Even as late as 1942, the midpoint of the war, Churchill was distressed by division in British society over the war. Elizabeth Nel, one of his secretaries during that period, observed that Churchill ‘felt our losses deeply, and threw himself anew into hitting back’. But ‘it was the lack of complete unanimity at home that troubled him as much as anything’.18
A complacent public that had forgotten the importance of its founding values
It wasn’t only highly visible members of the aristocracy who influenced the policy of appeasement in the years leading up to the Second World War. Public opinion was also largely in favour. But the attitude of many in the 1930s – that Hitler was providing a model for energizing a nation – was a stark contradiction to the democratic principles that had developed in Britain since the thirteenth century. Hitler’s vision and plan were diametrically opposed to the most cherished historical values on which British freedom rested.
Nevertheless, in 1933 students at Oxford University adopted a motion proposing not to go to war for king and country in the future. Apparently, the young scholars found nothing in their society worth fighting for. Voters in East Fulham handed a major defeat to the Conservative Party candidate, who was a vocal supporter of rearmament, and elected instead his opponent, who supported disarmament. Thus, as Hitler accelerated German rearmament in 1936– at a point when he could have been stopped – the British government, with heavy public support, was reducing its own military capabilities.
Much of the British press helped to mould public opinion, and though Hitler openly elaborated on his world view and goals, many saw no need to slow him down. Among a majority of the British public, and also in Parliament, a desire to avoid another world war prevailed.
Today, there is a troubling level of historical illiteracy throughout America and Europe. The historian David McCullough raised the alarm in 1995 at a National Book Awards ceremony.
We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate. The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of sight and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far.19
‘What it’s taken to come this far’ is a commitment to the Judeo-Christian world view that has shaped the best of the history we are now in danger of forgetting, and that has produced the fruit of Christian civilization that Churchill was so passionate about defending.
However, the source of all that good fruit is now under attack from all sides. Meanwhile, proponents of other world views and belief systems across the globe are zealously advancing their own causes and are committed to spreading their ideology to every nation, just as Hitler was in the 1930s.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the human soul. As we forget who we are and where we’ve come from, a great void is being carved out in the soul of the West – and many other belief systems are seeking to fill the vacuum. In the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas, it’s no surprise that ‘ancient paganism and idolatry are making a strong comeback in the midst of Western civilization.’20
In our time, the loss of the vision for the preservation of Christian civilization that was so central to Churchill’s thinking has also resulted in the devaluation of history. As Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) observes, ‘Critics of social institutions and traditions … should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change.’21 In his time, Churchill sought to practise historical conservation, and he highlighted the importance of defeating the Nazis and other movements that might in the future imperil that civilizational order.
THE RHYME OF HISTORY
Someone once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.22 Many observers of the current global situation hear familiar chords from the age of Churchill – especially from the rise of Nazism and the run-up to the Second World War.
The military historian Victor David Hanson warns that American and European leaders ‘are repeating the mistakes of their 1930s predecessors.’23 Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood says, ‘The Islamic State partisans have much the same allure’ as Hitler did prior to the Second World War – ‘project[ing] an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome’.24 The young ISIS fighters ‘believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure – especially when it is also a burden’.25 Meanwhile, Mein Kampf is enjoying renewed readership in Europe and elsewhere.
In the ‘rhyming’ of history, we face once again the issues of internal decay and a fierce set of external adversaries, fired by ideology at the very moment when the Western democracies seem rudderless in a sea of doubt and ambiguity.
Multitudes are now asking the same question posed by those whom Winston Churchill awakened in the 1930s and 1940s: Is there any hope?
PART IV
HOPE FOR OUR TIME
12
How Churchill Kept Calm and Carried On
Laugh a little, and teach your men to laugh… . If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, TO HIS OFFICERS IN THE TRENCHES IN FRANCE, 1916
CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL CONDITIONS have made us starkly aware of the fragile nature of civil order and the need for humanity to unite against the ‘barbaric and atavistic forces’ mentioned by Winston Churchill.1
We are living in a stressful age that the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen calls a ‘time of unraveling’.2 Cohen imagines a future conversation about the grim situations of the present, and writes: ‘It was the time of unraveling … a time of beheadings … a time of aggression … a time of breakup … a time of weakness … a time of hatred … a time of fever … a time of disorientation’ in which ‘the fabric of society frayed.’3
Democracy looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. Politicians, haunted by their incapacity, played on the fears of their populations, who were device-distracted or under device-driven stress. Dystopia was a vogue word, like utopia in the 20th century. The great rising nations of vast populations held the fate of the world in their hands but hardly seemed to care … until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.4
How, then, can we remain steady and unruffled in the civilization- battering turbulence all around us? Many people are wondering about that, as evidenced by the recent popularity of posters, T-shirts and other objects bearing a message that symbolized British pluck during the fiery storms of the Second World War: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.
