No One is Indispensable
History Today
Mihir Bose challenges the perception of Winston Churchill as a demi-god who was essential to Britain's war effort.
Aneurin Bevan (right) with the future prime minister Harold Wilson at the Labour party conference, September 1953.Aneurin Bevan (right) with the future prime minister Harold Wilson at the Labour party conference, September 1953.At the height of the Second World War, as Aneurin Bevan relentlessly criticised the strategy of Winston Churchill, his friend Archie Lush asked him in anguish: ‘Why do you keep attacking Churchill? What do you think happens if he goes?’ Bevan replied: ‘All right. Suppose he fell under a bus. What should we have to do? Send a postcard to Hitler giving in?’
Any criticism of Churchill as war leader is now seen as unpatriotic, if not heresy. This was vividly demonstrated during the events marking the 50th anniversary of his death, when the media joined hands in promoting the idea that during the war Churchill was a demi-god without whom this country could never have won. This has since been taken a notch further in Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor (2014), whose subtitle, How One Man Made History, sums up the book.
Churchill’s contemporaries would have found this incredible. Churchill did play a huge part in developing his own personality cult. His history of the Second World War enabled him to fulfil his desire to ‘justify myself before history’ and put him on a pedestal from where he could look down on his rivals. Yet his contemporaries were not afraid to chip away at it. Emanuel Shinwell described the first volume, The Gathering Storm, as a novel in which Churchill was the main character, while Michael Foot wrote that, while the book was ‘vastly more enjoyable and instructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf’, when it came to ‘personal conceit and arrogance there is some likeness between the two’. Foot, who worshipped Bevan, was deliberately trying to provoke outrage but what all this demonstrates is that Churchill’s contemporaries were not prepared to accept his myth.
Mihir Bose challenges the perception of Winston Churchill as a demi-god who was essential to Britain's war effort.
Aneurin Bevan (right) with the future prime minister Harold Wilson at the Labour party conference, September 1953.Aneurin Bevan (right) with the future prime minister Harold Wilson at the Labour party conference, September 1953.At the height of the Second World War, as Aneurin Bevan relentlessly criticised the strategy of Winston Churchill, his friend Archie Lush asked him in anguish: ‘Why do you keep attacking Churchill? What do you think happens if he goes?’ Bevan replied: ‘All right. Suppose he fell under a bus. What should we have to do? Send a postcard to Hitler giving in?’
Any criticism of Churchill as war leader is now seen as unpatriotic, if not heresy. This was vividly demonstrated during the events marking the 50th anniversary of his death, when the media joined hands in promoting the idea that during the war Churchill was a demi-god without whom this country could never have won. This has since been taken a notch further in Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor (2014), whose subtitle, How One Man Made History, sums up the book.
Churchill’s contemporaries would have found this incredible. Churchill did play a huge part in developing his own personality cult. His history of the Second World War enabled him to fulfil his desire to ‘justify myself before history’ and put him on a pedestal from where he could look down on his rivals. Yet his contemporaries were not afraid to chip away at it. Emanuel Shinwell described the first volume, The Gathering Storm, as a novel in which Churchill was the main character, while Michael Foot wrote that, while the book was ‘vastly more enjoyable and instructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf’, when it came to ‘personal conceit and arrogance there is some likeness between the two’. Foot, who worshipped Bevan, was deliberately trying to provoke outrage but what all this demonstrates is that Churchill’s contemporaries were not prepared to accept his myth.
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