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Articles
Churchill and Common Folk: A Case of Misconception
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | January 18, 2018
- Category: Churchill's Character Truths and Heresies
Churchill was at ease with common folk, and they with him. In Cherbourg, 24 July 1944, a Frenchman offers the PM a light. (Life Magazine)
Common and everyday…
The Daily Mail asked the Churchill Project for comment on assertions in the Mail Online of December 27th. A Member of Parliament, Laura Pidcock (Lab.- North West Durham) says she helps more people in her constituency than Sir Winston Churchill would have done.
The role of an MP has “fundamentally changed” over the past twenty years, Pidcock told The Guardian. Nowadays, politicians are expected to help people with everyday problems like housing. “I can’t really imagine someone like Winston Churchill or his staff supporting people like this. I know the system was completely different then, but now it’s literally asking people, have you got food, have you got electricity, can you live through this week? We’ve got to physically help people.”
Undoubtedly the constituency work of MPs has changed since Churchill’s time. Communications and awareness are vastly enhanced nowadays. But if the honorable Member is suggesting that Churchill was too much an aristocrat to concern himself with common people, she needs to further her education.
She might begin with a famous Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who said of Churchill:
Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.
On a more personal level, Churchill did frequent kindnesses for common folk, privately and without fanfare. We know about them only through his private correspondence, the Hillsdale Churchill volumes, and the testimony of observers.
Take for example the Romany couple, “Mr. & Mrs. Donkey Jack , ” who frequented his home town of Westerham, Kent. Churchill thought gypsy life romantic, and allowed them to camp in his wood. Said Churchill’s former secretary, Grace Hamblin: “Sir Winston allowed her to live in his wood, in a little gazebo which had been there for years, full of earwigs and that sort of thing, but she loved it. It would have been stupid to offer her a house because she wouldn’t have understood it. He knew just what would give her pleasure.” Later, when Mrs. Donkey Jack fractured an ankle , Churchill saw to her medical care, paid the bills, and took care of her two dogs in her absence.
Tom Alice Bateman were farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Churchill gave them one of his pedigree calves when he heard they were down on their luck. Questioned about the pedigree, Alice replied with Kentish common sense: “I suppose we could have had the pedigree if we’d liked [but it] wouldn’t make much difference to whether it was a good cow or not. ” She added: “ Got more in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies,” she added. “Always has a word for you, has Winston.”
To her he was just “Winston.” It was often that way with common folk who knew him, from neighbors to staff to secretaries, who loved him deeply. It is easy to build a picture in one’s minds of the arch-Tory who knew and associated with only the Good and the Great. That is not the man he was. The chapter, “The Common Touch,” in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, contains countless additional examples.
I am researching my own book on Churchill and can claim with some confidence that practically every contemporary of his noted his ability instantly to become lachrymose, particularly so when wanted to make an impression. 1) There is limited value that Clement Attlee remarked upon the same subject. Although it was very kind of Attlee to speak such generous words, since Churchill once said he was “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” President Eisenhower claimed that Churchill could “turn on the tears at will”; moreover General Brooke [later field Marshal Alanbrooke] commentated in his diary that Winston, “was particularly weepy today.”
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2) I am surprised that Mr. Langworth has chosen to describe the ‘War Damages Act’ [which certainly was a scheme personally championed by Churchill] as an act of kindness, since few of the working classes owned their homes. Churchill first proposed the “bail-out'” of private businesses and commercial properties. The only people who really benefited from the War Damages Act were business owners, shopkeepers and private landlords. Therefore the Act did not have an impact on the masses, as this article is suggesting. In fact there are many quotes that I could give claiming how out remotely out of touch he was with the British people.
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3) For example when walking through the poorer areas of Manchester once, he remarked to Eddie Marsh, [his Parliamentary secretary] “how can they live like this? How can they live not knowing what it is to eat something savoury?”
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4) The examples that Mr. Langworth gives above are also worthy of some scrutiny; ex-members of staff being given a gazebo on the Chartwell estate, a local Romany couple whom Churchill viewed romantically; and donating livestock to farmers “down on their luck” is hardly fitting as a testament as to what he would he did for common people because he knew them all personally.
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5) What Churchill did for the ordinary British person, particularly during the Second World War was not as much as people today may believe; in fact something’s that he is responsible for worked against them. Moreover many of the things that were done in his name, or where he is now given credit, were actually the ideas and initiatives of others. There are indeed many instances where Churchill showed his sentimental side and personally helped other people, and Churchill’s legacy will only survive artificially [as it does today] while historians keep trying to make a square peg fit a round hole. The real story of Winston Churchill [warts and all] is still yet to be told.
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Mr. Langworth resonds:
1) There is no attribution for the “sheep in sheep’s clothing” remark. Although WSC did say privately (to Truman) that Attlee had “much to be modest about,” he defended Attlee to critical Tories, and it was dangerous to attack Attlee personally in his presence. This may be hard to understand given modern politics, but had nothing to do with their political differences. See “Leo McKinstry on Churchill and Attlee.”
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2) The words about the War Damages Act are Attlee’s, not mine. It seems obscure why an act designed to alleviate hardship of Britons who had lost their homes or businesses in the Blitz should be evaluated on the basis of who owned the properties.
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3) This is a misquote. What Churchill said was quite different: “Fancy living in one of those streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!” —4 January 1906 to his private secretary Eddie Marsh, as they walked through a poor section of Manchester, where WSC was standing for Parliament. Those reflections influenced WSC’s development as a reforming Liberal in the early 1900s.
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4) The gazebo was not “given to “ex-members of staff.”
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5) Judging by this paragraph, I trust this book will have had the benefit of a good editor. RML
That personality trait of being lachrymose – is your view that it was somewhat theatrical, or was it genuine? I mean, was he always a moment away from being deeply saddened by a circumstance, or an anecdote ? If so, did it help his ability to empathize with people, or was it something that threatened his “grip” on situations?
As a Romani I’m disgusted by the suggestion that the couple wouldn’t know what to do with a house. Romanticising my people and giving us this sort of treatment is racism. Pure and simple. Showing it in any other light is a disservice to us.
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I knew Grace Hamblin many years and can guarantee that her observations about “Mrs. Donkey Jack” were said with the respect she extended to all. Her remembrances of one individual who lived as she did were never intended to apply to a whole nation. If we spent less time manufacturing grievances we would all get along better. RML
I really enjoyed your article. I think however that I enjoyed more your polite rebuttal to the smallminded critics of the mere mortal credited with saving civilization. It’s true that some social policies didn’t benefit all of the people intended, but I challenge Churchill naysayers to name any “perfect” policy from any leader of any century or continent. Thank you again for an outstanding article