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- [00:01]
Winston Churchill
Will Talk to Me ABC Tuesday they took his daughter. She's coming home alive. Will Trent the series critics are calling powerful Must see TV continues to thrill. Shouldn't we strategize before we go in there?
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Clement Attlee
If we screw up this case, a.
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Winston Churchill
Cop killer walks free with the riveting conclusion to a two part season premiere. TBI Help Me get down will tread all new Tuesday on ABC and stream on Hulu.
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Professor David Reynolds
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Later this week it'll be 60 years since the death of Winston Churchill on 24 January 1965, so we thought it'd be interesting to bring back this episode with Professor David Reynolds from 2023. He explores how Churchill's remarkable career saw him interact with other great figures of the age, many of whom had a profound impact on Britain's wartime leader. Speaking to Rob Attar, David examines Churchill's relationships with the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, Gandhi and Clement Attlee, and considers how these figures left their mark on the statesman.
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Rob Attar
So David, your book frames Churchill's life around some of the people who he interacted with and who influenced him over the years. Why do you think this is a particularly helpful way to approach Churchill?
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Winston Churchill
I think we often think of Churchill as a solitary genius, a self made man of incredible abilities. Undoubtedly that's the case, but in a way, because of the intense biographical focus on him as a person, we don't get a sense of the context. And the context is not just a historical one, but a human one. I think clear to me that Churchill's life involved carefully watching other leaders. This was a man who was obsessed, I think that's not too strong a word, obsessed with the idea of greatness. And his path to greatness involved learning from others. Churchill was a really close observer. He worked really hard in his prime, not perhaps in his later years. But he watched others, he learned from others, and then the opportunities that he had for greatness depended to a considerable extent on what others did to shape the world around him. So my feeling was that this was a way of approaching him as a person and in a way foretelling his whole life in a slightly unfamiliar fashion.
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Rob Attar
Now, this word greatness is very important in the book, and it's part of the title as well. What does the idea of greatness actually mean to Churchill?
- [03:22]
Winston Churchill
Churchill was deeply affected by his father, a man who had a meteoric but very brief career at the top of British politics. Chancellor of the Exchequer, for, I think, only five months in 1886, challenged the Prime Minister, his own prime minister, Lord Salisbury, over the budget, and was roundly defeated by Salisbury, forced to resign. And then the rest of his time was a gradual decline into illness, infirmity and death in 1895. So Churchill believed, Winston believed, that this was because the death was caused by syphilis. That's a matter of some debate, but certainly that was his own belief. So here was a father of enormous talent, but who had been in many ways a failure. Winston had the belief that he too would die young. And what he wanted to do was leave a mark on posterity. He wanted to be remembered because he was also somebody who did not have any particular belief in the afterlife. He thought that essentially it was what you did here and now that mattered. So his intention was to become famous because of his greatness, because of his achievements. Initially, he tried military matters. In the late 1890s, he was running around the war zones of the world, chasing fame and indeed courting danger to get himself in the newspapers, just to be on the safe side. He was writing those newspaper reports as well, a feature of his whole career that you don't leave it to history. You write the history yourself. But this was a young man in a hurry and a young man who wanted to make his mark as a great person. Before his short life, as he anticipated it, came to an end.
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Rob Attar
Now, as we know, of course, his life wasn't short, and he went on to have a hugely important and varied career. At what point, if ever, did he feel that he had achieved that greatness he was looking for?
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Winston Churchill
I think there are moments in 1940, 41 where some of the comments that he gets from some of his contemporaries indicate to him that he has made his mark in history, that he is being compared with figures of the past, that he recognizes that any Briton of that generation would do so. The elder Pitt during the Seven Years War, for example. But Churchill was very conscious that fame is ephemeral, and that is why he was so determined to write his wartime achievements into history himself. So what I'm trying to do in the book is also show the ways in which his interactions with Others became part of the story he was writing as he inscribed himself into history. Six volumes of a varied sort on the First World War and then six much more coherent volumes about the Second World War, in order to ensure that his account of the war, with himself at the centre of it, would not be forgotten.