For many, Winston Churchill epitomized the attitude those words convey. His life, as we have seen, was pummelled by heavy waves of adversity that could have capsized him many times, but he stayed on beam and sailed ahead.
On 1 September 1939, as Nazi troops invaded Poland, Churchill again found himself at the helm of the British navy, at the invitation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he also had a seat on the War Cabinet.
By now sixty-four years old, Churchill probably thought that his career had already crested. However, as he took up residence in Admiralty House, where he had last lived a quarter-century earlier, it was really only the beginning. His destiny – the day for which his entire life had been preparing him – was yet ahead. As he scanned the rooms so familiar to him, he could still see the maps depicting positions of ships in 1915, when he had left the Admiralty after the Gallipoli disaster.
This time, however, he would meet with only acclaim. When word of his appointment reached the Admiralty Board, the order was given to send a message to all British naval stations and ships: ‘WINSTON IS BACK’.
The last ti
me Churchill had helmed the British navy, he had sailed into the storm of the Dardanelles controversy. This time, the First Lord of the Admiralty would voyage with all his ‘shipmates’ into a typhoon of even greater proportions. And this time Churchill would come out the victor. However, it would be a frightening and arduous journey.
The great question before him initially was how to keep his naval forces afloat amid the turbulence of the early days of the war. In less than a year, his great concern would turn to holding the British ship of state on an even keel as it was pounded by Nazi assaults. To do that, he would need to keep the nation calm, a goal he would accomplish with his speeches and his demeanour of relentless optimism and composure.
His own personality and character would be a crucial element in this enterprise. He would have to demonstrate personally how to ‘keep calm and carry on’. The challenges he faced in forming a new government reveal the enormity of the task.
For starters, he had to put together a coalition consisting of various political parties and their leaders, all of whom he had managed to offend at some point in his long career. When he walked into the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister, his own party, the Conservatives, gave him a tepid response, not even offering a standing ovation – though they heartily applauded Neville Chamberlain.
‘Meanwhile events across the Channel were moving fast,’ wrote Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames.5 Four days after Churchill became prime minister, Nazi military forces blitzed through French defenders at Sedan. The next day, 15 May, the Luftwaffe levelled Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and the Dutch army capitulated. On 28 May, Belgium collapsed, and Hitler’s forces surged to the Channel coast, with many of his officers eager to invade Britain. Churchill, meanwhile, had to focus on the task of getting more than 330,000 of his own troops and their allies off the French coast and back to England.
On top of all that, an even greater nightmare was taking shape in Paris, where there were signs that the French were going to cave in to the Nazis’ military might and abandon the fight. Over the next few weeks, Churchill and his advisors made five perilous flights to France to try to persuade the French leaders not to give up. But their efforts were futile. The Germans captured Paris on 14 June, and by 22 June the French government had signed a surrender agreement with the Nazis.
Not long after moving into the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street, Churchill invited David Margesson, the government chief whip in the House of Commons, to lunch. Margesson, a fellow Conservative, had sometimes opposed Churchill, and he had been an appeaser during the Chamberlain administration. Now, however, he was a Churchill ally, and his change of heart seemed genuine.
Clementine, however, was not so ready to forgive and forget. She had strongly opposed the appeasement policy and could still taste the gall of those years. She felt that people like Margesson had put Britain in its present precarious position.
As they sat at table, Clementine could finally no longer contain her indignation. She exploded at David Margesson, and, in Mary Soames’s words, ‘flayed him verbally before sweeping out’ of the room, with Mary in tow. Mary was ‘most ashamed and horrified’, but she later concluded about her mother, ‘This outburst from the normally immaculately well-mannered Clementine is indicative of the tensions in her life at that time.’6
Considering the huge load that both Winston and Clementine Churchill bore during this period, they could be forgiven an occasional lapse in their composure. But as the war ground on for another five gruelling years, together they became a shining example of how to ‘keep calm and carry on’.
ORIGINS AND MEANING
Posters bearing the ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan had been created by the Ministry of Information in 1939 as preparations for war began in earnest. More than two million placards were printed, but they were ‘never officially seen by the public’ because the intended use was ‘only upon the invasion of Britain by Germany’, which never happened.7 It wasn’t until 2000, when Stuart Manley, a bookstore owner in Northumberland, discovered one of the original posters while sorting through a box of old books, that the posters, and the slogan, came to public attention. Manley and his wife framed and hung the placard over their cash register, and they eventually began printing and selling copies.8 In recent years, variations on the basic message have popped up all over, to the point of near-ubiquity.
