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Alistair Cooke, Churchill at the Time (Part 1): The Liberal Lion
- By ALISTAIR COOKE KBE
- | August 25, 2022
- Category: Resources Understanding Churchill
Introduction
Sir Alistair Cooke delivered this classic speech at a Churchill Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on 27 August 1988. An incandescent masterpiece, it offers the understanding and thoughtful appreciation of an observant contemporary, who followed Churchill for 50 years. Part 1 is devoted to WSC’s first quarter century in politics, most of it spent as a fighting Liberal.
When I thought to invite Sir Alistair I wrote him with trepidation, because he had a reputation for being very hard to get. Happily he replied: “This is the time of year when I turn down everything, but your letter gave me pause. And, after due consideration of all the insuperable obstacles, I am, like the character in Tennyson, ‘saying he would ne’er consent, consented.’”
Born in Manchester, Alistair Cooke sighted North America in 1932 at the age of 23. Nine years later he became a U.S. citizen. He was American correspondent for The Times from 1938 to 1942; and UN and U.S. correspondent for The Guardian from 1945 to 1972 when he “retired.” Viewing retirement with the same disdain as Churchill, he continued his weekly BBC “Letter from America,” eventually reaching 50 countries. His broadcast ran from 1946 to 2004, its final, 2869th installment less than a month before his death.
“My entire career from the age of 28,” he wrote, “has been that of reporting America, first to Britain and then to the rest of the world.” Recalling the storms which rocked American civilization, he reminds us of an old saying: “A friend is someone who knows all about you, but likes you.” It was logical to ask what he had observed about the most famous Anglo-American Sir Winston Churchill. And that night in Bretton Woods, he told us. —Richard M. Langworth
* * *
Churchill at the Time: 1906-1926
Alistair Cooke KBE
© Cooke Americas, LLC, reprinted by kind permission.
I think it is a happy thing that you are holding this anniversary meeting in New Hampshire, where, as you all know, Winston Churchill spent the last 50 years of his life.
I refer, of course, to the eminent novelist whose fame was so considerable that when young Winston Spencer Churchill decided to publish a book, he wrote to Winston Churchill in New Hampshire saying he did not wish to trade on his fame or mislead the reading public. Thus the young, relatively unknown English author would henceforth publish his books under the byline, “Winston S. Churchill.”
No doubt most of you knew that, but I thought it would interest the few who—out of praiseworthy but mistaken devotion—make pilgrimages to Cornish, New Hampshire, where Winston Churchill lived so many years.
Credentials of a sort
Many of you must wonder what I’m doing here. I look through the list of all the very eminent scholars and Churchillians who have spoken and written about him, and I feel almost as intimidated as Churchill did, when he appeared as the guest of honor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 31 March 1949.
He looked out at an audience of Nobel Prize winners, the cream of scientific expertise from universities in North America and Europe. And he “confessed” that they not only intimidated but frightened him. “I have no technical and no university education,” he told them, “and have just had—er—to pick up—ah—a few things as I went along.”1 Then he spent the next two hours instructing them in the future of science and all its applications in war and peace.
I can only say my main credential is that I was alive and sentient and interested in life and politics for the last 40 to 50 years of Churchill’s life. I also have a Churchill library, modest but substantial, which includes one treasure that (my vanity hopes) nobody here possesses. It is a physically beautiful book, an edition of Churchill’s My Early Life. What makes it unique, I think, is its inscription, in the scrawl of a very old lady: “Inscribed by Clementine Churchill and presented to Alistair Cooke, whose broadcasts gave so much pleasure to the author.”
A public life
What I should like to do is to retrace Churchill’s reputation, his public reputation—not from the view of historians or insiders, but as it appeared at the time to the ordinary people who lived through those years. I hope this will serve to correct or to modify the picture we have formed from television documentaries, and especially from the new, insidious form of docudrama. It’s true also, I think, that many recent biographies suffer from the innate curse of the biographical form: which is to pretend that the subject was at the focal center of the world or of his country, and that all the life of the time swirled around him.
So, I should like to follow Churchill’s public life step by step, not to review it by hindsight. Hindsight is the historian’s weapon. Knowing what happened, he is always able to pretend that things were bound to come out the way they did. Or, in the more brutal aphorism of Justice Holmes, “History is what the winner says it is.”