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Rob Attar
Now, I wonder if we could talk through some of the people and relationships that you cover in the book. And someone I'd like to start with is Neville Chamberlain, and he's often set up in kind of opposition to Churchill, the appeaser and the man who wants to go to war with Hitler, the failed war leader and the successful war leader. But is that really a fair characterization of their relationship and the two men?
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Winston Churchill
Well, in writing about Chamberlain, I went back to the 1920s because it was striking that when they were in the Baldwin government from 1924, Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Neville Chamberlain as Minister of Health, they had quite a close working relationship, because one of the trades that I detected in Churchill is there in his relations with Lloyd George before the First World War and with Neville Chamberlain now, Churchill back as a tory in the 1920s. Is Churchill's belief in the multiplier effect of working with another significant figure in the government, that this actually has the effect that you can get a lot more done if you've got a certain degree of commonality in the planning. And so both Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chamberlain as Minister of Health are very conscious that they are dealing with an electorate that has been fundamentally changed by the 1918 changes in the franchise, which make all men over the age of 21 and a significant part of the female population into electors. And this is a very different kind of politics from his father's day. And that means that social questions, questions about health, housing and so on, are going to be much more salient. That's accentuated by the feeling that the public wants something back for all the suffering in the Great War. And so there is an interesting double act going on between Chamberlain and Churchill. But what Chamberlain feels is that what Winston's up to is really he's looking for the headlines, he's looking for the big splash. He's the person who, as Chamberlain says, is the one who looks for color, for drama and so on. And Chamberlain writes in a letter, accuracy of drawing is beyond his ken. Accuracy of drawing, meaning careful command of detail, is not his forte. Now, that's an arguable point, because Churchill is an incredibly hard worker, but certainly he has a sense of the dramatic as a showman, which at that stage, Chamberlain did not approve of and felt this was in fact rather dangerous. And those concerns on Chamberlain's part, and indeed Baldwin's, were accentuated in the 1930s because at that stage the Baldwin government's come to an end. Labour government, then a national government, headed initially by Ramsay MacDonald, Labour leader and then, or the ex Labour leader and then by Baldwin, are in charge and Winston is in the wilderness. These are the famous wilderness years. And it's clear to a lot of people that what Winston's up to is making as much noise as possible to get himself back into politics, to force himself back into the attention of the conservative leadership. So that for a lot of people, the way that he rattles the can about India, which Baldwin is trying to develop a devolution plan for his agitation on behalf of Edward VIII over the abdication, these are politically opportunist. And that also colors for some people the way that Churchill is warning about German rearmament and the need for Britain to rearm. So here is the feeling. This is a political opportunist and it's part of what keeps him out of government. What is striking and I think very ironic is that when Chamberlain finally becomes prime minister, he succeeds Baldwin in 1937, it's almost as if power has gone to his head. He's very struck by now. He says, you know, I've only got to lift a finger. And. And the face of Europe is changed. And it's almost like the showman, the man of drama that he criticized Churchill for in the 20s is now what Chamberlain is up to. And those three famous visits to see Hitler in September 1938, which Chamberlain clearly sees as a completely new way of conducting diplomacy, going over the heads of the diplomats, avoiding all those ponderous exchanges of paper and so on, meeting the key leaders face to face. This is the way of the future. And of course, for a moment, a brief moment, Chamberlain seems to have secured something tremendous. He comes back from Munich, famously gets to Heston Airport, waives that piece of paper that he and Hitler assigned, pledging Britain and Germany not to go to war again, and utters the fateful words in Downing street, peace for our time. So it's almost like he has out Churchill, Churchill in 1938. Then it all goes pear shaped. Within a few months, the Munich Agreement is broken by Hitler. Within a year of Munich, September 39, Britain and Germany are at war and Chamberlain has no choice really, but to bring Churchill into the government. So there's, I think, a very strange and in some degree tragic sort of circle here of Chamberlain criticizing Churchill and then doing what Churchill did. And it's eventually Chamberlain, not Churchill, who bears full brunt of the criticism for the failed Norway operation, the attempt to stop Hitler getting into Norway in April 1940. So Churchill finally gets his chance to become prime minister, the job that he has wanted and for some time in the 1930s has feared that it's now going to be beyond him.
