
In 2015, Churchill’s most prolific and influential historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, died. At his memorial service, Randolph Churchill spoke of his family’s great debt to Sir Martin. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said that Gilbert had turned history into memory – he had made history part of how we think and feel not only about the past and present but also the future.
It is for this reason, above all, that Winston Churchill’s speeches have become our legacy. They have changed our past, present and our future. They shape our understanding of freedom.
A cardinal dimension of this legacy is thus its relevance. This is demonstrated whenever contemporary statesmen invoke Churchill’s memory as Prime Minister Cameron has over Syria. It is evidenced by the power of Churchill’s example on politicians as varied as John F. Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The relevance of Fulton and Zurich is particularly sharp today. Fulton laid upon the USA the responsibility to use its primacy of power to defend freedom. This burden still falls on America – especially as she grows more uncertain about her global status. She cannot withdraw from a dangerous world. As in 1946 isolationism remains an illusion. The United States has to engage with the challenges posed to democracy by Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine and by ISIS in the Middle East and terrorism across the globe.
The relevance of Zurich is also just as sharp. Europe ‘led by’ its core partnership of France and Germany must find its way through the confusion of both its refugee crisis and its currency chaos. It is still incumbent on them to seek ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. It is equally incumbent on the UK to resist any temptation to succumb to its own version of isolation.
These two speeches – Fulton and Zurich – set out imperatives for today just as powerfully as when they were delivered in 1946. They are a vital part of Ch
urchill’s legacy to us. Part of our heritage. UNESCO’s judgement endorses what we already know: that Churchill’s speeches are crucial to our understanding of democracy.
In 1946, Churchill knew that he was not writing and speaking merely for the moment. His purpose was to shape the future – to startle, provoke and inspire Americans and Europeans into building a new alliance capable of securing democracy.
The care with which he chose every word and crafted every sentence is shown vividly by the pages of his original text reproduced in this book – his annotations, his decisions on what to include and what to exclude, his re-phrasings are all part of his legacy.
These facsimiles, published here for the first time, illustrate not only Churchill’s professionalism but his determination to influence the thoughts and actions of free peoples in their future endeavours.
In this he succeeded. It is his legacy.
Letting Churchill Speak
A Note from Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge
It is now over half a century since the death of Sir Winston Churchill, but as this excellent book has shown, his deeds and his words continue to echo down the years.
My whole career has been spent working in archives, and the last twenty years have been spent working on the Churchill Papers. To my mind, the importance and the power of these documents is twofold. First, they strip away the layers of hindsight and plunge you back into the mind-set of the past. It may in some ways be a different country, but once you have cracked the language, you are rewarded with a rich insight into how our predecessors saw their world, and why they took the decisions that continue to shape our lives today. Second, these archives help explain the making of our modern world, and it is only by understanding where we have come from that we will be able to shape where we are going.
On one very basic level of course Churchill’s is just such an interesting life and he is just great fun. The first and most self-evident thing to say is that he lived his life to the full. As a young soldier and journalist he sought and found adventure, coming under fire in Cuba at the time of his twenty-first birthday, fighting the Pathans on the Indian North-West Frontier, charging the Dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman, and launching himself on the national and international stage with his daring escape from Boer captivity. He made his own luck, and then exploited it brilliantly by writing up his adventures as newspaper articles and books. It was a strategy that also underpinned his political career. Elected to Parliament at the age of just twenty-five, he was in the British cabinet aged thirty-three, and had already served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He was no great respecter of party, beginning as a Conservative, but breaking with the Tories in 1904 to join the Liberal Party over the issue of free trade, only to return to the Conservatives again in 1924 over his opposition to socialism. Thereby apparently allowing him to remark that anyone could rat, but it took a certain ingenuity to re-rat.
From the outset, Churchill embraced controversy, and never seemed happier than when in the thick of the fray. He told the suffragettes he would not be henpecked, dismissed Gandhi as a ‘half-naked fakir’, likened the arrival of Lenin in Russia in a sealed train to the importation of a plague bacillus and dismissed Hitler as a squalid caucus butcher. He entered the House of Commons in 1900, taking up his seat in 1901, and left it in 1964, just short of his ninetieth birthday. And of course he was prime minister twice, and from 1940 to 1945 led his country through the great crisis of the Second World War. In the words of President Kennedy, who took them from Edward R. Murrow, who may have got them from Beverley Nichols, Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. During his lifetime he published some fifty books in some seventy volumes and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And I have not even mentioned the flying, the painting or the bricklaying.
So, there is such a wealth of great material to engage with, as is illustrated by the fact that his official biography runs to eight volumes, with companion volumes still being produced (though sadly no longer by Sir Martin Gilbert). This is a man who made history and wrote history.