“Because of the Dardanelles”
I’ll start with my very first memory. I was on the verge of eight years of age when I saw in The Daily Mail a very strange picture. It was a photo of a Liberal politician, now Major Churchill, in uniform. I said to my father, “Why is he in uniform?” He replied, “Because of the Dardanelles.”
This didn’t mean very much to me at the time. but it very soon did. I don’t need to tell you about the enormous tragedy of Gallipoli. But if you lived in Britain then, even as an unquestioning boy of eight. it was one of the great disasters. The other was the Battle of the Somme in which, in three nights, the British lost 160,000 men and the Germans lost about the same.
It is very hard now, thanks to television and the abolition of front-line censorship, to imagine what those terrible events conveyed at the time. Today we see a war on the nightly news and say, “What are we doing there?” when we get a casualty list of 1000 in a week. It is today impossible to get used to the idea that we could lose 200,000 in one week.
* * *
The Dardanelles was very well reported in the beginning, because it was such a tremendous adventure. Then the months went by, and when it was over we heard that 8000 men had tiptoed out one night, and then 9000 and then 10,000. Soon the papers blared with the headline, “The Miracle of Gallipoli”—the evacuation. It’s ironical to recall now that Churchill should have been so involved, when 25 years later, after Dunkirk, he would remind the House of Commons, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”
But the Dardanelles had been Churchill’s preoccupation. We did not know at the time that it was also, as Clement Attlee would say, “the only great strategic idea of the First World War.”
What we knew then was that it was all over; that the casualty lists went on for pages; that half a million men on both sides had died or been wounded for nothing. We knew that Churchill, disgraced, had gone to France to fight in the trenches. But he was so dishonored that he could not obtain a suitable command. Later, he wrote to Lord Kitchener and asked to be relieved from his military duty. Kitchener gave him permission, but told him he must never again go back to the military. So Churchill, still a Member of Parliament, returned home in the spring of 1916, again to take part in House of Commons debates.
“Kitchener has died”
After school on 6 June 1916 I was meeting my mother. A steady rain had ended. A shaft of sunlight was breaking through, always a pleasant surprise in the murky Manchester climate. On her face was an expression I had never seen. I’m shocked to realize now that she was in her late 30s. To me then she looked suddenly old, grey, startled, yet not wanting to frighten. She took my hand and said, “Kitchener has died.” (HMS Hampshire, carrying him on a mission to Russia, struck a German mine.)
Even at that age, I felt the sky had fallen. Kitchener had seemed an Eisenhower-Montgomery-Nimitz, all rolled into one. He wasn’t, but we thought he was. We didn’t know then that his power was declining. He was more than anyone morally responsible for the failure of the Dardanelles. He would not support the original expedition with manpower or materiel. But as you may have noticed, the death of a famous leader confers a halo. Kitchener was drowned and he got the halo. Churchill got the blame.
I should explain why this is so vivid to me. Of course the Australians and New Zealanders took the worst beating at Gallipoli—and the Canadians. But of all the British regiments, the people who were hardest hit (I won’t say decimated because there were a great deal more than one in ten killed) were in the Lancashire regiments. I was born in Lancashire, and I was in Manchester at the time. I remember the effect on a little boy: The Dardanelles was the greatest failure of the war. I began to notice that in our street and the next street, and the one after that, suddenly every other young woman was wearing black.
Liberal lions
My father was a Manchester Liberal. I cannot think what that would be in an American translation. Liberal Republican? Conservative Democrat? I don’t know. But he was a Manchester Liberal, bearing with cheerful stoicism the fact that his wife always voted Conservative. On election day she would finish up the breakfast things and say, “Let’s get dressed and out to the polls, so we can cancel out each other’s vote.” It is what they call democracy.
A touchingly sweet man, my father was embittered, and said so, about the Dardanelles and Churchill. His youth had been spent during what he always said were Winston’s great years. Those were 1906-10, during the memorable Liberal Parliament, when the two great radicals, Lloyd George and Churchill, embarked on the reform of British society.
This Liberal alliance—the poor country boy and the aristocrat—abolished sweatshops and gave the miners an eight-hour day. They set up the labor exchanges that led to unemployment insurance. In fact, what Roosevelt later called the “New Deal” was really preceded by Bismarck’s Germany and Liberal Britain.
