Addison Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29640-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 518 Seiten

'The best one-volume study of Churchill yet available.' David Cannadine, Observer 'Magisterial.' Vernon Bogdanor, New Statesman 'A tour de force... A masterly chronicle of Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and one of the most subtle portraits of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting instead a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian. Churchill changed parties twice but managed to accomplish the change, writes Addison, 'with exceptional dexterity', making it appear as if he were maintaining his principles while the parties changed theirs... Addison's most interesting assertion is that the rise of Hitler saved Churchill from drifting into right-wing irrelevance. Most impressively, Addison doesn't settle for easy classifications, admitting that 'Churchill... is a man of whom almost everything that can be said is true in part.'' Kirkus Review

Paul Addison, born 1943, is a historian based at the University of Edinburgh. His interests lie in the social and political history of twentieth-century Britain. The author of many books, his Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955 and Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945-1951 are being reissued in Faber Finds. As is The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain which he co-edited with Jeremy Crang. His latest book, published by The Oxford University Press, is No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-war Britain.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Addison, Paul

Leseproben

Nearly half a century after the end of the Second World War, historians are still trying to come to terms with Winston Churchill. The winter of 1992–3 saw the publication of five new books about him, of which this was one, and a blazing row in the media ignited by the suggestion that Churchill ought to have negotiated a compromise peace with Hitler.1 But why do historians continue to write about Churchill when so much has been written already? Why this insatiable desire to re-interpret and re-assess?

The appearance of this book in paperback gives me the opportunity to add some reflections on this topic. The root of the matter is familiar enough. The Second World War made Churchill into a national hero and created around him an emotional field of force that affected a whole generation. And although the warmth and gratitude were inspired by his war leadership alone, they cast a certain glow over the whole of his life and career. Episodes that had once been harshly judged were viewed in a mellow and forgiving light. But in the making of national heroes there is always a large element of myth involved and there comes a time, inevitably, when the historians seek to disentangle the myth from the reality.

The task is all the more compelling for historians because Churchill himself was a historian – up to a point. Of the peacetime events of his times he wrote little or nothing. But he wrote a six-volume history of the Second World War with himself as the central character, the sequel to a similar mammoth work on World War One. Apart from making money, his purpose was to lay claim to a place in history as a prophetic statesman and genius of grand strategy. Buttressed with a wealth of documentary evidence, the architecture of his books was imposing. But they were no more free of special pleading and self-deception than the memoirs of any other politician.

The reappraisal of the Churchill myth began as long ago as 1957, with publication of the first volume of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Arthur Bryant. Ever since then historians have been revising the Churchillian version of Gallipoli, appeasement, and the military and diplomatic conduct of the Second World War. Over such episodes as Dakar, Greece, the fall of Singapore, the strategic bombing offensive, the Italian campaign and the planning of the Second Front, his military judgement has repeatedly been called into question.

When I first began historical research in the mid-1960s, my own two mentors on the subject were A.J.P Taylor, my research supervisor, and the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who was not only generous with his time but eager to impress his views on younger historians. They convinced me that Churchill was, to say the least, fallible in his military judgement, a view that most subsequent writing has endorsed. Liddell Hart, who had been a strong supporter during the war of a compromise peace with Germany, also had a more radical criticism of Churchill. In his concentration on the exclusive objective of smashing Germany, he argued, Churchill had lost sight, until it was too late, of the long-term danger from Soviet Russia. The war could and should have been conducted in such a way as to separate the German people from their rulers and bring about an early peace. On this point, however, I found Alan Taylor more persuasive: he maintained with great force that in the Second World War there were ‘no good Germans’.

These debates continue. The conclusion I reached was that although Churchill was never the strategic genius of the Second World War, he was a great political leader: the impresario of the Grand Alliance, the principal driving force in wartime government, and the charismatic orator who lifted and sustained popular morale. This view owed much to a growing interest on my part in the politics of the home front during the Second World War. In the course of writing a book on the subject I was impressed by the fact that inside Churchill the generalissimo was an alter ego: a parliamentary democrat with more than forty years of political experience behind him.

