Andrew Roberts and the Age of Churchill

Essays

Eminent Churchillians by Andrew Roberts

People, by which I mean historians, don’t seem to write collections of essays any more. Perhaps the public is not buying. Or it might be that, because publishing even a moderately sized work takes three or more years for even the most productive writers, there is no sense in using up one of the few slots available for second-rate, left over stuff.

This book of Andrew Roberts’s, however, is not second rate and it’s not left over. In the manner of Lytton Strachey, Roberts took on six aspects of the Age of Churchill — although, if we are honest, we must accept that there was no Churchillian age. Such a period did not exist.

I enjoyed this book. It’s readable, full of information that the vast majority of its readers will have never heard before, and provocative. The book appeared just over thirty years ago, so some of what Roberts argued then has become accepted wisdom, or at least socially acceptable, in the years since.

In his essay on Lord Mountbatten, for instance, Roberts says there is no convincing evidence that Mountbatten was a serious homosexual. The currently done thing, for writers like Andrew Lownie, is to call Mountbatten a dedicated, determined paedophile and to go right to the very edge of accusing the Security Service of covering it up. Times change.

The weakest essay, in my view, is the first, on the House of Windsor and appeasement. It is not weak, per se, because it’s badly researched. Instead, it’s weak simply because there’s not enough fire — there’s not enough shock and scandal. What we get instead of vitriol and revisionism is, ultimately, a respectful portrayal of the royal family. We have hints that Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, was a fool, that he was not strictly on the level. But nothing that would jeopardise the knighthood — or, as Roberts eventually claimed, a peerage.

What comes second is the essay on Mountbatten, which is a real shot across the bows. Mountbatten in this telling was not only the vain and fairly stupid man that his contemporaries largely believed him to be. He was also someone who spent his whole life throwing others’ lives away. In the war and after. He got millions killed when his carelessness got men sunk in HMS Kelly; Canadians mown down at Dieppe in the needless, despicably-planned raid, for which Mountbatten bore a lot of responsibility and about which he lied; and yet more massacred at Partition, in at minimum hundreds of thousands, in what later became India and East and West Pakistan — all as Mountbatten insisted the British army disarm and demobilise itself, commit to not stopping intercommunal violence at any price, and while the viceroy himself spent his time thinking about the uniforms he would wear, the flags and standards that ought to be afforded him, and how well he could spin it all later as the greatest of triumphs.

Some of the interviews Roberts quotes that Mountbatten gave to what were planned as valedictory television series are breathtaking in their vanity, their implied deceit.

Next is Roberts’s assessment of the Chamberlain faction of the Conservative Party, and how long it took for the same to come around to Churchill as prime minister and war leader. Roberts believes the private sletters of the Appeasement crew are worth repeating. Their basic inability to predict the future, even as May 1940 and the beginning of the blitzkrieg in Europe neared, is disturbing and could teach many lessons about who actually governs countries like Britain in moments of trial.

The venom of their private correspondence concerning Churchill is less revelatory. We knew before Roberts said so that they thought Churchill a drunk, too rude and abrupt, vainglorious, violent, doomed. That some said he was being paid by the Jews.

Roberts does not have a very fine line to thread here because there is no one more denigrated than the appeasers. They scuttled and hid and tried to reinvent themselves, but there is a reason why Guilty Men sold so many copies and why many people still buy its basic arguments. These were the people who made the war take the terrible shape it did. Roberts does a good job. Sticking the boot in, but not excessively, and letting them speak for, and damn, themselves.

On the next essay, this one largely about the advent of ‘coloured’ immigration from the Commonwealth during Churchill’s second period as prime minister between 1951-55, there is not much new to say. Yes, the scale of migration and its reasons were largely hidden from the public. Whitehall was as deceptive and inept then as it has been ever since. And yes, the English spirit is fundamentally one of go along to get along and basically self-deprecatory. Hence the lack of urgency, the lack of national resolve.

There was no serious way to address the problems of other countries exporting their excess labour problems to Britain. Not without a change in policy. And not without a different view of the world. A view that few in British life have ever had the foresight to see, let alone articulate.

In the case of Walter Monckton, wartime propagandist and civil servant, post-war minister of labour, Roberts is able to find many examples of when the lawyerly Monckton lived up to the letter of his brief without considering the macro consequences. As minister of labour, the brief was to avoid strikes at all costs — but the minister did so only at the cost of guaranteeing low productivity growth, massive overmanning and inflation which ate years if not decades of Britain’s future.

What relevance this has to Britain’s more recent lost decades, I will leave for readers to judge on their own time. At the very least, Roberts says, one cannot fault Monckton overmuch. He was a charmer, a man who followed his orders and worked well under others. Monckton was discreet regarding the things he said he’d keep quite about — a well-intentioned servant. He was not to blame, not really, for the lack of bravery and clarity of the instructions offered by others.

Arthur Bryant, meanwhile, was very much to blame for what he said and what he did in the war years and before. In the course of a long post-war life, Bryant wrote many books, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, wrote columns for the papers, was garlanded by everyone who mattered. Companion of Honour, honorary degrees to paper a wall. Innumerable literary fetes and fancies.

Roberts is able to quote not only from private letters and the memories of those still living to be interviewed, but also from Bryant’s own writings. All to prove that if anyone was, close enough, a British Nazi sympathiser, Bryant was that man. Bryant thought Hitler was ace — the Unknown Soldier come back to life. A titanic figure of myth. And meanwhile, Bryant believed that Britain had no real sympathy for Czechs, Poles, Jews, all of whom took away from the bucolic old England of Bryant’s historial imagination with their capitalism and moral depravity.

Bryant was a popular historian, even more so when he quite theatrically turned against Hitler in 1940, quite some time after everyone else had realised which way the wind was blowing. Popular it may have been, but every example of his style that Roberts quotes in this book is risible. Risible when Bryant is not saying something truly sinister — as in his authentically bizarre pro-Nazi tract Unfinished Victory, also from 1940, which included many howler statistics straight from Nazi agents with whom Bryant had been dialoguing. Bryant went to Germany not long before the war’s beginning in September 1939, on an unofficial but paid-for mission from Chamberlain; and in doing so, he told his German hosts that the real Britons did not care much for Poland. Bryant gave it out also that Britain would not fight. If the Germans believed him, it made war more likely.

That kind of thing is treason. In wartime, there are laws against treason. They tend to carry a capital sentence. Bryant died at a very great age, Roberts never quite says, but he ought to have had quite another fate. His life ought to have ended forty-five years previously, at the end of a rope.