Some Thoughts on the BBC's latest Churchill programme

A reader urged me to comment on the BBC2 TV programme (originally broadcast on Monday 25th May) called ���Churchill: When Britain Said No��� . I���m grateful for the suggestion.

 

It can still be seen on BBC iplayer , but only until Monday evening.  It is very odd indeed, as I shall show later.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=Churchill%3A%20When%20Britain%20Said%20No

 

It���s true that there���s always been a bit of a mystery about the scale of the Tory defeat in 1945. It���s actually quite reasonable that they should have been beaten ��� they���d been in office, under the ���National��� label since the collapse of Ramsay Macdonald���s Labour government 14 long years before. They would have faced a difficult election in 1940 had the war not broken out

 

During the war, an electoral truce had suppressed opposition and political debate. What���s more, several leading Labour politicians had successfully occupied major offices of state in the wartime coalition. The wartime government had pursued the sort of regulation and control that Labour then advocated. The undeniable contribution of the USSR to victory was seen by many as another vindication of socialism. It also helped the growth of the Communist Party (see below).

 

Victory in war does not necessarily bring joy. By July, the war in Europe was over but huge numbers of men were still stuck in the services and waiting to go home, some dreading a long war against Japan (Hiroshima was still a month in the future, the Atom Bomb a secret). Rationing and shortage were still pervasive. Those who did return often came back to bombed cities , wrecked homes and to wives they had lost touch with and children they had hardly seen. People might have associated Churchill and his wartime colleagues with war and victory. But as they re-emerged as Tory politicians they remembered Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their fumbling, erratic conduct of foreign policy.  

 

Set against them was the achievement of victory under Churchill���s leadership, and his enormous personal prestige. Contrary to myth, pre-1939 Britain was not a desert of starvation, soup-kitchens and misery, but had an elaborate welfare state, generous by world standards (as the far from right-wing historian Paul Addison has pointed out in his book ���The Road to 1945���) plus a great deal of public housing and state schooling. Chamberlain hated the war largely because it got in the way of his social programmes.

 

But it was logical to believe that the Labour Party, strengthened by proven experience in wartime government, would be keener on implementing social programmes (and less keen on another war) than the Tories.

 

Even so, a reasonably close result would have been perfectly possible. The overwhelming victory of Labour has never been fully explained, with some attributing it to political indoctrination of soldiers by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. Opinion polling was barely done in those days, and I am myself a bit sceptical of the reports of ���Mass-Observation���, wrongly described as a government agency in the programme) with its self-selecting sources and its far-from-conservative (or Conservative) origins.

 

It���s not that the opinions it records aren���t genuine. It is just that one has absolutely no way of knowing how representative they are, and a constant suspicion that it was drawn to complainers, and they were drawn to it.

 

My own suspicion is that Churchill himself had little to do with it. Actual archive film shown by  the programme shows him being greeted on tour by large crowds, who even then must have felt some admiration for this extraordinary figure.  But it probably didn���t influence their votes at all.

 

As Clement Attlee pointed out in a clever and drily witty broadcast reproduced by an actor in the programme, the voters distinguished between Winston Churchill the great war leader, and Mr Churchill, the Tory politician.  This broadcast was a riposte to a daft broadcast claim by Churchill (also reproduced by an actor) that a Labour government would impose its opinions on dissenters by a ���Gestapo���.  

 

The good thing about the programme is that it shows that Churchill was a more or less useless politician, a follower of lost causes from King Edward VIII (oddly not mentioned) to the Gold Standard and intransigence over India. He had severely cut the armed services when in office in the 1920s, and his calls for rearmament are now over-emphasised in historical accounts influenced by his own writings and by our desire for a national myth.  Under Chamberlain, as it happened, Britain re-armed quite effectively for a war in defence of the empire and the home islands (Spitfires, radar, a reasonably strong navy, the Singapore base ). What it did not prepare for was the war it got - an alliance with France against Germany for a land-campaign in defence of Poland. Duff Cooper had argued for a continental-sized army when he was a defence minister in 1936, but was told (truthfully) that the country could not do this and defend its empire.

 

Nobody apart from Cooper ever made this case, as far as I know.   And, just as in 1914 the supporters of entering the war believed that Britain���s role in continental fighting would be marginal, supporters of ���standing up to Hitler��� tended to imagine that most of the standing-up would be done either by the French or by the Russian, or perhaps both. When Russia chose an alliance with Hitler, and when France collapsed, we found ourselves in a war we were totally unequipped to fight, and to whose main battlefields we had no access except from the air.

