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Churchill and the ‘Black Dog’ of Depression: Reassessing the Biographical Evidence of Psychological Disorder, by Wilfred Attenborough. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 264 pages, $90 (inexpensive used copies offered on Amazon), Kindle $85.50.
How Black was His Black Dog?
Eventually an erudite synthesis will capture all aspects of Churchill’s personality, including his mental health. Unfortunately this book focuses almost exclusively on his depressed moods, and does not address the relevant diagnoses that need to be considered, such as cyclothymic personality—the opinion of his neurologist, Lord Brain. It is also incredibly overpriced, although Amazon offers used copies.
Churchill picked up the term “black dog,” a commonplace description by Victorian nannies for out-of-sorts children, from his childhood nurse, Mrs. Everest. Over the years, writers have made the most of it, beginning with psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s essay “The Man,” in the 1969 collection, Churchill: Four Faces and the Man. Conjecture since has led all the way to the theory that Churchill had a bipolar disorder. But none of these arguments are considered in any detail here.
Attenborough contrasts Storr’s opinions with Sir Martin Gilbert’s countervailing view that Churchill’s melancholy (except for the depression in his very old age) was brief, never disabling and usually a reaction to personal misfortune or thwarted ambition. He then evaluates occurrences of “black dog” episodes during Churchill’s career, in chapters from “Breakdown in the Commons” to “The Quest for Vindication.”
But we are not offered an adequate presentation of the full scope of Churchill’s dark moods. To conclude that he was vulnerable to mild depression compounded by worry and anxiety is not difficult; but anxiety is a common co-morbid condition of depression, and there are other conditions—alcohol intake, odd sleep patterns and the use of amphetamines (during World War II)—which should have been considered.
Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965, the alleged diaries of Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran, is well represented throughout, with an appendix devoted to Moran’s view of the grim weeks after Churchill’s defeat in the 1945 general election. Moran recorded the several conversations when his patient referred to “black dog” as, WSC described depression. But Moran was not versed in management of mental deficiencies, and certainly never referred Churchill to another physician, particularly a psychiatrist, which Churchill abhorred. (There is an intriguing discussion of Moran’s other book, The Anatomy of Courage, and how this may have colored his opinions.) Certainly Lord Moran provided (maybe prescribed) such a variety of uppers (amphetamines) and downers (Phenobarbital) that Churchill kept them in a pill box and sometimes took as he saw fit.
Attenborough seems to equate Churchill’s depression only with anxiety, ignoring other levels or sources. He concludes that the problem was mild, without providing a definition in behavioral terms, or considering dysthymia or the SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) syndrome.
Churchill’s last private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, told me that on a gloomy, overcast London day his boss might say: “Let’s go and find the sunshine.” This often presaged a trip to the south of France, where the sun would alleviate Sir Winston’s SAD syndrome. There he could indulge in oil painting, which so insulated him from his troubles. Churchill himself admitted that painting was a sure antidote to his predisposition to dwell on the dark side.
There has been much dispute about Churchill’s confessed fear of railway platforms or the sides of ships, suggesting a predilection towards suicide, and how they might connote deep-seated anxiety or panic attacks. After considering these, Attenborough attributes them to “mental overstrain” (Churchill’s words in his book Painting as a Pastime).
The absence of an explanation of Churchill’s mood disorders is disconcerting in a book assessing psychological disorders. It is not mentioned here, but even Randolph Churchill observed the frequency and range of his father’s mood swings, and discussed them with a psychiatrist, Dr. Fieve. Colleagues such as Brendan Bracken and Lord Ismay commented on Churchill’s dramatic changes of mood, not always associated with any specific event, during World War II.
There is passing reference to the work of Doctors Ghaemi and Norman, whose books concluded that Churchill’s alleged bi-polar personality was an advantage in his role as prime minister during World War II. But there is no deep analysis of those works. Was Churchill’s indomitable mental resilience and courage in 1940 only possible because of a hypomania that drove him to a work schedule which often exhausted his generals and the war cabinet? The answer to that question is not here.
