In Churchill's Shadow: confronting the past in modern Britain
David Cannadine Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 386pp, £25
ISBN 0713995076
The most stylish and resourceful of modern British historians, David Cannadine has artfully put together a collection of a dozen already published pieces that, while disparate in nature and content, find a certain unity in a single theme. That theme is how to adjust to living in reduced circumstances, and the author plays variations on it with considerable skill. The core of the book is to be found in its two separate essays on Churchill, the second of which ("The Voice of Destiny") struck me as just about as sharp and penetrating as anything to be found in the now vast Churchill archive.
Borrowing the phrase from the American CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow, Cannadine advances the proposition that from 1940 onwards, Churchill's greatest achievement lay in how he "mobilised the English language and sent it into battle". It so happens that a week or two ago, I found myself in the company of half a dozen other people who had been either at school or at university during the darkest days of the Second World War. The only thing we agreed on was that never once - not even at the time of the fall of France in June 1940 - had we contemplated the possibility of defeat. As the external evidence, at least until December 1941, pointed firmly in that direction, the conclusion we found ourselves driven to was that we must simply have been borne along - deluded and deceived, if you like - by the power of Churchill's rhetoric.
It is difficult to think of any other war leader (unless it be the parallel instance of de Gaulle) whose use of language made so much difference. And it was an achievement all the more remarkable because Churchill - unlike, say, David Lloyd George or Aneurin Bevan - was by no means a natural orator. Every word, every phrase, every rhythm was polished and honed - and, if necessary, rehearsed either in the bath or in front of a mirror. If, between Dunkirk and El Alamein, Britain saved the world by her lonely example, then Churchill saved his country by his rhetorical exertions.
Yet his story remains a sad one. Virtually everything he sought to uphold and defend has turned to dust. Even the famed British empire, which, he once declared, he did not become prime minister in order to liquidate, had by his death in 1965 long since gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre. (Incidentally, Cannadine errs in saying that at the time of Churchill's funeral "no one dared mention" that it marked not only the last rites of a great man but also "a requiem for Britain as a great power": on the contrary, that was precisely what was realised at the time, as the author could discover for himself by looking at Patrick O'Donovan's splendid front-page story in the Observer of 31 January 1965, the day after the funeral took place.)
Perhaps, though, it is the fate of fluent, sparkling writers to be a little slapdash. For instance, the United States never, as Cannadine implies, declared war on Germany: Hitler, to Britain's great relief, declared war on America in the wake of Roosevelt getting congressional approval for war against Japan. Nor, as suggested in the text, did the abdication take place in November 1936; if Churchill made a speech in the Commons on 7 November 1936 defending the King (which I very much doubt) it was certainly not followed "within three days" by Edward VIII leaving the throne (that came a whole month later). A distinguished modern historian ought also to know better than to think that Lord Fisher was "First Sea Lord on the outbreak of the First World War". It was only because Lord Mountbatten's father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced to resign at the end of October 1914 that Churchill (fatally) was able to recall Jack Fisher to the White Ensign at all.
Enough of minor reservations - even Homer, after all, could nod. Cannadine has put together a splendid book, as impressive in its range of sympathy as in its arc of interest. There are, admittedly, a couple of laborious essays - the opening one on the Palace of Westminster I found particularly hard to get on with - and I am still not quite sure how the piece on Birmingham and the Chamberlains fits in with the rest of the book (if one person was never "in Churchill's shadow", it was surely Joe Chamberlain, and even with his two sons, Austen and Neville, the situation was rather the other way about).
But it was never just politics that Churchill dominated, and the author is right to include lively, evocative pieces on Gilbert and Sullivan, the patriotism of Noel Coward, and Ian Fleming and the "realities of escapism" (appropriately, the last genuine James Bond novel was published in the year Churchill died). In a collection otherwise gathered in from such austere and learned quarters as Staffordshire Studies or the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, these latter two pieces (both, as it happens, originally published in the old Encounter) may stick out a bit like iced lollipops; but they earn their place and pay their keep. They also somehow make a fit - Ian Fleming representing the undoubted Boy's Own Paper side of Churchill's nature and the sugary, sycophantic Noel Coward acting as plenipotentiary for the petite bourgeoisie to whom, for most of his career, the man who made a religion out of walking with destiny never really appealed.
Anthony Howard is a former editor of the NS
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