 

From 1940 to 1944, we fought the war we had prepared for, successfully defending our islands and (less effectively) defending the empire, in Iran, Iraq, North Africa and then the far east, only occasionally coming up against the main body of the German enemy, as in North Africa and the absurd Greek and Crete campaigns, but mainly not doing so. Our great imperial campaigns of reconquest, especially that in Burma, were major military achievements, but led nowhere. The territory we recaptured  or defended was all lost to us within 20 years. 

 

It���s quite an odd story when you look at it. One of our largest and most concentrated single naval engagements of the war (obviously not to be compared with the (defensive) battle of the Atlantic or the (politically driven) Russian convoys,  but nonetheless of huge politico-military importance)  was our attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, designed to prevent that fleet falling into enemy hands and to win support in the USA.   

 

Our air force was (rightly) deployed mainly in defence of the home islands, the task for which it had been designed from the start. The Graf Spee, Bismarck and Scharnhorst episodes were not classic battles for sea power, but the destruction of convoy raiders. I suspect that the most important single naval engagement was at Narvik, where our destruction of German surface ships crippled Hitler���s navy, making an invasion of Britain even less likely than it had been in the first place.  The next was at Dunkirk, where once more our superb and well-trained modern destroyer force did its job defending our shores and neighbouring seas, while also saving the British Army from being turned into hostages.

 

So Churchill���s supposed prescience and warnings were perhaps not as significant as is often believed, a point the programme legitimately makes. It also mentions the little-known fact (nowadays) that Churchill���s famous speeches were by no means all heard at the time, apart from by MPs, and were not universally enjoyed when they were broadcast.  

 

It rehashes the well-known diary revelations about Churchill���s often insufferable behaviour to his generals and other colleagues, and the severe doubts frequently expressed in private about his conduct of the war. This is well-known, but does not in my view detract from his supreme achievement, the decision not to seek peace with Hitler in 1940. Readers here will know that I am still puzzled as to why we and the French had entered the war in 1939, at the worst possible moment for ourselves rather than waiting, with Rooseveltian cunning, till we were ready. But that wasn���t Churchill���s fault either.

 

This is all very well. What I find slightly less convincing are the contributions which stress reports from ���Mass-Observation���, and the ones from a self-styled ���activist��� with a Geordie accent (I am still trying to contact this person to make sure I have got the right man) whose political perspective seems to me to so far to the left that it tells us only what very left-wing people think about Churchill. I do not think this necessarily tells us what mainstream Labour voters and trade unionists thought about him.

 

In similar vein is an account of an election meeting at Walthamstow. There is actual film of this, but it is interspersed with dramatised reconstructions (which feature greatly in the programme) . It was quite clear to me which was which, but I am not completely sure that all viewers will have realised that fiction was being mixed with actuality.

 

Anyway, what was certain from the archive film of the rally, and from an eyewitness account of it which described the presence of pictures of Stalin and hammer-and-sickle symbols, was this. Communists had organised the interruption. One absolute giveaway of this is the use of the clenched-fist Red Front salute by several of the hecklers and protestors. This is as Communist as the ���Internationale��� and would not have been used at that time by ordinary Labour supporters.

 

I think the programme makes a mistake by suggesting that this organised Communist intervention tells us much about general public opinion at the time. British Communism, although more popular than ever before at this stage, never ceased to be a small minority.

 

So why *did* the Tories lose so badly? The programme makes this harder to understand by using modern terminology, and talking about Churchill seeking to be elected as Prime Minister, just as they tend to say that david Camron was re-elected as Prime Minister.

 

But in those days people understood much better that they were voting for a party candidate, not for a national President .  they were used to Cabinets full of big men who had authority of their own, and weren���t ciphers appointed by an al-powerful boss. It was far easier for them to separate a liking and respect for Churchill from a dislike of his party (which, as they well knew, had not much liked him for most of his career, and which he had himself deserted and rejoined) .

 

And I think they felt Labour had earned the right to govern for the first time with a majority. Labour supporters, who had borne the heat of the day and the burden of a war they had not chosen,  had earned the right to choose a government of people like them. It was a bit like the way in which people felt women had earned the right to vote during the 1914- 1918 war. All the old arguments looked a bit silly.

 

I���d also guess (though I was unborn at the time) that Clement Attlee���s very English modesty appealed far more strongly to a war-exhausted nation than Churchill���s bombast. In many ways, Attlee is the most English Prime Minister this country has had ��� terse, dry, withdrawn, understated, unshowy, modest (yet with real experience of combat) but determined and unquestionably patriotic, as Labour was in those days. I fancy I would have voted Labour in 1945, had I been old enough to do so.   And I���m still not sure I���d have been wrong to do so.