What are we to think about Churchill’s “black dog”? He definitely had episodes of “the blues” or melancholy. His daughter Lady Soames insisted that the dog was usually “kenneled,” except after devastating reverses in battle, and that “the things he went through would depress anybody.” She believed he was able to alleviate those moments with his absorption in work and painting, and through a devoted wife. Never, she declared, did they seriously affect his performance as a war leader and statesman.
This was not however the case during her father’s second premiership (1951-55). But by then he faced the compounding factors of TIAs* and strokes affecting his executive and cognitive skills.
* Transient ischaemic attack: a brief episode of neurological dysfunction resulting from an interruption in the blood supply to the brain or the eye, sometimes as a precursor of a stroke.
Dr. Mather is a physician executive who has spent many years in research for a book on Winston Churchill’s medical history.
Parenthetic page references are to Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.)
Dr. Mather considers that I should have ranged more widely across the other diagnostic possibilities for Churchill’s depression, such as cyclothymic personality, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), dysthymia and bipolar disorder. Although I think he is mistaken to believe that precise psycho-diagnostic pronouncements are attainable so far removed, the point of my book, as conveyed by its title, required me to minimise such diagnostic, or pseudo-diagnostic, endeavours.
Instead I scrutinised the biographical evidence deployed by writers who uncritically echo the definition of “Black Dog” in Lord Moran’s problematic memoir of his years as Churchill’s doctor, and Dr. Anthony Storr’s psychoanalytic essay on Churchill, which first appeared three years later.
Moran did not refer to bipolar disorder/manic depression, dysthymia, cyclothymic personality or SAD. Applied to Churchill, such terms are later embellishments based on Moran’s book, or the memoirs, papers and diaries of those who worked with Churchill in World War II. They may require scrutiny, but within my publisher’s word limit I had to address only the main and still-prominent belief, stemming from Moran and Storr, that Churchill suffered prolonged fits of unipolar depression.
Dr. Mather says Moran records “several conversations” when Churchill referred to “Black Dog.” In Moran’s entry for 14 August 1944 Churchill refers to “black depression,” but nowhere is he quoted using “Black Dog.” It is Moran, not Churchill, who says, “Your trouble—I mean the Black Dog business—you got from your forebears” (Moran, 180).
My contribution, unacknowledged by Dr. Mather, is the evaluation of key and supposedly authentic biographical evidence of Churchill’s “depression,” which is well illustrated in this instance. As my book shows, the 14 August 1944 entry was a much later interpolation by Moran to a part-fabricated and misdated diary passage, probably inserted to juxtapose comments by Brendan Bracken in 1958: “Winston has always been moody; he used to call his fits of depression the ‘Black Dog’” (Moran, 794). I made this finding when I compared and contrasted Moran’s published entry with his near-contemporaneous handwritten notebook.
To Churchill, “black depression” indicates no more than worry or perhaps mild anxiety. When Moran juxtaposes Bracken’s “Black Dog” remarks with his, he suggests that Churchill may have been afflicted with melancholia, the severest form of depression. This was probably because Moran first entertained the notion that Churchill had inherited melancholia from his forebears. As I write, Moran in his book later retracted the melancholia idea. Unfortunately, he left the part-fabricated 14 August 1944 entry in place—causing later writers to give it more credence than it deserves.
Similarly, although Moran’s footnote to the August entry describes “Black Dog” as “the prolonged fits of depression from which Churchill suffered,” Moran declares at the end of his book: “…before the outbreak of the First World War he had learnt to disguise his natural apprehension and had managed to extirpate bouts of depression from his system” (830).
Dr. Mather refers to Churchill’s “use of amphetamines (during World War II).” Moran’s biographer, Richard Lovell, in a 1995 letter to the British Medical Journal, disclosed Moran’s prescribing this drug for the management of Churchill’s cerebrovascular disease following his major stroke in June 1953. It is clear from Moran’s book and Lovell’s biography that this was an innovation in his work with Churchill; until then Churchill had regarded Moran as “a most reluctant prescriber,” except in life-threatening emergencies.