- [12:46]
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Winston Churchill
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- [13:16]
Clement Attlee
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Rob Attar
Minimum purchase required as you've alluded to there, Churchill was an early opponent of Hitler's and he was warning about Hitler from quite an early stage. But I'd be interested to get your thoughts about his relationship with Mussolini and whether he actually looked more favourably on that fascist leader than he did on his Nazi counterpart.
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Winston Churchill
They make an interesting, a very interesting contrast. Churchill is very taken with Mussolini in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Remember, Italy is one of Britain's allies. He admires Italy for fighting, for battling on against great disasters like Caporetto in 1917. And he admires Mussolini for really taking action to try and prevent the spread of Bolshevism into Italy. Mussolini's fascist squads are fighting the communists in many parts of Italy. Mussolini takes power. Churchill is in favor of that. He has reservations about the methods, but certainly this is a valued bulwark against communism and he and his wife are both impressed by Mussolini in person when they visit Italy in the 1920s. So he has a really elevated view of Mussolini's skills as a leader. And he comments rather amusingly that at least it's fortunate for us that Mussolini is not in charge of a really potent country like Germany. And his respect for Mussolini lasts even to the end, even after Mussolini's Italy is on the other side and increasingly defeated. But Churchill is, I think on a human level, disgusted by the way that Mussolini is finally caught by the partisans and shot and his body hung up in a petrol station upside down in Milan. This is not the way that a great leader should be treated. A man of genuine greatness in his view. What is really striking about Hitler is how little interest he seems to have taken in Hitler himself and in the phenomenon of Nazism where it came from Churchill. I think his view of Nazi Germany is that it's an essentially a continuation of Prussia, of Prussian militarism and that Hitler is just the figurehead on top of this. The real danger is from the German propensity for conquest, for violence. That's what's got to be stopped. And a number of his entourage were very struck in 1945, the end of the war after Hitler's death, Adler, Hitler's suicide, that when they visit the bunker in Berlin, the remains of the Reich Chancellery, Churchill is really not that bothered about sort of poking around and trying to find out about the last hours of Hitler and so on in the way that many of his colleagues were. He's not fascinated by Hitler himself. He is obsessed with German militarism, German phenomenon. And that's why there isn't in the book, there deliberately isn't a picture of Hitler there or Churchill and Hitler. Whereas in other chapters, every other chapter, it's Churchill and the person I'm talking about. Because in a way Hitler's face and personality are secondary, but Germany, the horror of German militarism is fundamental. And that's why I also end that chapter by saying what Churchill had been saying ever since the 1920s, that the road to peace is for France and Germany to end their age long quarrel that goes back to the 18th century, but certainly is fundamental to the Great War in 1914-18. Churchill thinks about geopolitics in this case doesn't really think about personalities in quite the same way as he does with a phenomenon like Mussolini's Italy.
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Rob Attar
That's a really interesting comparison. So what was it about Mussolini that Churchill admired and yet didn't admire in Hitler? I mean, obviously to caveat it, I'm not saying anyone should admire Hitler, but why am I Mussolini and not Hitler.