If you were an English Liberal, 1906-10 were stirring years. Here on one hand you had the crackling, sarcastic, brilliant Lloyd George. On the other there was the witty, devastating Churchill. They followed each other like a great vaudeville team up and down the country. Churchill at one point even spent a week on the road begging—pleading—for the abolition of the House of Lords: “This second chamber as it is, one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee.”2 (It is still there, though shorn of all power.) But after the Dardanelles, all this was forgotten.
Escaped scapegoat
In 1917, Lloyd George brought Churchill back into government as Minister of Munitions, against much opposition, especially in the press. And from then until 1923, Churchill could not go before a British audience, especially during an election, without 30 or 40 people suddenly starting the chant, “What About The Dardanelles?” He had a very rough time.
In 1924 came a trade agreement between the incumbent Socialist government and the Soviet Union. The Liberal Party withdrew support from Labour, saying they were not going to throw Britain into the arms of Russia. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had to go to the country. Eight days before the polls there appeared the so-called Zinoviev Letter, purportedly written by a high member of the Comintern to the British Communist Party—an election bombshell.
I think it was Robert Graves who said at the time that the British Communist Party was as rich and powerful as the Flat Earth Society. There must have been all of 187 Communists then. But the Zinoviev Letter asked them to foment strikes and disrupt the factories, to overturn the constitution. The newspapers picked this up, and it terrified and petrified the middle class. Even before the election the letter was shown to be a very crude forgery, but it worked. I remember a cartoon in Punch the week of the election, which showed the then stereotypical Russian, with a leather cap, hairy face, shaggy clothes, leggings and a bomb behind his back, wearing a billboard which said, “Vote for MacDonald and Me.” There was, consequently, a Tory landslide.
Liberal back to Tory
Now at this point, Churchill, was ready to “cross the aisle” (change parties—something he’d done once already). He briefly contemplated forming a center party with old Asquith Liberals and some “center-leaning” Conservatives. It simply didn’t work. The most important thing, from his point of view in 1924, was the end of the Liberal Party as the main Opposition.
What then does Churchill do? He decides to become a Conservative. Suddenly he appears in the Baldwin cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer!
That astounded people. I remember another cartoon in Punch, showing Churchill, who had sniped away at past Conservative budgets, patrolling what was labeled the “Exchequer Woods” with a gun. The caption read simply, “Poacher-Turned-Keeper.”
“Watch him and tame him”
He admitted, as he stood up to present his first budget, that he knew nothing about high finance or economics. He could sink admirals or generals, he said: “But when I am talking to bankers and economists, after a while they begin to talk Persian, and then they sink me instead.”3
What came out of it was Britain’s return to the Gold Standard, which proved quite fatal. It overvalued sterling, produced an enormous slump in exports, provoked the owners of the coal mines to reduce the miners’ pay and increase their working hours. They struck, and that led to the General Strike in 1926.
Churchill’s role there was to get out a government newspaper called the British Gazette. He was actually sympathetic to the miners. If the quarrel had been with them alone, he probably would have helped to settle it. But what he could not abide was the action of the Trades Union Congress in calling sympathetic strikes and, in the end, for a General Strike of the entire nation.
We lived through that, too. I was then, by the way, 17, and my father felt worse than ever about Churchill because of his chauvinist, flag-waving British Gazette, talking about the miners and the T.U.C. as enemies of the people. Baldwin restrained him. (The day after appointing Churchill Chancellor, Baldwin had said to a cabinet colleague: “Winston is a tiger, and he’s likely to tear the Party apart. We must watch him and tame him.”)
So now, consider Churchill’s parlous position. He is a member of the Conservative cabinet—but warily looked on, distrusted. The Liberals and he have rejected each other. He has entered for all time the Socialist demonology. He has nowhere to go and no support from anybody. What next?
For listening
An Epic Ends, Another Dawns: 17 January 1965
Alistair Cooke on Churchill’s Stroke and Johnson’s Inauguration
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, “The 20th Century: Its Promise and its Realization,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, 31 March 1949, in Churchill, In the Balance (London: Cassell, 1951), 41.
2 WSC, House of Commons, 29 June 1907, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 1916), 104.
3 Ibid., 411. WSC, 1924, reported in the Daily Telegraph, 5 August 1965.