Indeed, Churchill in 1953 was so thrilled to have a medication that so improved his post-stroke recovery that he named the first pill Moran concocted a “Moran.” Had he been familiar with amphetamines in the war, it is unlikely he would have expressed such surprised delight.
As for the co-morbidity indicators of depression, such as alcohol intake, to which he refers, does Dr Mather agree that these have diagnostic significance only if there is evidence of depression or bipolar disorder etc. of sufficient length and severity to qualify as actual mental illness, when diagnosed by the patient’s actual doctors, as distinct from an author, qualified or not, writing interpretatively decades later?
The structure of my book resulted not only from the use of the term “depression” by Moran, Storr and others, and from word-count limitations, but from what I view as compelling self-diagnosis by Churchill himself, in his essay and later book, Painting as a Pastime. I looked for evidence not just of depression, but also worry, anxiety, and mild anxiety-depression, because of the opening task Churchill sets himself in that work: to identify “remedies…for the avoidance of worry and mental overstrain by persons who, over prolonged periods, have to bear exceptional responsibilities and discharge duties upon a very large scale.”
Churchill concludes that “brain-workers”—those whose work relies on reading, writing, information-processing, discussion and debate—can restore “psychic equilibrium” by using “those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand”: joinery, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying and painting. With an unmistakable autobiographical flourish, Churchill writes: “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man.”
My main criticism is that any self-contained work on Churchill’s “Black Dog” that doesn’t address the full scope of his personality and changing moods is an insufficient treatment of the subject.
It was not just Lord Moran who noted Churchill’s mood swings, but his neurologist, Lord Brain—more qualified than Moran to make a diagnosis of a cyclothymic personality through direct observations, which he did. (See Brain, “Encounters with Winston Churchill,” Medical History, 2000, 44: 3-20.)
It is imprecise today to label someone as having a depression or melancholia without specifying the exact nature and severity of the condition. Hence the use of terms such as SAD syndrome, dysthymia and more severe forms of clinical depression requiring medical intervention. (The absence in Churchill of severe clinical depression has been usefully addressed in several recent articles.)
In the traditional view, depression was the product both of inherited and outside factors, and had various levels of severity. Clearly Churchill was affected by events—severely, for example, after his dismissal from the Admiralty in 1915 or the great military reverses of early 1942 (as documented in the diaries of Alexander Cadogan and Harold Nicolson). Likewise, the historical record is clear that his forebears had a depressive steak going back to the First Duke of Marlborough.
While Moran may not have precisely diagnosed the essence of Churchill’s “Black Dog,” his book does bring this facet out, while not over-emphasizing its impact on his patient. The Churchill family was chagrined at the idea that Sir Winston had any such stigma, and sought other explanation for his use of the term.
There is no doubt that Moran prescribed medications to ameliorate or enhance Churchill’s mood swings long before his stroke, and might have recognized other co-morbid conditions such as alcohol intake. Yet he did not consider Churchill’s condition warranted referral to a psychiatrist. Given his opinion of psychiatrists, Churchill would have stopped that dead in its tracks (See: Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, London: 1951, 814-15.)
Churchill was subject to mood swings, downs and ups, sometimes accentuated by anxiety and exhaustion. I agree that he recognized them, and found solace and rejuvenation in his painting, writing, family and great love for his wife. I do sympathize with the problem of publisher’s word limits, and can only wish that the author in turn had imposed a price limit, so that more readers can profit by his research.
Incidentally, “Black Dog” appears in three other places in Moran’s book, but I agree that these are the words of Lord Moran:
13 September 1944: “In his early days, as I have already recounted, he was afflicted by fits of depression that might last for months. He called them the ‘Black Dog’….I am disposed to believe that his reluctance on this occasion to open up old wounds was but another instance of his drawn-out battle with the ‘Black Dog.’ (195-96).” 8 June 1959: “Is Winston’s Black Dog catching? I was glad to find William Haley [editor of The Times] planted in a chair in the sun, absorbed in a book” (804).
