In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.

Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery — The Tragedy of a Political Family by David Faber

More backlog, more Tories.

Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery — The Tragedy of a Political Family by David Faber

On 2 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared in a debate in the House of Commons that he was not going to declare war on Germany, even though the invasion of Poland the day before had made a clear statement about Hitler’s intentions towards Europe. Deputy Labour Party leader Arthur Greenwood rose to speak in reply, and initially announced that he would be speaking for the Labour Party in response to the prime minister’s statement. But before Greenword could say another word, a voice called out from the Conservative Party benches, ‘Speak for England, Arthur!‘ — and it would not be an exaggeration to say that that furious outburst from prominent Conservative MP Leo Amery marked the beginning of the end for Chamberlain’s government. Amery also provided the statement that marked the actual end of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, when he finished his long and devastating critique of the government during the Norway Debate by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s famous words of dismissal to another Parliament, several centuries before:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Leo Amery (1873-1955) spent much of his life devoted to politics, particularly the political causes of imperial preference — favourable tariffs for trade with the Dominions and colonies — and other aspects of the relationship between Britain and the Empire. He eventually became Secretary of State for India under Winston Churchill’s wartime government. But it was during his time as India Secretary that his political life was marked by a sudden and personally devastating event that caused quite a stir at the time. Amery’s elder son John, who had been living in France and had been unable to get back to England when the Germans invaded, went on German radio and made a series of virulently anticommunist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Berlin. (Considering the fact that Leo Amery’s mother was a Jewish Hungarian and Leo had grown up surrounded by his mother’s Jewish friends and relatives, his son’s anti-Semitism was a particularly personal blow.) John Amery also gained permission to travel around occupied Europe in an attempt to recruit British prisoners-of-war to a ‘British Free Corps’ that would fight with the Nazis against the Red Army on the eastern front. When the war ended, John Amery was arrested and tried for high treason, actually plead guilty to the charge (on the premise that doing so would mitigate the pain of his family, since it was all too apparent that he wasn’t likely to win with a not-guilty plea), and was duly hanged in Wandsworth Prison in December 1945.

Speaking for England is primarily a biography of Leo Amery, and the bulk of the book is devoted to chronicling his youth, education, wartime activities, and the ups and downs of his political life. Amery was contemporary, friend, and occasional sparring partner to the vast majority of the British political elite from the first half of the twentieth century, and his turbulent relationship with Winston Churchill provides a wealth of anecdotes and historical analysis that at times is the driving force of the biography. It isn’t until the later chapters of the book that the focus partly shifts away from Leo Amery and onto his sons John and Julian — highlighting the sharp contrast between John the amoral and shiftless wastrel and Julian the polyglot World War II intelligence officer who later followed in his father’s footsteps to become an outspoken backbench Conservative MP.

David Faber has written a strong and moving biography in Speaking for England, one that reads more like a real story than a biography. There’s a fairly good balance of the political and the personal, as Faber seems to devote almost as much attention to Leo Amery’s fondness for mountaineering and other rugged outdoor sports as he does to the blow-by-blow accounts of interwar and wartime politics. Faber certainly doesn’t try to redeem John Amery as a person — not a easy thing to do at any rate, since the evidence points to the conclusion that John Amery was a thoroughly nasty piece of goods from his childhood days, a sociopath and a compulsive liar who probably would have been imprisoned long before his broadcasts had it not been for his father’s influence. I do wish that Faber had paid a bit more attention to Julian Amery’s later career after the war and after his brother’s death. Julian Amery was a fascinating character in his own right, making a right nuisance of himself from the backbenches over British involvement in Suez in 1956, and Faber barely breezes through that period. Considering how much of an impact Leo Amery had on his younger son’s political ambitions, it’s a shame that Julian’s story isn’t told to the fullest. That, I think, is really the only thing that mars what is otherwise a marvellous biography.

The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made by Simon Ball

May as well start up the reviews with a book that’s tangentially related to my current reading. I’m working through Francis Beckett’s biography of Clement Attlee and re-reading D.H. Thorpe’s biography of Sir Alec Douglas-Home to write a double review article for Political Studies Review, and I ended up doing a bit of cross-checking with Ball’s book just to make sure of my facts. All the more reason to post a review of it here.

The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made by Simon Ball

The old saying about the battles of England being won on the playing fields of Eton is well past cliché by now, but it’s difficult to deny the hold that Eton’s students-turned-soldiers have had over British political history, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. To take one representative sample — the subjects of Simon Ball’s collective biography — four young men entered Eton in 1906, proceeded to Oxford University, served in the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards on the Western Front during the Great War and became members of Winston Churchill’s Cabinet during World War II. One of the four, Harold Macmillan, would eventually serve for nearly seven years as Prime Minister. The other three — Robert Cranborne (known to his friends as ‘Bobbety’, and later as the fifth Marquess of Salisbury), Oliver Lyttleton (later the first Viscount Chandos), and Harry Crookshank — would all hold prominent positions in the Conservative Party. Looking at political history from the perspectives of these four men makes for an interesting and intimate perspective, one worth examining further.

The Guardsmen’s focus is primarily on Macmillan and Salisbury (as the two who made it farthest up the greasy pole, as king and king-maker respectively), but Lyttleton and Crookshank certainly aren’t ignored by any stretch of the imagination. Ball has crafted his study of these Tory politicians from a staggering amount of personal letters and diaries, pulling together any number of complex narrative threads to weave the four men’s lives together. The history’s solid, the narrative for the most part keeps up a steady pace (though it does get bogged down a little in the intricacies of inter-party politics in the 1930s), and Ball manages to keep the reader engaged in his subjects without sounding overly sympathetic or hostile to any of them. He’s very deft at character sketches: Macmillan’s obsessive and often vicious politicking and Salisbury’s sense of his political destiny come through very clearly, but also with subtlety that keeps them from becoming the caricatures they so often ended up as in the press.

The Guardsmen is in many ways a very sad book, most notably in the later chapters as the friendship between the four men increasingly fragments and unravels. It is not easy to keep friends in politics, as any reader of political diaries and memoirs will note. What makes it all the more sad is that even as Macmillan, Salisbury, Lyttleton and Crookshank were drifting apart, the rising generation of the 1960s found their generation a worthy and easy target for scorn and satire — the play Oh! What a Lovely War!, for instance, is a biting commentary on the entire mindset of those who had fought in the Great War. Where once they had been young dashing heroes, now they were either laughable or pitiful old men, hopelessly out of touch and even viewed by some more radical writers as little better than war criminals for the part they had played in both world wars. The world they had made had somehow fallen away from them, and to a man they almost seemed to end their days in frustration and sorrow. The Guardsmen doesn’t end on a very happy note, but it does illustrate just how much these four men had to sacrifice to ‘play the game’ in their attempts to thrive and stay alive in the delicately cut-throat world of Westminster politics.

- SG