Churchill's First Forty Years

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30390, 14 March 1964, Page 3

Churchill's First Forty Years

Winston Churchill. By Lewis Broad. Sidgwick and Jackson. 380 pp. Sources and Index.

So much has already been written about the greatest Englishman of our time that, he could be excused when a new work is submitted to him for approval, for growling irritably in the words of the Duke of Wellington (uttered in a rather different context) “Publish and be damned.” This is not to say that Mr Broad's first volume (which takes us up to 1939) of the Churchill story falls in any way short of its purpose. It is a skilful assessment of the first 40 years of a chequered but always brilliant career, based largely on the evidence of his subject’s own speeches.

The early chapters reveal young Winston’s delight in playing soldiers, his undramatic record at Harrow, and his entry into the army which enabled him to see service in the Sudan and South African wars. In the latter as a war correspondent he was captured, and was enabled to study the Boers at first hand. It is a measure of a very young man’s independence of mind that he became their champion and persisted in supporting an unpoplar cause after his return to England. This spirit of independent thought persisted throughout his long Parliamentary career, often making him an object of execration to “Party liners” over four decades before fundamental greatness

both of intellect and character found its long-delayed reward in 1940. Individual, but deeply held, convictions led him to change his political allegiance more than once, thereby committing the ultimate heresy in the eyes of. the deserted party. From 1900 to 1906 he sat as a Conservative, but his belief in Free Trade was so rooted that in the stormy election of that year he crossed the floor of the House for the first time to join the triumphant Liberal ranks, and served the party in various Ministerial roles for 18 years. Praise and obloquy, high 'office, disgrace and reinstatement went to make up the Churchill story as here related. His ■ hatred and distrust of socialism which was largely superseding the dying force of Liberalism brought him once more into the Conservative fold in 1924, when, in another upset election his enemies were prompted to accuse him of a second time jumping on the band-waggon. But this last allegiance held, and he was to prove, after the heart-breaking years of the thirties the prophetic truth of Lord Birkenhead’s commendation to the electors of Epping in 1924 that he was “The greatest House of Commons man now living.” Present day readers will probably be more interested in the closing chapters in this book than in the history of “the day before yesterday” which precedes it. The vicissitudes of Parliamentary life, and a determined distrust of the type of legislator to whom the preservation of peace at any price was a prime objective, kept him out of responsible office, but all his energies and eloquence were devoted to warning ■ his countrymen of the dangers ahead. He was not for abrogating responsibility for British rule in India; and in 1948 his -words of a decade earlier were to come substantially true: “Were we to wash our hands of all responsibility and divest ourselves of all powers as our sentimentalists desire, ferocious civil war would speedily break out between Moslems and Hindus.” The progressive weakening of resolution and the growth of a pacifism which was creeping like slow paralysis through the country, moved him to a forensic brilliance which fell upon carefullysealed ears. Of the Munich agreement he said .... “What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, and into the orbit of influence of Nazi Germany . . . We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the Nazi system of European domination. ...” These sentiments and others equally cogent in a long and brilliant speech were received in dead silence by the House. But within 18 months of their utterance the fortunes of the country were to be entrusted to the speaker, and his years or frustration wer e at an end. Mr Broad has done full justice to the details of the 10 different Cabinet appointments by Sir Winston Churchill since 1906, and the often dramatic happenings which were concomitants of each, but the main fascination of the book lies in the magnificent liturgical sweep of prose with which the Churchillian speeches abound, and in which are embodied wisdom and grasp of the essentials of government that transcends those of any other twentieth century statesman.

Last word on the Beatles. Someone asked David Riesman. Professor of Social Science at Harvard University and possibly the most prestigious sociologist in the United States of America, if he could offer a definitive explanation for the Beatles’ hair-style. His answer (admittedly in part) was: “Well, they are British, and the British are accepted as being eccentric, anyway.”