Parenthetic page references are to Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.)
I thank Dr Mather for responding to my comments about his review of my book.
Even more clearly now, my perception is that he and I are not in dispute about the central purpose of my book and the extent to which I have realised that purpose; rather, we are at cross-purposes, with Dr Mather still troubled that I have not written an entirely different book, namely one that is a comprehensively diagnostic treatise on Black Dog. May I try one final time to clarify what I have been attempting to achieve?
The task I explicitly set myself, as indicated by the title plus sub-title of my book, is that of reassessing the biographical evidence for what is widely, if not universally, held to be Winston Churchill’s lifelong psychological disorder of recurrent bouts of severe unipolar ‘Black Dog’ depression.
Had I been minded to write an eclectically diagnostic treatment of the entire subject of Churchill’s temperament, personality and mental health, instead of focussing on such biographical evidence and supposed evidence as other authors have adduced when making inherently problematic posthumous diagnostic pronouncements about the great man and depressive illness, I might have been foolish enough to attempt to provide the ‘answer’ Dr Mather rhetorically sought for in vain in his review: ‘Was Churchill’s indomitable mental resilience and courage in 1940 only possible because of a hypomania that drove him to a work schedule which often exhausted his generals and the war cabinet?’ It does not follow from my having a markedly more limited and modest approach that I made no significant contribution to the discussion of the sort of question that Dr Mather was posing. Let me briefly explain this assertion by taking just one example of the findings I make in my book
Dr Mather links his question about hypomania in 1940 to studies by Dr Nassir Ghaemi and Dr Andrew Norman. He correctly states that these authors both ‘diagnose’ Churchill as having had a benign form of bipolar disorder during the Second World War, However, in faulting me for omitting a ‘deep analysis’ of their work, Dr Mather ought perhaps to have acknowledged a relevant and important finding of mine that suggests much caution is needed when reading posthumous diagnosticians of Churchill be they from the ‘bipolar disorder’ or the ‘unipolar depression’ school of advocacy. For I demonstrate that both Ghaemi and Norman – in common with other authors who in contrast to them pronounce Black Dog to be severe unipolar depression – place heavy reliance on problematic ‘evidence’ to be found in Lord Moran’s memoir of his years as Churchill’s principal doctor.
The principal item of that problematic ‘evidence’ is the supposed diary entry of Moran misdated as 14 August 1944. All of the authors I have referred to are plainly completely unaware that the conversation with Churchill that the entry apparently records is in significant part a fabricated one. The reason for this, and its implications, are carefully teased out in detail in my book, and briefly summarised in my first posted comment. Deprived of the first-hand contemporaneous clinical certainty of medically diagnosed depression that had seemed to be within the said Moran ‘diary’ entry, the work of Ghaemi and Norman, no less than the work of the numerous authors dating back to Dr Anthony Storr in 1969 who pronounced Black Dog to be unipolar depression, must have significantly reduced credibility.
Thus, although I make no pretence of being a posthumous diagnostician, I do claim, as a result of findings such as the foregoing example, to have made a worthwhile attempt as an historian to reassess the credibility of the biographical evidence relied on by those who have boldly made diagnostic findings of clinical depression in Churchill’s psychological functioning.
Parenthetic page references are to Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.)
Dr. Mather considers that I should have ranged more widely across the other diagnostic possibilities for Churchill’s depression, such as cyclothymic personality, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), dysthymia and bipolar disorder. Although I think he is mistaken to believe that precise psycho-diagnostic pronouncements are attainable so far removed, the point of my book, as conveyed by its title, required me to minimise such diagnostic, or pseudo-diagnostic, endeavours.
Instead I scrutinised the biographical evidence deployed by writers who uncritically echo the definition of “Black Dog” in Lord Moran’s problematic memoir of his years as Churchill’s doctor, and Dr. Anthony Storr’s psychoanalytic essay on Churchill, which first appeared three years later.
