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Churchill and Influenza: Lessons of Leadership and Courage
- By ANDREW ROBERTS
- | April 13, 2020
- Category: Churchill for Today Explore
Minister of Munitions Churchill watching a march-past of the 47th Division, Grande Place, Lille, France, 29 October 1918. (To his right, scratching chin, is his brother Jack. To his left, gripping a bowler, is his private secretary Eddie Marsh.) In 1918 the Spanish Flu would claim twenty-five million lives in as many weeks. (Photo: Thomas Keith Aitken, Imperial War Museum, public domain)
“The Influenza”
The only significant poem Winston Churchill ever wrote in his long life was about influenza. He surveyed the epidemic ravaging Asia and Europe between 1889 and 1890, which ultimately killed one million people. He was fifteen years old and his twelve verses were published in his school magazine, The Harrovian. (See below for full text.) It opened with the lines:
Oh how shall I its deeds recount
Or measure the untold amount
Of ills that it has done?
From China’s bright celestial land
E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
It journeyed with the sun.
In subsequent stanzas, Churchill geographically followed the disease’s path westwards until it reached Britain. His words were a mixture of teenage rhyming juvenilia (“O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains / Where Russian exiles toil in chains”), and occasional flashes of the kind of vivid linguistics (“vile, insatiate scourge,” “Whose loathsome hand and cruel sting / Whose poisonous breath and blighted wing”) that were to be heard again six decades later during Churchill’s wartime premiership.
In the penultimate stanza of the poem, the epidemic had weakened:
Its power to kill was o’er;
And with the favouring winds of Spring
(Blest is the time of which I sing)
It left our native shore.
Lessons in leadership
Before Covid-19 leaves our native shores, is there anything that might be learned from Churchillian leadership about our best response to it?
Some leaders have already tried to derive inspiration from Churchill in the current crisis, not always successfully. The BBC reported that the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, was “quoting Churchill” in his speech to the Italian people when he said, “This is our darkest hour, but we’ll get through.” In fact Churchill spoke about Britain’s’ “finest hour” in his great speech of 18 June 1940. Darkest Hour was the name of the Gary Oldman movie about him.
Churchill saw a great deal of flu and flu-like epidemics in his life. He was Secretary of State for Munitions and later Minister for War during the Spanish Flu of 1917-19. Catharine Arnold, author of Pandemic 1918, tells us that during the first twenty-five weeks of that truly horrific pandemic, no fewer than twenty-five million people died of the disease, which eventually was to kill well over fifty million and perhaps as many as a hundred million worldwide, many more than the cataclysmic world war that overlapped it chronologically.
“Fake News” a century ago
Allied “fake news” ascribed the influenza to being deliberately developed by German scientists. In return German propaganda blamed Allied scientists. The accusations became particularly virulent in those places where the war had already led to malnutrition. It is a remarkable statistic that of the 116,516 American military deaths in the First World War, no fewer than 63,114 (54.2%) were due to disease (mainly influenza), against 53,402 (45.8%) due to battle.
The subtitle Laura Spinney chose for her book Pale Rider was “The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World.” She explained how influenza had incredibly powerful political, cultural, and social effects in a world still reeling from the military Armageddon. She even ascribes the rise of Churchill’s great opponent, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Indian nationalist movement, in part, to the way that millions had died of influenza there, with the British authorities unable to contain it.
1937
“Grave are the times,” Churchill wrote to Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for Defence Co-ordination, in a January 1937. His topic was the Nazi rearmament programme, yet his reference here was to the influenza from which Inskip was suffering. Churchill added that he had told Inskip’s secretary not to show him the letter until he had recovered. Churchill continued:
I hope you will make sure that you have the necessary periods of convalescence. All my household has been down with this minor scourge, and a certain number of days of complete relief from work of any kind is absolutely necessary for perfect recovery. So far I have survived and If I escape altogether I shall attribute it to a good conscience as well as a good constitution.
The 1937 influenza outbreak was indeed a minor one compared to earlier episodes. Having a good constitution might indeed be useful in mitigating the effect of the virus. But there’s precious little epidemiological evidence to suggest that having a good conscience was of much help.
The pandemic in perspective
Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, has said that if Britain escapes with only 20,000 killed by Covid-19, as opposed to 8000 who normally died of influenza each year, it would be relatively speaking “a good outcome” considering how rampant it is. Of course he is right. It is salutary to think, however, that on the first day of the Somme Offensive, 1 July 1916, Britain lost 19,240 killed.
The Somme battle continued for another five months. Churchill denounced its abominably large cost in lives for the measly amount of ground gained. There were also over 38,000 non-fatal casualties that same day, whereas those who survive Covid-19 will get through it intact, without the loss of limbs and organs associated with the fighting on the Western Front.