- [17:56]
Winston Churchill
I think Mussolini in his prime was quite a dashing figure. Clementine, his wife, who did meet him, she was on a visit to friends who were ambassador, and his wife in Rome was really quite struck by him. Mesmeric eyes and real charm. And he sent her a portrait of himself, a photograph signed Devotamente and so on. And she referred to in correspondence with Winston as Pussolini, that he was a real sort of sweetie, a real gentleman. So there was clearly something there that struck her. Although we think often of Hitler in military uniform and so on, in the early days in the 1920s, he often sort of turned up looking like a traveling salesman or something, in a sort of grubby Mac and so on. I think one of his first meetings with Mussolini was rather like that. And it just added to Mussolini's contempt for this sort of junior fascist who was trying to take over my role as the leading fascist. Again, something that now looks very strange to us, but that certainly was how it was seen in the 20s, in the mid-20s, that Mussolini was the substantial fascist figure and Hitler was a rather seedy sort of character from the Munich underworld, as it were. Huge underestimation of Hitler. And, of course, what's also interesting, I think, in terms of Churchill's attitude to Hitler is that one of the most important moments in the Second World War is the successful German breakthrough on the Western Front in May 1940, where, after a recalculation of German strategy, instead of going through Belgium as it happened in the first world war in 1914, the bulk of the panzer divisions are sent very riskily through the Ardennes Forest and across the Meuse river near Sedan, and then race, or at least clunk, towards the Channel ports. Now, we're very familiar with that, and it seems just part of the normal narrative. It was absolutely amazing at the time. Churchill was completely taken by surprise when he discovered the magnitude of what had happened and the fact that the French had no strategic reserve. But he seems to have treated that as a comment on the French high command and its slowness to react, which was indeed true. But he doesn't ever really credit Hitler with a gambler's stroke as strategic or tactical genius, which you'd have to say was the case. So it was almost as if, even at that moment, he could not credit this gutter snipe from Munich with opening up his road to greatness. And that's one of the ironies, really, that if you're asking, how does Churchill get his finest hour, it's thanks to Hitler. It's Hitler's success at that moment, that really puts Churchill on his mettle and really gets him to rise to the occasion at a point when the fate of Europe and indeed much of the world is in the balance.
- [21:13]
Rob Attar
And then during the Second World War, Churchill has to align himself with. With a political force that he spent his entire life opposing in the form of Bolshevism. And he also has to align himself with Joseph Stalin. That's also a really interesting case because he has to switch his views quite radically there. How does his relationship and opinion of Stalin change over the course of the war?
- [21:35]
Winston Churchill
Okay, well, I'd just back up for a moment and say that what Churchill has to do in 1940 is to think completely differently about two countries. And it's not just the Soviet Union, it's also the United States. Because his basic assumption when the war starts in 1939, is that it's going to be in some ways a replay of 14:18. The crucial thing, the anchor will be a strong Western front with the French army as the key figure. And then at some point, maybe the Americans will come in as they had done belatedly in 1917. Churchill now has to think about the Americans as a prime ally. And after June 1941, when Hitler invades Russia, then he has to think about Russia. But in both cases, Churchill is improvising in many ways. He has to improvise for the rest of his life because Britain is now in a completely different position from anything that we had expected before. And for me, one element of Churchill's greatness is this man who we think of as robust and dogged and unchanging is actually really learning to improvise in 1940, 41 in ways that are fundamental for the future. So the Americans are a more natural ally for Churchill, who is, after all, half American. American mother. But in the 1920s, Churchill is quite antagonistic or critical of the United States. When we're having engaged in a big naval race with the United States, and he says we don't. We can't afford to put ourselves in the power of the United States. This familiar claim, he says, that war with America is inevitable, is actually not true. We couldn't afford to not fight for our interests if they were really being undermined by the U.S. now he changes his view by the late 30s, but it's an interesting reminder that alliances are not set in his mind in stone. In the case of the Soviet Union, absolutely, this is a man. Churchill was one of the most vehement British opponents of Bolshevism After Lenin's revolution, he was determined to carry on the war to support the whites, the anti Bolsheviks. And he talked in the most derogatory terms about the foul baboonery of Bolshevism. It's almost like these are people who are subhuman. So this is not a natural relationship in 1941. But realistically, as Churchill says famously in his speech after the Barbarossa, the attack on Russia begins. He says, any country that is fighting on against Nazi Dom, as he puts it, is our ally. That's the situation. Any enemy of Hitler is our friend. And he then pursues Stalin very intently and very intensively, initially through correspondence, trying to build with Stalin the kind of epistolary relationship, as I call it, in other words, letter writing relationship that he'd had with Roosevelt, but then also looking for a chance to visit Stalin in person. And what's striking by 1941 is that it's almost as if the idea that Chamberlain had had in 1938, you've got to get up close and personal with the movers and shakers in the world. Churchill's picked that up and he's saying, I've got to meet Roosevelt in person. The famous atlantic meeting in August 1941. I've got to see Stalin in person. Which he finally manages to do in August 42, incidentally. A journey of enormous danger, given the circumstances. Flying over to West Africa, along North Africa, up to Cairo, onto Tehran and then back over the Caucasus to get to Moscow. This is not an easy trip, but