Moran did not refer to bipolar disorder/manic depression, dysthymia, cyclothymic personality or SAD. Applied to Churchill, such terms are later embellishments based on Moran’s book, or the memoirs, papers and diaries of those who worked with Churchill in World War II. They may require scrutiny, but within my publisher’s word limit I had to address only the main and still-prominent belief, stemming from Moran and Storr, that Churchill suffered prolonged fits of unipolar depression.
Dr. Mather says Moran records “several conversations” when Churchill referred to “Black Dog.” In Moran’s entry for 14 August 1944 Churchill refers to “black depression,” but nowhere is he quoted using “Black Dog.” It is Moran, not Churchill, who says, “Your trouble—I mean the Black Dog business—you got from your forebears” (Moran, 180).
My contribution, unacknowledged by Dr. Mather, is the evaluation of key and supposedly authentic biographical evidence of Churchill’s “depression,” which is well illustrated in this instance. As my book shows, the 14 August 1944 entry was a much later interpolation by Moran to a part-fabricated and misdated diary passage, probably inserted to juxtapose comments by Brendan Bracken in 1958: “Winston has always been moody; he used to call his fits of depression the ‘Black Dog’” (Moran, 794). I made this finding when I compared and contrasted Moran’s published entry with his near-contemporaneous handwritten notebook.
To Churchill, “black depression” indicates no more than worry or perhaps mild anxiety. When Moran juxtaposes Bracken’s “Black Dog” remarks with his, he suggests that Churchill may have been afflicted with melancholia, the severest form of depression. This was probably because Moran first entertained the notion that Churchill had inherited melancholia from his forebears. As I write, Moran in his book later retracted the melancholia idea. Unfortunately, he left the part-fabricated 14 August 1944 entry in place—causing later writers to give it more credence than it deserves.
Similarly, although Moran’s footnote to the August entry describes “Black Dog” as “the prolonged fits of depression from which Churchill suffered,” Moran declares at the end of his book: “…before the outbreak of the First World War he had learnt to disguise his natural apprehension and had managed to extirpate bouts of depression from his system” (830).
Dr. Mather refers to Churchill’s “use of amphetamines (during World War II).” Moran’s biographer, Richard Lovell, in a 1995 letter to the British Medical Journal, disclosed Moran’s prescribing this drug for the management of Churchill’s cerebrovascular disease following his major stroke in June 1953. It is clear from Moran’s book and Lovell’s biography that this was an innovation in his work with Churchill; until then Churchill had regarded Moran as “a most reluctant prescriber,” except in life-threatening emergencies.
Indeed, Churchill in 1953 was so thrilled to have a medication that so improved his post-stroke recovery that he named the first pill Moran concocted a “Moran.” Had he been familiar with amphetamines in the war, it is unlikely he would have expressed such surprised delight.
As for the co-morbidity indicators of depression, such as alcohol intake, to which he refers, does Dr Mather agree that these have diagnostic significance only if there is evidence of depression or bipolar disorder etc. of sufficient length and severity to qualify as actual mental illness, when diagnosed by the patient’s actual doctors, as distinct from an author, qualified or not, writing interpretatively decades later?
The structure of my book resulted not only from the use of the term “depression” by Moran, Storr and others, and from word-count limitations, but from what I view as compelling self-diagnosis by Churchill himself, in his essay and later book, Painting as a Pastime. I looked for evidence not just of depression, but also worry, anxiety, and mild anxiety-depression, because of the opening task Churchill sets himself in that work: to identify “remedies…for the avoidance of worry and mental overstrain by persons who, over prolonged periods, have to bear exceptional responsibilities and discharge duties upon a very large scale.”
Churchill concludes that “brain-workers”—those whose work relies on reading, writing, information-processing, discussion and debate—can restore “psychic equilibrium” by using “those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand”: joinery, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying and painting. With an unmistakable autobiographical flourish, Churchill writes: “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man.”
I thank Dr Mather for responding to my comments about his review of my book.
Even more clearly now, my perception is that he and I are not in dispute about the central purpose of my book and the extent to which I have realised that purpose; rather, we are at cross-purposes, with Dr Mather still troubled that I have not written an entirely different book, namely one that is a comprehensively diagnostic treatise on Black Dog. May I try one final time to clarify what I have been attempting to achieve?