But who was this other Churchill? In the Second World War his oratory was shot through with a vision of Britain that was archaic and romantic. But in his youth he had been a radical, frequenting the company of Lloyd George, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. Where, then, had his radicalism come from, and what had become of it? It was curiosity of this kind that led me to explore, in this book, the whole of his career in party politics and home affairs.

Though they have long ceased to believe in the wartime myth of Churchill, historians are still haunted by it, if only because it lives on in popular memory. But for Churchill in home affairs no clear bench-mark was visible. The official biography told parts of the story at great length, but always in the form of a chronicle that left a sizeable gap between the evidence presented and the claims that were made on Churchill’s behalf. In general it seemed to me that Churchill’s stock as a domestic politician was low. In some cases this was because people had no clear conception of this aspect of his career: in others because his part in particular episodes, like the General Strike of 1926, was remembered with hostility.

My first priority was to describe Churchill’s activities as accurately as possible and I began the book with no preconceived idea of stating a case for or against him. But as I wrote I found that the pendulum was swinging in his favour. This was partly because I discovered more to like and admire in his political personality then most of his contemporaries did. I was much indebted to Mr Robert Rhodes James’s analysis of the reasons why he inspired so much mistrust, and attracted so few supporters, before the Second World War.2 But Mr Rhodes James tended to see Churchill through the eyes of his parliamentary critics, whose judgements, I felt, needed to be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt. Their comments often seemed to me to reflect the personal jealousies and limited horizons of the Palace of Westminster. Tadpole and Taper were doubtless scandalised by Churchill’s changes of party and frequent disloyalty to the party line, but there was no need for historians to adopt the same scale of values. We ought, I felt, to be more critical of the party system and more appreciative of mavericks like Churchill who claimed to stand for a ‘nation beyond party’.

But the principal aim of the book was to challenge the view that Churchill was only of interest or importance in the military and diplomatic history of Britain. I set out to show that he had much to do with the transformations of government and politics that took place during his lifetime.

Writing in 1950, Churchill looked back over the changes he had witnessed since the turn of the century:

During this first half of the terrible twentieth century all values and proportions have changed to a degree that would make the picture of British society, as it now manifests itself, very strange and startling to those who had their heyday in the Victorian era. Though we have declined as a world power, we have immensely broadened the foundations of our national life. We have accomplished a social and political revolution, greater than France underwent at the end of the eighteenth century, without shedding a drop of blood in fraternal strife.3

In writing of a ‘revolution’ Churchill was exaggerating: and the part he had once played in Irish affairs ought to have reminded him that not all the changes had been free of bloodshed. But there is no doubt that great transformations did occur in the course of his lifetime. The aristocratic governing class into which he had been born gradually lost its political ascendancy. The limited, all-male franchise of 1900 gave way to universal suffrage, the Liberal party collapsed, and the two-party system of Tory and Liberal was replaced by a two-party system of Tory and Labour. The rise of the Labour party, meanwhile, was accompanied by the growth of the trade union movement and the propagation of socialist ideas. The state, too, was transformed, from the ‘night-watchman’ state of 1900, to the administrative colossus of the mid-twentieth century. When Churchill first entered Parliament in 1900, the combined expenditure of local and central government amounted to 14.4% of the Gross National Product; by the time he retired in 1955, it accounted for 36.6%.

Whether Churchill’s part in all these developments was wise or foolish is a matter for debate. But it was certainly extensive, and he was no less consequential a figure than Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Attlee, Bevin or Morrison. Like them he dealt with a wide range of social, economic and constitutional problems from which a line of descent can be traced to the politics of the late twentieth century. We tend to associate Churchill with a realm of imperial and military grandeur that is over and done with: but he was also one of the ancestors of modern Britain.

A polemical historian of the kind who blames contemporary problems on the follies of the past could easily frame an indictment in which much of the responsibility for the backwardness of modern Britain was pinned on Churchill. Nor would this be entirely mistaken. During the Second World War Churchill was so obsessed with the conduct of military operations that he completely neglected such long-term problems of the future as industry and education. The very idea that he might have taken a serious interest in the future of the coal industry, for example, seems far-fetched and the...