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Articles
Back in the News: Richard Burton’s Fraught Relationship with Churchill
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | June 11, 2020
- Category: Churchill in Film and Video Truths and Heresies
Trailer screenshot of Richard Burton as Flying Officer David Campbell in the D-Day film “The Longest Day,” 1962. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
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The airwaves and Twitterverse are full of Churchill bile following recent sad events that have nothing to do with him. Churchill’s faults and errors are well known, so he is an easy target. Alas, most current criticism is unlearned, rising from skewed interpretations and out-of-context quotes. Surfacing again are attacks half a century old by the famed actor Richard Burton. Film critic John Beaufort first reported these in the Christian Science Monitor in 1972:
December 9th, 1972— Richard Burton has just given two of the oddest and most contradictory performances of his career. Both involved his portrayal of Winston Churchill in film The Gathering Storm. The prologue consisted of two articles by the actor in TV Guide and The New York Times. Mr. Burton put on a good show as Winston Churchill, a bad show as Richard Burton. His intemperate anti-Churchill articles appeared just before the film was broadcast in the United States.
All the more astonishing, Burton had previously expressed only admiration for Churchill. Their encounters at the Old Vic, when Burton played Hamlet, were legendary. The actor recalled the Prime Minister reciting the lines with him, sputtering if he skipped any to save time. Burton called Churchill “this religion, this flag, this insignia.” Lady Williams of Elvel, the former Jane Portal, was WSC’s secretary in 1949-55. She remembered when “Richard came down to the front of the stage to speak the great Shakespearean words with Churchill. The audience was ecstatic.” Later she was a production advisor for The Gathering Storm. “I had the impression that Richard worshipped Sir Winston,” she said.
“To play Churchill is to hate him…”
…was now suddenly Burton’s refrain. “Churchill and all his kind…have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history,” he wrote. Why was he, the son of a Welsh miner, celebrating an enemy of his class—a “toy soldier” who never grew up? Meeting Churchill had been “like a blow under the heart…. My class and his hate each other to the seething point.”
The actor’s words are in vogue again. They fit well. Journalism seems largely to have parted company with old stand-by rules like “have multiple sources” or “verify your quotations.” Burton’s screed fits today’s narrative. Churchill was a war-mongering racist imperialist who despised the poor, brown and black. Here is Burton, bending quotes a half century ago:
Churchill quote, Burton version: “They [Germans] must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smouldering ruins.” Churchill’s actual words: “It is our interest to engage the enemy’s air power at as many points as possible to make him bleed and burn and waste on the widest fronts” (23 April 1942).
Burton: “We shall wipe them [the Japanese] out, every one of them, men, women and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth.” (No portion of this resembles anything Churchill said or wrote.)
Burton: “That morbid creature, Hitler, of ferocious genius, that repository of human crime.” (Burton adds: “He might have been talking about himself.”) Churchill’s actual words: “…a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast” (The Gathering Storm, 9).
Doubling down
Burton correctly quoted “We are revolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime” (broadcast, 22 June 1941). Then he interpreted it: “What he was really saying was that ‘every vestige of the Nazi regime’ included the entire German race.” Churchill, writing of his visit to Berlin in 1945, said: “My hate had died with their surrender” (Triumph and Tragedy, 545).
We should be glad these were the only Churchill “quotes” in Burton’s catalogue of disdain. The rest consisted of boilerplate condemnation. Everything from despising Clement Attlee to WSC’s “baby-like, hairless, effeminate right hand, slowly slamming the table to some doomed rhythm known only to himself, and saying again and again in that bizarre cadence of his curious voice, ‘We were right to fight, we were right to fight’…. I went home and had a few nightmares.” Readers possessed of reason might have had a few nightmares themselves.
Reactions
In those days we felt more confidence toward our heroes, and Burton reaped the whirlwind. The BBC Drama Department banned him for life. (Today they would probably be offering him a TV special.) In Parliament, Norman Tebbit spoke of “an actor past his peak indulging in a fit of pique, jealousy and ignorant comment.” More pointedly, Neville Trotter said: “If there were more Churchills and fewer Burtons we would be in a very much better country.”
The actor received scores of protesting letters. They went unanswered, even from friends like Robert Hardy. Instead, Burton doubled down. “Churchill has fascinated me since childhood,” he retorted—“a bogeyman who hated us, the mining class, motivelessly. He ordered a few of us to be shot, you know, and the orders were carried out.” Historian John Ramsden observed: “The myth of Tonypandy was still around to haunt Churchill’s memory.”
Why did Burton do it?
Richard Burton played to his audience. In 1962 he earned $100,000 for recording Churchill’s words in Jack Le Vien’s television series The Valiant Years. Dr. Ramsden believed he was nominated for that role by Churchill himself: “‘Get that boy from the Old Vic.’ [It was] arguably one of the best things he ever did.” Like Lady Williams, Le Vien saw in Burton only an admirer. The actor had a Churchill bust which, he said, was one of his “most treasured possessions.” He told both Clementine Churchill and Sir Winston’s grandson how much he admired “the old man.”
To different audiences Burton revealed other opinions. On television chat shows, Dr. Ramsden wrote, he would often emphasize: “‘I’m the son of a Welsh miner.’ Here too he was playing a part, for his lifestyle was way beyond the comprehension of Welsh miners.” Implicitly, such words undermined “the image of Churchill as an epic figure. He was in fact unhappy being Churchill partly because he had found in himself a tyrannical, domineering person…hard to live with and not the way he liked to think of himself.”
