I couldn’t tell you how long I’ve had this particular biography of Churchill lurking on my bookshelves. It’s been years and I’ve taken runs at reading this thing before and I’ve always given up. That’s not because it’s badly written (it’s not) or I’m disinterested in the source material (again, not) but it’s nine hundred and twelve pages long. So it’s a lot— like an intimidating level of ‘a lot.’
But this time, I did it. I finally finished it!
I have no desire to write a biography about anyone but even if I did, a figure of Churchill’s stature would be intimidating to approach. There are multiple one-volume biographies of him out there— including Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts and Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert. The only other biography I took a peek at was William Manchester’s three-volume effort The Last Lion1 and even then, the fact that there were three volumes and the sheer immensity of the subject matter made me wave off.
That’s just what other people have written about him. You also have to take into account that Churchill was a voluminous writer himself. He cranked out a twelve-volume history of The Second World War. He wrote an autobiography (My Early Life), a history of the First World War (The World Crisis), A History of The English Speaking Peoples (I have a one-volume abridged version that’s very good), and tackled biographies of his father (Lord Randolph Churchill) and the Duke of Marlborough (Marlborough: His Life and Times.)
So, you have a historical figure that tons of people have written about. He’s also credited with writing seventy-two works himself2 and that includes both an autobiography and multiple biographies while his style and language might seem a little dated in parts, his writing for the most part, still holds up.
Anyone approaching Churchill is faced with two challenges. One is coming up with something fresh and the other is writing something that lives up to his very considerable reputation and I have to admit, I would want the writing to be top-notch as well- I feel like even though he’s been dead for nearly six decades now, he would probably expect (nay, demand) that much at least.
Happily, Roy Jenkins is not only up to the task, but he’s also probably amongst the most qualified to take this on.
First of all, he’s done it before. His one-volume biography of Gladstone, while it didn’t have the hold on me that Churchill does, was comprehensive, to say the least. Some of the debates about 19th Century religious doctrine (disestablishmentarianism was a hot topic for Gladstone) sort of put me to sleep now and again, but at the end of it, I was left with an appreciation for the influence and impact that Gladstone (the Grand Old Man, as he was called) had on British politics in the 19th Century.
Second of all, he actually met Churchill ever so briefly, and his own Parliamentary career which began in 1948 overlapped with Churchill’s second government. While Jenkins began with the Labour Party (before moving on to found the Social Democratic Party and then the Liberal Democrats later in his career) he certainly has direct knowledge of some of his contemporaries that ran with Churchill during the Second World War. That direct knowledge plus his political experience make him an authoritative source to tackle the immense amounts of the source material.
I’m not going to get lost in the Churchill of it all. Most people have a casual familiarity with who he is and, as noted above, if you want to learn more there are veritable libraries available to you to improve your knowledge. I will say this: this book if you make your way through all nine hundred and twelve pages of it, will teach you all about Churchill. It’s bordering on ‘everything you wanted to know about Winston Churchill but was afraid to ask.’ And that, to me, is not a bad thing. One-volume biographies should be comprehensive and you cannot say that Jenkins doesn’t do his homework- he does. This is as comprehensive as it gets.
Instead, I want to dig a little into the writing itself. Jenkins went to Oxford and happily doesn’t pull punches with his language. I reached for the dictionary multiple times for delightful words such as these:
tergiversation
contrapuntal
mutatus mutandis
roseate
abstemious
recrudescence
desuetude
lugubrious
sybaritic
(Abstemious, I’ve seen before, the others… not so much.)
Jenkins doesn’t pull punches with his subject matter either. If you’re expecting hagiography, think again. He’s open about Churchill’s occasional bouts of childishness. He’s quite critical of Churchill’s disastrous obsession with India in the early 30s, which hurt his political resurrection and delayed his ultimate comeback. He doesn’t shy away from things like the Dardanelles or Norway or Churchill’s weird tactical obsessions that sent him off on tangents that proved disastrous.
He also lays out Churchill’s frankly insane management of his own personal finances which simultaneously manages to be a comfort (hey, look, even the famous towering figures of world history are bad at this shit) and somewhat horrifying (this guy was Chancellor of the Exchequer?).
If there is one area that Jenkins doesn’t really touch on, it might be Britain’s somewhat fraught relationship with India during the Second World War. While he does point out that Churchill’s frankly antediluvian (hey, I can do it too!) attitude towards India in the 30s was unhelpful to his own fortunes and entirely the wrong horse to back- he doesn’t get into things like the Bengal famine of 1943, which Churchill is often criticized for. Part of that I can understand- Churchill’s relationship or lack thereof with Indian nationalism is almost a book unto itself and Jenkins has to keep the proverbial train on the tracks to jam everything into one volume- but it’s also an omission that stands out a bit.
But that also underlines the difficulty of taking on a figure like Churchill: there’s just no way you can fit absolutely everything into one volume.
What I didn’t know about Churchill was his wandering ideology. He actually crossed party lines for a while and sat as a Liberal up until the aftermath of the First World War when the Conservative Party lured him back and the Liberals faded from the scene with the rise of the Labour Party. He seems to have moved largely on the issue of free trade, which the Conservatives were against at the time and the Liberals were in favor of. (His stance on trade also seems largely contradictory with his stance on India in the 30s— he opposed Dominion Status for India largely because he wanted to keep soaking up its resources for Britain’s economic benefit which seems largely backward given his stance on trade.)
I didn’t really have a good grasp of Churchill’s post-war government and Jenkins definitely fills in the blanks there— it seemed that after a stinging defeat in 1945, Churchill’s second government was formed with a stated desire to well, being sort of boring and ‘steady as she goes’ for a bit and in that sense, it worked. The question of when exactly to take a bow and exit began to consume the second half of his latter premiership and it was largely due to the infirmities of his heir apparent, Anthony Eden, and the lack of killer instinct on the part of a possible alternative Rab Butler that kept Churchill in place, perhaps a bit longer than his family would have liked. Had he gone earlier, he might have enjoyed a more robust post-political life, but a stroke harbingered a last decade of health problems that grew increasingly worse. (He broke his hip in a fall in Paris and had another stroke, which ultimately proved fatal in 1965.)
A fun little aside worth mentioning was the following sentence which you don’t expect to read in a biography:
“The letter arrived on Saturday, 20 January, when Atlee, was no doubt awaiting the reaction with some agitation, was attending my wedding.”
It’s almost thrown in as an aside, but it’s just a nice little detail that reminds you that the author has a decent amount of overlap with a lot of the people he’s writing about. (The quotation in question references the negotiations between Labour and the Conservatives about when to dissolve the wartime unity government and have an election.)
Finally, I think it’s worth noting that between Gladstone and Churchill, Jenkins finally picks which one he thought was better— and I’ll quote again, directly from the author:
“When I started writing this book I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man, certainly the more remarkable specimen of humanity. In the course of writing it, I have changed my mind. I know put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity, and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”
If this was the case Jenkins was trying to make, I think he was successful.
Overall: Comprehensive, masterful, not at all a dry and dusty read and it will tell you more than you can possibly imagine about Churchill. My Grade: ***** out of *****
I don’t think I read much, but it struck me as a bit hagiographic— I seem to recall a stirring paragraph about the perils Britain faced at the start of the war the implication of which was that they would need someone truly remarkable lead them through these dark times. “In London, there was such a man.” is the only phrase I can remember reading.