The task I explicitly set myself, as indicated by the title plus sub-title of my book, is that of reassessing the biographical evidence for what is widely, if not universally, held to be Winston Churchill’s lifelong psychological disorder of recurrent bouts of severe unipolar ‘Black Dog’ depression.
Had I been minded to write an eclectically diagnostic treatment of the entire subject of Churchill’s temperament, personality and mental health, instead of focussing on such biographical evidence and supposed evidence as other authors have adduced when making inherently problematic posthumous diagnostic pronouncements about the great man and depressive illness, I might have been foolish enough to attempt to provide the ‘answer’ Dr Mather rhetorically sought for in vain in his review: ‘Was Churchill’s indomitable mental resilience and courage in 1940 only possible because of a hypomania that drove him to a work schedule which often exhausted his generals and the war cabinet?’ It does not follow from my having a markedly more limited and modest approach that I made no significant contribution to the discussion of the sort of question that Dr Mather was posing. Let me briefly explain this assertion by taking just one example of the findings I make in my book
Dr Mather links his question about hypomania in 1940 to studies by Dr Nassir Ghaemi and Dr Andrew Norman. He correctly states that these authors both ‘diagnose’ Churchill as having had a benign form of bipolar disorder during the Second World War, However, in faulting me for omitting a ‘deep analysis’ of their work, Dr Mather ought perhaps to have acknowledged a relevant and important finding of mine that suggests much caution is needed when reading posthumous diagnosticians of Churchill be they from the ‘bipolar disorder’ or the ‘unipolar depression’ school of advocacy. For I demonstrate that both Ghaemi and Norman – in common with other authors who in contrast to them pronounce Black Dog to be severe unipolar depression – place heavy reliance on problematic ‘evidence’ to be found in Lord Moran’s memoir of his years as Churchill’s principal doctor.
The principal item of that problematic ‘evidence’ is the supposed diary entry of Moran misdated as 14 August 1944. All of the authors I have referred to are plainly completely unaware that the conversation with Churchill that the entry apparently records is in significant part a fabricated one. The reason for this, and its implications, are carefully teased out in detail in my book, and briefly summarised in my first posted comment. Deprived of the first-hand contemporaneous clinical certainty of medically diagnosed depression that had seemed to be within the said Moran ‘diary’ entry, the work of Ghaemi and Norman, no less than the work of the numerous authors dating back to Dr Anthony Storr in 1969 who pronounced Black Dog to be unipolar depression, must have significantly reduced credibility.
Thus, although I make no pretence of being a posthumous diagnostician, I do claim, as a result of findings such as the foregoing example, to have made a worthwhile attempt as an historian to reassess the credibility of the biographical evidence relied on by those who have boldly made diagnostic findings of clinical depression in Churchill’s psychological functioning.
When it is averred that an author and/or historian has deliberately concocted statements that are not substantiated by the extant record it is usually a big ‘red flag’. For a medical researcher to be ‘accused’ of research misconduct (falsification, fabrication and/or plagiarism) it is commonly a death knee for their immediate research endeavors and may eventually result is cancelling any further opportunities for research altogether.
We know that Lord Moran’s “Diary” has many flaws. (1) There are inaccurate dates, missing historical events (2) omitted episodes of medical care (3) (4), surgeries (5) and, possibly worst of all, entries in the “Diary” for which here is no documentation. (6)
Lord Moran’s son in re-publishing his father’s “Diary” provides insights into how the text of the book was prepared. “—the haphazard way in which the contemporary passages were assembled and the constant revision and rewriting — made it difficult to determine what was written at the time and what was added later”. (7)
So it can be imagined that there are portions of the “Diary” where it might be the concluded that it was contrived as an afterthought to embellish the strength of the recorded events. The author of this book. Mr. Attenborough, has made much of the apparent discrepancies in Lord Moran’s “Diary” concerning his record of the conversations he, Lord Moran had with Churchill about the ‘Black Dog’. He may be right in drawing attention to possibility that Moran was true to his nickname of “Corkscrew Charlie” with either by sloppiness or malicious aforethought.