it's something that not only does Churchill feel he needs to, but he relishes it. He has that almost schoolboy love of danger and excitement and so on. But he meets Stalin in person and it's a fascinating set of conversations. The first meeting is businesslike, pretty friendly. Churchill explains we can't do a second front in 1942, it's too dangerous. We haven't got enough troops across the Channel. Second meeting, however, the tone is very different. Stalin really goes for him. He says that Churchill's breaking promises that had been given about second front, not really true, but he lays that on and he even accuses the British army of cowardice. And Churchill is really angry, he's really upset, and he has to be persuaded by the British ambassador in Moscow not to go home, not to just take the plane and go. And in the end he has, rather grudgingly, another meeting with Stalin which doesn't go very far. And then Stalin very adroitly sort, well, you know, you haven't seen my apartments. Why don't you just come over and we'll have a little drink before you fly off? So they go over to his apartments in the Kremlin, and then there is this long running drinking, eating match that goes on into the early hours of the morning. And I think it is one of those occasions where even Churchill more or less admitted that he ended up with quite a hangover. But more important, as far as he's concerned, is that he leaves there with a feeling that up close and personal, he can get on with Stalin. And that the explanation for that bad second meeting where Stalin had been rude was probably that, as Churchill puts it, Stalin's Council of Commissars had taken exception to what Churchill said about the second front. And Churchill says, well, maybe he writes to the Cabinet. He says, well, maybe that Council of Commissars is a bit more powerful than we'd thought. So you have this really strange situation, from what we now know about Stalin's Russia, that Stalin is the kind of moderate, and there are all these dark forces lurking in the background in the Kremlin, the Politburo, the commissars, the marshals, whatever it is, who are the ones putting pressure on him. So what Churchill is really saying for the rest of the war is, if I can talk to Stalin, I can sort things out, but if I don't, and if it doesn't work out, then we could end up with all those fears that I'd had after the First World War about the spread of Bolshevism. So this is, I think, an interesting example of where Churchill, studying another leader very closely, asking questions, in the end, sees almost what he wants to see, which is that he, Winston, can actually swing this if he's given the chance to do so. So he almost buys into that Chamberlain syndrome, which is not just a matter for Chamberlain or Churchill. It's true of many leaders that power does inevitably go to their heads. And there is this feeling that I can sort things out if I'm given a chance to do so. And that, I think, is the key to Churchill for the rest of his life. And it's true, of course, even in his second premiership, the feeling that, you know, he couldn't he not have another meeting with Stalin? Can he resume that relationship that had been tragically cut off in 1945 because he lost office because things went wrong over Poland? So it's a very interesting story of the ways in which Churchill sees clearly and the ways that sometimes what he sees in the mirror is what he.
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Rob Attar
Wants to see on the other side of the Atlantic. You've talked earlier about Britain, America in the second world war. Does Churchill get that special relationship with Roosevelt that he was looking for?
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Winston Churchill
In the end, he has a very close relationship on a personal level with Roosevelt. And Roosevelt is a man that Churchill greatly admires. Churchill, right through his life, admires men of courage. He was, after all, a very daring soldier in his own time, courting danger. So he's always, for example, admiring of someone who's won a decoration for gallantry and things like that. Somebody like general Alexander in the second world war. War. But he's particularly admiring of Franklin Roosevelt for a different kind of courage, because anybody who met Roosevelt or conferred with him would see something that we don't see in the photographs, all those photographs of the big three at these conferences, Roosevelt sitting in a chair and so on. You have to remember that before that happened, an aide wheeled Roosevelt into the room, heaved him out of a wheelchair, dumped him in the chair, and arranged his legs. Because this was a man who's paralyzed from the waist down, had been since the 1920s because of polio. And for Churchill, that was real courage. This was a man who every day had gone through the, if you like, the hundred petty humiliations of being a paraplegic. But what he conveyed to the public in America and in the world was tremendous courage and optimism in new deal America, Depression America, and in the horrors of the war. And for Churchill, it was deeply moving. And on a number of occasions after the war, he said, after Roosevelt's death, he said with tears in his eyes, I really loved that man. So that, to some extent, I think, colored his feeling that getting to Roosevelt, trying to influence Roosevelt, would engineer and leverage a strong relationship with the United States. He was certainly devastated by Roosevelt's death. He tried hard with Truman in the short period in which he worked with him. He would try again with Eisenhower. But increasingly, the disparity in power between the two countries was too great. But you could say, I think, that the memories of the wartime alliance in a more general way, were a very important element in the special relationship for at least a period of time in the 1940s and into the 1950s, while Britain was still a global power. As Britain lost its global reach, it became less important to the United States, but it still remains a very significant interlocutor with the Americans, partly because of the common language. It means that, you know, officials and in the two countries can naturally talk to each other in a way that is not so easy if you're dealing with foreign languages and so on. So Churchill's special relationship, I think, wasn't an illusion, but it certainly was an exaggeration that grew out of these very, very moving experiences he had in the Second World War.