Dr. Ramsden’s final judgment is apposite: “As his career and life deteriorated around him and the fog of alcohol descended, Burton was trying desperately to play the man he had been long ago, and he at least knew what young Welshmen had been expected to believe about Winston Churchill. He was not asked to play either part again.”
Further reading
John Ramsden quotations are from his thoughtful book Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and his Legend Since 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2002).
Thank-you. Before flying off with Twitterverse generalities, do consider expanding your horizons with facts. The source you gratuitously offer simply regurgitates what the author has said for years—long written off by responsible historians. Here is a good place to start: “Winston Churchill the Racist War Criminal”: http://bit.ly/2S81wzd
To take one example of your source’s screed, blasting the Indians with “surplus bombers” sounds pretty bad until you read the source and context (Colville memoirs, 21Feb45). Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory 1942-1945, 1232. Here is the full, unedited quotation:
“At dinner I asked the PM if he had read Beverley Nichols’ Verdict on India which I had urged him to take to Yalta. He said he had, with great interest. He had been struck by the action of the Government of India in not removing a ‘Quit India’ sign which had been placed in a prominent place in Delhi and which Nichols had seen on arrival and on departure a year later. He seemed half to admire and half to resent this attitude. The PM said the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’ and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them. As for Lord Wavell, and his Anthology of Poetry, he thought him ‘mediocrity in excelsis’.”
So….what do we make of this great offense? Churchill in after-dinner conversation, with sardonic wartime humor against the Hindus (not the Indians). Which Hindus? As usual, the Delhi separatists, about whom his worst remarks were ALWAYS made. Was strafing them with bombers ever seriously discussed? Of course not. Here’s another thing to read: ‘How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: Paradox of the Raj,’ by the Indian historian Tirthankar Roy, who writes:
“The context for almost everything he said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.”
We will shortly publish Dr. Roy’s review your recommended source’s 2017 book. You can look it up.
Richard Burton was a hypocrite. Try not to join his ranks with artificial offense based on non-facts and out-of-context quotations. Otherwise you risk fitting Churchill’s description of Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
Thank you for your response. I have read the link you have attached here. You, Mr Langworth, and the author of that article both base your defence of Churchill on the context of his quotes. But the provided context doesn’t really acquit his words or his actions. Your analysis of the example given above shows how much you yourself have glossed over the facts while forming your own understanding about Churchill. Just focussing the provided excerpt, the quote:
displays his mindset. While the second part of the above quote might well be his “sardonic wartime humour”, first part very clearly conveys the man’s mentality about the Indians. To palliate his quote by saying that he said this about hindus, specifically delhi hindus is bereft of any truth in light of two facts:
1) Quit India was a pan India movement not restricted to Delhi.
2) Hindus Constituted three-fourths of the total population of India at the time and to say something about hindus is to say something about most of the Indians.
Churchill’s role in the Bengal famine really puts him in the company of worst dictators of the 20th century. I welcome any specific evidence to the contrary but here is a link to a news article regarding a scientific study about the bengal famine:
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3005838/churchills-real-darkest-hour-new-evidence-confirms-british
While studying Churchill is a good initiative for our collective understanding, i am afraid you have taken on an impossible task of whitewashing his image in this age of information where his words and actions are more easier for the general public to access.
One more try. Thank you for repeating everything I said, but I rather think readers got it the first time.
So we must judge Churchill by his deeds? May we then disregard what he said about Hindu separatists in the narrow window 1942-45? Or what Leo Amery says he said—since without Leo, there are no other sources?
No sooner do you assert this than you offer another Amery quote which you say “displays [Churchill’s] mindset.” How do you know? Is it not odd that among 80 million words, we can find no similar descriptions of Indian peoples except in one source?
Yes, Hindus were 3/4s of the Raj population (as they often reminded their Muslim countrymen). To assert that Churchill’s words were about all Indians ignores where those words were directed. Dr. Tirthankar Roy: “Everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous” because the moderates were demoralized by dissensions and the radicals wanted the Axis to win. “No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.”
Judge him by his deeds? Right, here are his deeds: 1) Ordering Wavell to make “every effort,” even at the cost of military shipping, to “deal with local shortages.” 2) Telling Wavell to “assuage every strife” between Hindus and Muslims, assuring “the fundamental right of equality.” 3) Scouring every source for grain, even Iraqi barley, ultimately relying mainly on Australia. 4) Asking Roosevelt to help ease the “grievous famine” (FDR refused). 5) Sending Sir Henry French, Minister of Food, to India to prevent another famine in late 1944.
The cited article only repeats the same empty, unlearned accusations of the Mukerjee book, itself long dismissed by competent historians. Only last week it was refuted again. The Indian historian Zareer Masani says Mukerjee ignored “half a century of historical scholarship which has established beyond reasonable doubt that the famine was of no individual’s making. It was the result of wartime speculation by Indian traders, who put up prices and hoarded stocks while the Japanese invasion forces were knocking at the gates of Bengal.”
Rather than whitewashing, reputable historians have for decades discussed Churchill’s real errors, and no politician around for fifty years is without them. Oddly enough, we never hear any more about the Dardanelles, Gallipoli, the Gold Standard, the India Act, the Abdication, Singapore—things on which Churchill was his own worst critic. What sells today is the late-night hearsay of Leo Amery, which is much easier to scrawl in a Tweet than it is to read a 1000-page book. The role of History includes scrutinizing a figure’s flaws and shooting them down. But in order to shoot, you need something to shoot with.