Susannah Walker, a design historian, explains the contemporary significance of the message as ‘not only a distillation of a crucial moment in Britishness, but also an inspiring message from the past to the present in a time of crisis’.9
Though Winston Churchill may never have seen one of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ posters during his lifetime, during the Second World War he epitomized the message. Amid the greatest of upheavals, he showed that composure is a choice, an act of the will that subdues terrible thoughts and steadies frazzled emotions.
Churchill also modelled endurance that arose from a larger vision. He intuitively grasped the ancient truth of Solomon that people without a vision will cast off restraint and give way to chaos, through which they will ultimately perish.10 As Churchill demonstrated during his years on the backbenches in the House of Commons, vision should inspire all of us, not just our leaders. As the Mayor of London Boris Johnson says of Churchill, ‘The point … is that one man can make all the difference.’11
How, then, did Churchill ‘keep calm and carry on’ at the very epicentre of the Allied war effort? For one thing, he believed that his entire life – with all its character-forming lessons, tempering experiences and attitude-shaping challenges – was preparation for that destiny. The character revealed in the great moments had been formed in the small moments. Those character traits enabled Churchill to stay on an even keel and stabilize the nation through the turmoil of war.
Moreover, the spiritual lessons he had learned from Elizabeth Everest were lodged in his heart and guided his actions. As a testimony to the importance of her role in his life, Mrs Everest’s picture was still at Churchill’s bedside when he died in 1965 at the age of ninety.
THE UNDERPINNINGS OF CHURCHILL’S COMPOSURE
Faith
Winston Churchill was not an overtly religious man, but he was a man of faith. He believed in God’s ultimate providential care – for himself and for his nation. Such a faith was foundational to his internal fortitude when all external signs pointed to disaster.
Churchill referred often to Providence, as he did in a February 1941 broadcast appeal to the United States:
Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.12
When his bodyguard, Walter Thompson, complained that Churchill was placing himself at risk, Churchill replied that he would not die because he had ‘important work to do’. Churchill had faith that God would keep him safe all the way to the accomplishment of that ‘important work’. He believed that he would fulfil the destiny he had foreseen in 1891 at the age of sixteen, and that Providence would protect and preserve him for his life’s mission.
Churchill did not regard Providence as an impersonal force; he saw it as the guiding hand of God. In his very first speech as prime minister, Churchill said that the policy of his new government would be to wage war against Hitler ‘with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us’.13 Speaking on Trinity Sunday 1940 about the eventual outcome of the war, Churchill quoted from the Bible and concluded, ‘As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.’14
Churchill’s faith was not a rigid sectarianism, but it encompassed a high view of Jesus Christ. One day in May 1952, he was strolling on a hill overlooking Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a Christian of deep conviction. They were talking about hu
man greatness. John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, accompanied the men and later recorded his memory of the conversation.
[Montgomery] would fire questions at the Prime Minister as from a machine gun, loving to act the part of Grand Inquisitor. How did Churchill define a great man? Was Hitler great? Certainly not, said Churchill; he made too many mistakes. How could Churchill maintain that Napoleon was great when he was the Hitler of the nineteenth century? He was not, Churchill replied. Surely the only really great men were the religious leaders? Churchill’s reply to that interested me, for he seldom spoke of religion. He said that their greatness was undisputed, but it was of a different kind: Christ’s story was unequalled and his death to save sinners unsurpassed.15
When Churchill’s grandson and namesake was born, in May 1952, Churchill proposed a toast to ‘Christ’s new faithful soldier and servant’.16
Churchill’s faith was personal and private, but it was foundational to his character and all that he did.
Confidence
Churchill’s faith in God’s providence was at the core of his confidence. ‘Strength is granted to us all when we are needed to serve great causes,’ he said in 1946.17 Through the strength of that confidence, he was able to reassure the British people during the darkest days of the war.
Confidence is forged by adversity, and Churchill had seen plenty of that. A person, he believed, ‘must never be discouraged by defeats in one’s youth, but continue to learn throughout one’s whole life.’18 Churchill knew people who had been hobbled by reversals, mistakes and failings early in life. But the way to rise above them and gain confidence was to learn from them.
Vision
‘I see further ahead,’ Churchill told his friend Murland Evans in 1891 at Harrow. During the 1930s, Churchill’s vision enabled him to see clearly the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis. More importantly, he was also able to grasp what it would take to defeat the growing German war machine.
God and Churchill HB Page 20