- [32:14]
Rob Attar
Now, one aspect of Churchill that we haven't discussed a huge amount yet is imperialism, and that's embodied in your book by Gandhi. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how Churchill viewed Gandhi and how that perhaps reflects his broader views of the empire in general.
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Winston Churchill
Gandhi and the chapter on Attlee go together in a way because they're both about empire and Attlee's views about empire very different from Churchill's. So Andrew Roberts, Churchill's biographer, as I think, said very correctly that Empire was Churchill's secular religion. He was not a deeply pious man, but in terms of his creed, the Empire and the importance of the British Empire was fundamental. And in many of the speeches he is writing about Britain and the Empire, it's part of a job lot, if you like. Churchill's understanding of India is fundamentally shaped, I think, by indelibly shaped by his experiences as young subaltern in the late 1890s. He doesn't return to India again, and indeed many parts of the Empire he never goes to. I don't think he goes to Australia or New Zealand. He knows Canada quite well from his trips to North America. So there's a certain romanticism about the Empire in Churchill's mind, as well as a recognition that this is an important base of Britain's power. And Churchill is very clear that our position in India is fundamental to our larger position in the Empire. Gandhi is a fascinating figure because on one level, this is a man who is campaigning against the British Empire or at least the rigidity of British imperial rule. And Churchill is pretty adamant about that, whereas somebody like Baldwin, Prime Minister in the 30s, and Ackley after the Second World War are taking a much more fluid view of the empire and the need for change without denying the need to keep India in some way in the British world, if you like, but not as a country that is denied its independence. So Gandhi's agitations for Indian rights and so on is regarded by Churchill as undermining British power. But what's fascinating too is that Gandhi is an offense against Churchill's conceptions of masculinity, of maleness. Here is a man who deliberately dresses in what Churchill sees as feminine dress. He wears a loincloth from the early twenties. He endorses spinning, for example. He believes in Spinning craft industries. India should get away from heavy industry and so on. Spinning, for Churchill, is a woman's job. It's another, if you like, aspect of Gandhi's feminization of politics. So it's offensive to him at a personal level. It's even more offensive because Churchill's understanding of the empire is about bringing civilization to backward peoples. So Gandhi had been, in his youth, trained at the Inns of Court in London. He dressed as a. And you can look at the pictures as a young lawyer in a very dapper way. And then he'd abandoned all that. He'd thrown off the opportunities for civilization in the British Empire and adopted these feminine dresses as part of his campaign against British rule. And then I think the most problematic thing for Churchill is here is a man who is trained as a soldier, who understands and understands far better than many of his contemporaries the importance of force, say, in the relationship with Germany, the need to rearm and all the rest of it. In the 1930s, you can't really use force, force to quell a man whose whole approach is passive resistance, peaceful protest, the mobilizing of influence in ways that are not militaristic. And so for Churchill, pretty much everything Gandhi does is an anathema to his conceptions of manliness and also a fundamental challenge to the British Empire because it can't be met by force in the way that, in principle, Churchill believes you can do with Nazi Germany.
- [36:34]
Rob Attar
I wanted to talk to you about athlete as well, because obviously he's another interesting example of Churchill collaborating with someone whose politics quite different from his own, and seems to him to perhaps talk about how that shows again, his validity.
