Winston Churchill As I Knew Him

"Yes, throughout his political career, really. She was one of the few close female friends that he had. That’s not to say that he didn’t get on well with women, but most of his close friends were men. That’s not particularly unusual for somebody of his generation or, indeed, probably for many men today. She was, of course, also the daughter of H.H. Asquith and met Churchill early on in his career. She gives this account in the book of the first time they met. At that dinner he says something like, ‘We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm.’ She captures various memories, which otherwise might not have been recorded. It was clearly something of a labour of love. It was being prepared for publication before he died. It only takes the story up to 1915. She did think of writing another volume, but never got round to it. It’s full of personal anecdotes and a considerable amount of charm. She was a very determined person. She knew her mind. She didn’t mind telling Churchill off when she thought that he was making mistakes. There’s a lovely bit of evidence I found in her archive. It was Churchill’s 80th birthday and they were going to publish an edited book, where different people who knew Churchill would provide their memories and reflections. She did contribute. She was the only woman in the book and the editors wrote to her to say they’d like her to write a chapter called ‘Winston Churchill: the Woman’s Perspective’. She refused to do that, saying that it would be as ridiculous to have a chapter called ‘Churchill: the Woman’s Perspective’ as it would be to have a chapter called ‘Churchill: the Man’s Perspective’. She told them she was going to write something else. They got this letter and they wrote back saying, ‘Oh, all right. We accept you’ll write something else. It’s a pity because we would so much have liked to have had ‘Churchill: the Woman’s Perspective’.’ And she writes back and explains it all again which, I have to say, I admire. “When they met, Churchill said, ‘We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm’” But she could be over the top in making a fuss about things. Martin Gilbert, who was Churchill’s official biographer, but in the early 1960s was a researcher, once made the mistake of spelling her surname with a hyphen. And she told him, ‘There’s no hyphen in my name. I’m very very surprised that you should have made this basic mistake.’ She could have been a bit more relaxed about that! The other thing to say is that nobody quite knows whether, when she first met Churchill, she expected or hoped that he would propose to her. Was she in love with him? If she was, she clearly got over it. We don’t know. When she was writing her own work on Churchill she had a sort of rivalry with Randolph, Churchill’s son, who had started the official biography at the same time. She wrote to him saying, ‘I had all these letters from your father from the early period, but I’ve destroyed them because they’re too personal or too intimate.’ Of course, she may have meant intimate in the political sense. But it’s very sad that that happened and one can only wonder what gossip was in there that we would very much like to have today. I think she may have met him as early as 1906, so before he’d really properly met Clementine. Clementine and Winston had a whirlwind courtship in 1908. How to compare them? You’ve got to remember, there’s a little bit of tension because, rather than just being somebody who wants to give Churchill the best possible write-up, the person she is really concerned about defending is her father. I don’t think there are any particularly obvious points in the book where there is a clash between the two, or at least she manages to nuance it. But, if she had to make a choice between saying something that reflected badly on her father or something that reflected badly on Churchill, then she wouldn’t be afraid to say something critical of Churchill. Whereas Asquith is untouchable. I think that is, actually, an important dynamic. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But it’s basically an affectionate portrait by somebody who was, on the whole, politically sympathetic to him, particularly during his Liberal phase. She was a lifelong Liberal and the respect that he had for her, which was very genuine, was well illustrated in the general election of 1951. She ran as a Liberal in Colne Valley and he succeeded in getting the Conservative candidate to stand aside. In fact she lost anyway, but he was so determined that she should be elected that he was willing to put the fundamental interest of the Conservative Party to one side. That was partly a political strategy on his part, because he wanted to appeal to Liberal voters and former Liberal voters and to win them back from Attlee. He wants to play up his own former Liberal credentials and he wants to highlight Liberals and former Liberals whom he’s associated with. But his willingness to challenge the bureaucracy of his own party over this does show the very considerable respect he had for her. It’s more of a memoir. She had a researcher working for her on it, so she didn’t just sit there and write it off the top of her head. She definitely made sure she had her factual points of orientation and got her dates right. And she had kept extensive diaries and letters, which have subsequently been published. You do get some discrepancies. The glow-worm quote isn’t in the diary. So, you do wonder, did she just forget to write it in her diary, but remember it clearly and reproduce it years later? Or did her mind play some weird trick on her, or did he say it on some other occasion? One always gets little questions like that. If Churchill can be shown to have been virtuously promoting Liberal reforms, that reflects well on her father. I’m certainly not saying she wrote the book on Churchill in order to vindicate Asquith. But it’s a benefit of the book, in a way, because it means she’s not going to be an absolutely uncritical or slavish admirer of Churchill, whether or not she makes all the right criticisms. I think that, for that reason, it becomes a better book because it has that element of distance, while still being admiring. I think the books I’ve cited show it’s possible to take an original approach to Churchill and take an angle which nobody has ever done before. But there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of people who are willing and able to do that systematically and create new insights. At the other end, there is a market for what you might call the ‘Churchill’s laundry lists’ angle. Or, if you want to write a book about some aspect of World War II you call it ‘Churchill’s Bomb-Sight Developers’ or something like that. There’s a certain amount of mediocre work that continues to be promoted. And then there are some things that are OK as ‘curiosities’—I won’t name any titles, it would be unfair. They are perfectly alright as far as they go, but they don’t really advance our understanding very much. Every couple of years another really good book on Churchill comes out and, at the same time, huge numbers that are somewhat indifferent. I expect it will continue in a similar vein for the foreseeable future. I would probably recommend Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero , particularly bearing in mind that not everybody wants to read an awful lot about Churchill and that it is a fairly short one. It’s very scholarly, but very accessible. I think Paul, who died this year, was an excellent historian, who deserves more recognition. When I was running a course on Churchill, that was the book I told my students to read over the summer. That and My Early Life and they’d be well set up with a basic understanding for the start of the year. That would be my recommendation, rather than an intimidating doorstopper, although Roy Jenkins’ book understandably—and rightly—has a lot of fans."