Yet does the author’s ‘analysis’, apparently implying some “dirty tricks’ by Lord Moran, really change in some way the actual existence of Churchill’s ‘Black Dog’. I suggest not.
What is more important is that Lord Moran did make it evident and abundantly clear that Churchill was afflicted with some degree of ongoing depression with a co-morbid anxiety. It was others, and not particularly Lord Moran himself, who have increased our knowledge of Churchill’s personality and character with observations of his not infrequent and sometimes intense mood swings.
Lord Moran himself noted in The Times: “It is not possible to follow the last twenty-five years of Sir Winston’s life without a knowledge of his medical background.” He, it was, who, much criticized by the Churchill family, medical colleagues and political entourage, stuck his neck out and attempted to ensure we had an inkling of Churchill’s resilience and strength while still coping with mental and physical challenges and deficits.
References:
(1) Mather J.H. “Lord Moran’s Diary Forty Years On” Finest Hour 132: 46-49. Autumn 2006
(2) There is no mention of the crucial Battle of Britain, Autumn, 1941 of which Churchill had some very lofty phrases to make.
(3) Brain, W Russell: “Encounters with Winston Churchill”. Medical History 2000 44: 3-20.
(4) Missing some references to Churchill’s visits to his first cardiologist Sir John Parkinson (1942 to 1954) and none for his second cardiologist Lord John Richardson (1954 to 1965); there were many visits.
(5) No mention of the left hip surgery in June 1962 performed at the Middlesex Hospital by Mr. Phillip Newman, orthopedic surgeon, although Lord Moran was present in the Operating Room.
(6) Martin Gilbert: In Search of Churchill. Page 233. Pb. Harper Collins, 1994.
(7) Lord Moran: Churchill at War 1940-45. Introduction Page xxiii. Pb. Carroll & Graf, 2002
(8) Lord Moran, letter to the Editor of The Times, 25 April 1966.
The End
When it is averred that an author and/or historian has deliberately concocted statements that are not substantiated by the extant record it is usually a big ‘red flag’. For a medical researcher to be ‘accused’ of research misconduct (falsification, fabrication and/or plagiarism) it is commonly a death knee for their immediate research endeavors and may eventually result is cancelling any further opportunities for research altogether.
We know that Lord Moran’s “Diary” has many flaws. (1) There are inaccurate dates, missing historical events (2) omitted episodes of medical care (3) (4), surgeries (5) and, possibly worst of all, entries in the “Diary” for which here is no documentation. (6)
Lord Moran’s son in re-publishing his father’s “Diary” provides insights into how the text of the book was prepared. “—the haphazard way in which the contemporary passages were assembled and the constant revision and rewriting — made it difficult to determine what was written at the time and what was added later”. (7)
So it can be imagined that there are portions of the “Diary” where it might be the concluded that it was contrived as an afterthought to embellish the strength of the recorded events. The author of this book. Mr. Attenborough, has made much of the apparent discrepancies in Lord Moran’s “Diary” concerning his record of the conversations he, Lord Moran had with Churchill about the ‘Black Dog’. He may be right in drawing attention to possibility that Moran was true to his nickname of “Corkscrew Charlie” with either by sloppiness or malicious aforethought.
Yet does the author’s ‘analysis’, apparently implying some “dirty tricks’ by Lord Moran, really change in some way the actual existence of Churchill’s ‘Black Dog’. I suggest not.
What is more important is that Lord Moran did make it evident and abundantly clear that Churchill was afflicted with some degree of ongoing depression with a co-morbid anxiety. It was others, and not particularly Lord Moran himself, who have increased our knowledge of Churchill’s personality and character with observations of his not infrequent and sometimes intense mood swings.