- [36:45]
Winston Churchill
Yes. Well, in 1940, Churchill, he finally gets this job that he's always wanted. He forms a coalition government, which for many people in Conservative Party was long overdue. But Churchill is not leader of the Conservative Party. Even after Chamberlain loses the prime ministership, he remains leader of the party until he dies in the autumn of 1940. So Churchill is in this strange situation in May 1940, where he's putting together a government of different parties with only his personal position, his own personal credibility as the kind of cement. It's not like he's got a body of party members, party MPs, who are automatically loyal to him. So it's a very. This is another part of his improvisation. And what really matters in this situation is that the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who's been leader since 1935, makes no conditions, does not say, well, we need to have so many seats in The Cabinet and all the rest of it actually really supports Churchill. Churchill makes him Deputy Prime Minister, creates a post that hadn't really existed before. And in the book I use the famous illustration of David Lowe's cartoon of the coalition government, which is all behind you. Winston is the title, and it shows Churchill leading the charge, but then behind him, right at his shoulder, is Ackley and then Ernie Bevan of the Labour Party and then a whole phalanx of people. But what I say about Attlee is that he was immensely loyal to Churchill. He minded Churchill's back and there were many occasions where he gave Churchill frank advice about things that Churchill wasn't always willing to think about. But Attlee also was quite clear that this war had to result in a better world for working people than had come out of the First World War and the slump, the homes fit for heroes, the promise in 1918 had gone nowhere. So Attlee did use the time in Coalition to bring on a group of Labour MPs given their first experience of government, and prepare them for government by themselves after the 1945 election. And Attlee's conception of what Great Britain meant, what that word, great, is very different from Churchill's in two ways. One is that Attlee's formative experiences were not on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Africa, as Churchill's were. It was in the East End of London. He came from a very comfortable middle class professional family, his father's a lawyer, actually got involved in social work settlement in London in East End, and was deeply affected by what he saw. The young men, many of them working as barrow boys and so on, or work hands in the docks, who really found a sense of meaning in these club nights where they put on army uniform as cadets, they trained, they learned fitness and skills and so on. And for Attlee, this was an example of the way that there were parts of our country that had simply been ignored, people who were being ignored, not supported. And this is what turned him into being a socialist. And his notion of Great Britain is partly that support for a neglected part of our country. Now, Attlee was also a patriot. He fought in the First World War. He was one of the unit commanders in the rear guard evacuating Gallipoli. This was a man who was wounded in the First War. He had no problems fighting for his country, but he certainly believed by the 1940s that the days of empire were coming to an end and Britain's global influence had to be conducted in ways that were more sympathetic to the demands for independence, which were now very clearly coming along. And he'd seen that when he visited India at length in the late 1920s, he could already see it. So what Attlee is very clear about is that Britain has got to liquidate some of these burdens in places like India, in Palestine, which are too heavy after the Second World War. But in the case of India, he also says very clearly, look, we were always there to prepare them for us not being there. That was part of the idea of some of those great Victorians in the 19th century saying, you know, we are preparing people to stand on their own feet. And now is the opportunity in the 1940s to do that. And although in the end, the way we got out of India in 1947 and the story of partition involved appalling bloodshed and human misery, Attlee did feel that there was a sense of mission accomplished, that we had done the job that the British had gone in to do, as he romanticized it, if you like, Whereas Winston still was clinging on to the idea that we must hold on to the Raj long after it was credible to do so. So I think Attlee provides us with an interesting contrast in his conception of greatness at home and of greatness abroad, which helps us to understand some of Churchill's achievements and also some of Churchill's imitations.
- [42:15]
Rob Attar
And of all the people that you write about in the book, which of them do you think had the most profound influence on Churchill?