In 1940, Churchill had a card placed on the table of the War Cabinet bunker in Whitehall, which can still be seen today. It consisted of a quotation from Queen Victoria’s letter to Arthur Balfour during Black Week —the worst week of the Boer War, in December 1899. It read: “Please understand there is no-one depressed in this house, and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat, they do not exist.” As homes throughout the country self-isolate through Covid-19, we could do worse than adopt that motto.
Churchillian wisdom
Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames often repeated her advice to historians and admirers of her father: “Never presume to know what Papa would have thought or said” about any situation or phenomenon that took place after his death in January 1965. Yet it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that response to Covid-19. It would have resolute, guided as he was by scientists, though never dominated by them. “Scientists should be on tap,” he once said, “not on top.” It is certainly a very good thing that our prime minister is an admirer—indeed a biographer—of Churchill. Speaking to the Royal College of Physicians on 2 March 1944, he said:
The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion.
* * *
As political and business leaders have to take decisions that will have life-changing consequences for their employees, there is another quotation, this time from Churchill’s great speech of 14 June 1940, that might be helpful for them—once adapted from wartime to peacetime exigencies. “People must have hope, to face the long haul that lies ahead,” he told the House of Commons, only ten days after the Nazis had forced the British Expeditionary Force off the Continent at Dunkirk….
Is the tragedy to repeat itself once more? Ah no! This is not the end of the tale. The stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of Mankind. Not so easily shall the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily shall the lights of freedom die. But time is short. Every month that passes adds to the length and to the perils of the journey that will have to be made. United we stand. Divided we fall. Divided, the Dark Age returns. United, we can save and guide the world.
The author
Andrew Roberts is the Roger & Martha Mertz Visiting Reader at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, is the only work meriting two book reviews on this website. See Larry P. Arnn, “Man of the Century” and Richard M. Langworth, “The New Churchilliad.” Dr. Roberts is married to Susan Gilchrist, Chair, Global Clients at Brunswick Group. This article appears here by kind courtesy of the Brunswick Review.
Appendix: “The Influenza”
Written by Winston Churchill age 15, first published in The Harrovian, 1890, published by kind permission of Randolph S. Churchill and Curtis Brown Ltd.
Oh how shall I its deeds recount
Or measure the untold amount
Of ills that it has done?
From China’s bright celestial land
E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
It journeyed with the sun.
O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains
Where Russian exiles toil in chains
It moved with noiseless tread;
And as it slowly glided by
There followed it across the sky
The spirits of the dead.
The Ural peaks by it were scaled
And every bar and barrier failed
To turn it from its way;
Slowly and surely on it came,
Heralded by its awful fame,
Increasing day by day.
On Moscow’s fair and famous town
Where fell the first Napoleon’s crown
It made a direful swoop;
The rich, the poor, the high, the low
Alike the various symptoms know,
Alike before it droop.
Nor adverse winds, nor floods of rain
Might stay the thrice-accursed bane;
And with unsparing hand,
Impartial, cruel and severe
It travelled on allied with fear
And smote the fatherland.
Fair Alsace and forlorn Lorraine,
The cause of bitterness and pain
In many a Gallic breast,
Receive the vile, insatiate scourge,
And from their towns with it emerge
And never stay nor rest.
* * *
And now Europa groans aloud,
And ’neath the heavy thunder-cloud
Hushed is both song and dance;
The germs of illness wend their way
To westward each succeeding day
And enter merry France.
Fair land of Gaul, thy patriots brave
Who fear not death and scorn the grave
Cannot this foe oppose,
Whose loathsome hand and cruel sting,
Whose poisonous breath and blighted wing
Full well thy cities know.
In Calais port the illness stays,
As did the French in former days,
To threaten Freedom’s isle;
But now no Nelson could o’erthrow
This cruel, unconquerable foe,
Nor save us from its guile.
Yet Father Neptune strove right well
To moderate this plague of Hell,
And thwart it in its course;
And though it passed the streak of brine
And penetrated this thin line,
It came with broken force.
For though it ravaged far and wide
Both village, town and countryside,
Its power to kill was o’er;
And with the favouring winds of Spring
(Blest is the time of which I sing)
It left our native shore.
God shield our Empire from the might
Of war or famine, plague or blight
And all the power of Hell,
And keep it ever in the hands
Of those who fought ’gainst other lands,
Who fought and conquered well.
Further Reading
John H. Maurer, “How Churchill Dodged the Flu Pandemic, and Others were Not So Lucky.”