Lord Moran himself noted in The Times: “It is not possible to follow the last twenty-five years of Sir Winston’s life without a knowledge of his medical background.” He, it was, who, much criticized by the Churchill family, medical colleagues and political entourage, stuck his neck out and attempted to ensure we had an inkling of Churchill’s resilience and strength while still coping with mental and physical challenges and deficits.
References:
(1) Mather J.H. “Lord Moran’s Diary Forty Years On” Finest Hour 132: 46-49. Autumn 2006
(2) There is no mention of the crucial Battle of Britain, Autumn, 1941 of which Churchill had some very lofty phrases to make.
(3) Brain, W Russell: “Encounters with Winston Churchill”. Medical History 2000 44: 3-20.
(4) Missing some references to Churchill’s visits to his first cardiologist Sir John Parkinson (1942 to 1954) and none for his second cardiologist Lord John Richardson (1954 to 1965); there were many visits.
(5) No mention of the left hip surgery in June 1962 performed at the Middlesex Hospital by Mr. Phillip Newman, orthopedic surgeon, although Lord Moran was present in the Operating Room.
(6) Martin Gilbert: In Search of Churchill. Page 233. Pb. Harper Collins, 1994.
(7) Lord Moran: Churchill at War 1940-45. Introduction Page xxiii. Pb. Carroll & Graf, 2002
(8) Lord Moran, letter to the Editor of The Times, 25 April 1966.
The End
I can assure Dr Mather that there is no suggestion on my part of “dirty tricks” by Lord Moran, although I do argue in my book that certain as-published ‘diary’ entries, particularly those for 14 August 1944 and 2 August 1945, either as a result of subsequent additions or deletions, have misled many later authors, starting with Dr Anthony Storr, on the nature of Churchill’s psychological difficulties, and of the extent and character of Moran’s own first-hand knowledge of those difficulties.
Moreover, those two entries have had the effect of deflecting attention away from the actual psycho-diagnostic preoccupation of Lord Moran, which, influenced by his study of soldiers under stress in the First World War, was that ‘Winston was by nature very apprehensive’. According to Lord Moran in the final chapter of his memoir, Churchill by August 1914 had learned only ‘to disguise his natural apprehension’, whereas he ‘had managed to extirpate bouts of depression from his system’. Did Moran really mean what he appears to be declaring about Churchill and depression, or is there a touch of instructive hyperbole in those words? The very least that can be said for sure is that those words stand in massive contradiction to the ‘diary entry’ for 14 August 1944 and its footnote defining Black Dog as a significant ongoing depressive disorder from which Churchill suffered.
Dr Mather’s final, overview, paragraph about Lord Moran and his legacy for Churchill scholars is one with which I readily concur. As I write towards the close of my book, ‘Lord Moran was probably putting forward, somewhat confusingly, the most helpful way of understanding Black Dog when he suggested, in effect, that this resulted from the interweaving of some form of anxiety-related condition with some form of depression … the evidence of his book is that the rarely mentioned Black Dog … was never fully manifested … during Moran’s twenty-five years as his [Churchill’s] doctor, save for, perhaps, the period around the disasters at Singapore and Tobruk…. [Nevertheless, Churchill] himself confirmed many times … that he was always at risk of being hounded by the form of anxiety he knew as the worry that springs from the mental overstrain of the zealous politician and statesman.’
Those readers who have found the foregoing review and the ensuing streamed debate of interest, might wish to refer to Michael McMenamin’s review on this site (25 March 2016) of David Lough’s ‘No More Champagne’. McMenamin, who provides a link to ‘Winston Churchill and the “Black Dog” of Depression’, has pertinent things to say about Lough’s implying that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was associated with Black Dog as bipolar disorder.
Those readers who have found the foregoing review and the ensuing streamed debate of interest, might wish to refer to Michael McMenamin’s review on this site (25 March 2016) of David Lough’s ‘No More Champagne’. McMenamin, who provides a link to ‘Winston Churchill and the “Black Dog” of Depression’, has pertinent things to say about Lough’s implying that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was associated with Black Dog as bipolar disorder.
Comments of mine contemporaneous with Dr. Mather’s article have been deleted. Why is this?