- [42:21]
Winston Churchill
Well, the last main chapter is about his wife, Clementine, you might say. Well, not a leader, not a political figure, whatever some writers have said. You know, Churchill could have done all this by himself. I think he depended hugely on Clementine. She was his closest advisor. She read a great deal in his speeches. She read a lot of drafts of his memoirs and things like this. And she did not hesitate to tell him when she thought he had been insensitive to what was going on around him, insensitive to his staff. And on a number of occasions in letters or something like that, when she was away, he would say, you know, I feel safer when you're here. And to some extent, if you look at it now, and certainly with, if you like, a feminist eye, you'd say this was an exploitative relationship. He was a very talented young woman who was a suffragette, was very intelligent, well educated, excellent French, did at one point, I think, aspire to go to university, until her mother said, you know, you're a society lady. It's time to get married. And there was no doubt that she really fell for Winston and he for her. And she never regretted it. But as she said, it became his life's work and it was extremely exhausting. Every month or two she had to go away for a rest cure because he was so demanding as a person, partly because he was not domesticated in any ways, also because he earned the money and spent the money and never really checked the bills. And she had to try and make ends meet because of his extravagances. Yet what's fascinating about their relationship is that there were points where being married to him really gave her a chance for fulfillment in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise. That's true in the First World War because as the wife of a senior, well, government minister and senior politician, she was put in charge of the canteens for munitions workers in the northeast quadrant of London. So this was set up to. Because women were working in the munitions factories, they needed to have a square meal in the middle of the day. In the evening they'd be going back to do 101 household chores, look after the kids, do the laundry, all the rest of it. But they at least got one square meal a day that they didn't have to cook. And she got into that, she did that work. And she wrote to him very proudly because he was on the Western Front at the time. And she said, I'm working from 7 till 7, and don't chide me, because I have learned. It's your fault I have learned Churchill methods. There was a real sense she was emulating him. And in the Second World War, she ran the Aid to Russia campaign for humanitarian aid to Russia and particularly for hospitals, to rebuild hospitals in the parts that had been devastated. And in April 1945, she did a tour of the Soviet Union to visit some of the places that had been helped. Not only did that satisfy her in a very deep way in terms of her abilities and use her abilities, but she had also been very affected by the stories of Russians fighting. And there was a real feeling for her that we, the British, were letting the Russians spill their blood while we didn't land on the continent. And although Winston explained why you couldn't do the second front in 42, why you couldn't in 43, at a moral level for her and as an emotional level, she was upset by it. And this was her way of, if you like, doing something in expiation. So it's a very striking story and one where you could, in a way, you explore the complexities of any marriage, I think, of any partnership. But the point of bringing out Gandhi and Attlee and Clementine at the end of the book is if you like to pick out characters who are much more likely to strike us now in the 21st century as significant figures. Gandhi is widely admired across the world. Attlee has had something of a Renaissance Clementine, because we're interested in women as leaders and women as public figures in a way that was not necessarily the case before. And that, I think, gives us a different mirror on greatness from some of the other characters, the more conventional ones, earlier in the book. So what I'm trying to do, in a way, is to take us into some of the larger debates about Churchill, a man who, in writing the book, I just gained renewed admiration and amazement for his energy, his sharpness, the degree to which he worked, for example, on speeches, many of those speeches. And we think of Churchill as a rhetorician, as a soundbite man. The speeches are really significant pieces of intellectual argument and analysis, and that's part of why they had such compelling power in the Commons, in a way that I don't think happens today. And certainly given, you know, the social media thing, it's a completely different way of communicating. Whereas the parliamentary speeches were still of very great significance, and Churchill was very good at it. But I think we also need to see him as a man of his time. The energy, the commitment, the hard work, but not necessarily to elevate his worldview, because in many ways, he's a man who was talking about a bygone age holding onto the Raj made no sense in the 1940s. Attlee was much clearer about that. Even if you could say Attlee, in the end, had a belief that nationalization was a panacea, which hasn't actually proved to be the case either. So, like all politicians, they are, to some extent, not prisoners of their past, but they're sort of caught up in it, and they tend to see, as they look around, what they want to see. So we're back at mirrors again. Sometimes there are glasses where you see clearly right through. Or sometimes what you see is what you want to see in the mirror.
- [48:18]
Professor David Reynolds
That was Professor David Reynolds speaking to Rob Attar in 2020. For more on Churchill and the Second World War, head to our website, historyextra.
- [48:29]
Winston Churchill
Com.
- [48:30]
Professor David Reynolds
Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.