This is reflected in the scale and complexity of his personal archive. The Churchill Papers are a wonderful resource. They are not a handful of papers, but rather a huge collection of almost three thousand boxes: an estimated one million pieces of paper. The collection was deliberately and systematically assembled by Sir Winston Churchill during his career, and includes everything from his childhood letters and school reports to his final writings. All sides of the man are represented: Churchill the writer in the drafts and manuscripts of his books and newspaper articles; Churchill the politician in his political and constituency correspondence; Churchill the minister in his official telegrams and minutes; Churchill the husband and father in his personal correspondence; and Churchill the orator in the annotated notes for the famous speeches. Together, this material makes a resource not just for the study of Churchill, but for the study of his era, and for the study of important international events and personalities from the imperial wars of the 1890s to the Cold War conflicts of the 1950s.
Why did Churchill assemble and keep this material? In part, he used his archive as a working resource. You only have to look at his multi-volume histories of the First and Second World Wars to see how he uses documents to tell his story. Of course, he uses them selectively. This after all is the man who joked in the House of Commons in 1948 that, ‘For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.’
There is no doubt that Churchill also had an eye to posterity and the judgement of history. He had written the biography of his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and lived to see his own son named as his chronicler. In the event, Randolph junior only survived to produce the first two volumes and the project was taken forward through eight volumes and related companion volumes by Sir Martin Gilbert. Churchill was aware of the value of his archive, both as a commercial and an academic resource, and he made provision for it when he came to settle his estate. The pre-1945 papers were assigned to the safekeeping of the Chartwell Trust, a family trust established with the intention of benefiting Churchill’s direct line. The post-1945 papers were placed under the control of his wife, Clementine Spencer-Churchill.
The papers passed physically from father to son. After Randolph’s death, they were given a temporary home at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where Sir Martin Gilbert could access them from his base at Merton College. In the meantime, Churchill College had been built, and built as the National and Commonwealth Memorial to Sir Winston. From the time of its foundation in 1960, it began to acquire the papers of some of those who had worked in Churchill’s inner circle. The first master, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir John Cockcroft, Winston Churchill’s confidant and former private secretary Sir John Colville and the naval historian Captain Stephen Roskill set about collecting a body of political, military, diplomatic and scientific papers relating to the ‘Churchill Era’. In a letter of 14 July 1967, Cockcroft wrote:
The aim of this venture is to make the College a major centre of historical research into what might be termed the Churchill Era, where scholars will be able to find a great mass of inter-related material gathered together under a single roof.
Of course, the hope was always that Churchill’s own papers would form the centrepiece of a new Churchill Archives Centre, and this dream came a step closer in 1969 when Lady Spencer-Churchill gave her husband’s post-1945 papers to the college. A new building was purpose-built to house them, sitting at the heart of the Churchill College campus, and offering high-quality conservation, storage and reading-room facilities. The pre-1945 Churchill Papers arrived on deposit in 1974. They were still in the ownership of the Chartwell Trust, and were therefore described as the Chartwell Papers, as opposed to
the post-1945 college-owned material that became known as the Churchill Papers. This is a somewhat confusing distinction that survives to this day in the reference codes for Churchill material. The pre-1945 papers all have the prefix CHAR; the post-1945 papers have the prefix CHUR.
Broadly speaking, this remained the position until April 1995 when, with the aid of a grant from the newly established Heritage Lottery Fund, the pre-1945 papers were purchased from the Chartwell Trust, securing the whole collection intact, in Britain, in perpetuity and vesting it all in a new charitable trust, the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust.
The pre- and post-1945 papers, now collectively known as the Churchill Papers, continue to be preserved in the Churchill Archives Centre, but on a completely different and fully open basis. Anyone can now consult the Churchill Papers and related collections in the Archives Centre reading rooms. Admission is free and the Centre is open from Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5pm.1 Interested parties simply need to make an appointment. The papers have also been conserved, packaged, microfilmed, exhibited and crucially digitised. The Centre has worked with the publisher Bloomsbury to make the collection freely available to all interested schools, and available by subscription to other universities and research institutes.2
The Churchill Papers now form the centrepiece, the jewel in the crown, of a wonderful collection of political, diplomatic, military and scientific papers at the Churchill Archives Centre. It is a huge honour to be their temporary custodian and enormously rewarding to see them used to support education, research and scholarship at all levels. The collection has inscription on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, and the Centre has designation from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Yet, the mission remains the same, to preserve the material for future generations, and to make it as widely available as possible. I am grateful to Alan Watson for his passionate interest in our material and for helping the Churchill Papers to fulfil their potential.
