The two faces of Churchill

WINSTON Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. He was a child of

Victorian England, and of its aristocracy; his grandfather was seventh

Duke of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, came close to

being a major political figure, but ruined his chances before dying of

syphilis.

Young Winston idolised his father but was excluded from his company

and affections. He very much enjoyed, however, the privileges which his

birth conferred -- indeed throughout his life he enjoyed everything with

enormous gusto. ''Winston has written a great big book about himself,

and called it the World Crisis,'' Balfour, one of his colleagues, said

of Churchill's attempt at a history of the First World War. Its last

volume on the Eastern Front, of which *Clive Ponting thinks little, was

for long the best, almost the only, book on its subject until Norman

Stone's fine, detailed study in our own time.

Balfour's much-quoted line sums up much of Churchill's egocentricity,

for which Ponting can hardly forgive his subject, but there was much

more to Churchill than that. He had a resilient personality, a

remarkable capacity for hard work, a marvellously inventive imagination,

and an ability to persuade both in Parliament and in private, though he

was in fact in his fifties before the parliamentary supremacy began to

be certain. He could be a bully (as the Poles found towards the end of

the war), myopic (as Ponting shows quite often) and irrational. He could

treat people badly, steal their ideas shamelessly, change his mind with

facility, and cry with such an ease that it seems almost to have been a

political gift.

Ponting does not like Churchill. He goes on about his privilege and

associated elitism, and he tends to make more of his failures and

shifts, than of his successes. This is a portrait with warts, and it is

badly skewed; though that does not mean the author always misses the

marks. Many of Ponting's criticisms are beyond dispute (Churchill's

preoccupation with poison gas is a case in point); but sometimes

Churchill manages to engage even his sympathies, as in the account of

the famous return to the Gold Standard in 1925 where Churchill's

instincts were better than his advisers' expertise. He took the expert

advice, a rare occasion when he did, at least without argument.

Generally, Ponting is so hostile, that his book comes close to failing

to explain why it was that Chuchill did emerge in 1940 to play the role

which led to A. J. P. Taylor's famous one-line obituary, ''The Saviour

of his country'', a judgment endorsed by *Norman Rose. In fact hardly

anybody wanted him in 1940: most of the Tory Party was hostile, as was

Labour, but for some reason there really appears to have been no

alternative with the required weight and courage, though Churchill had

been long out of office until the beginning of the war and had made

something of a fool of himself over his opposition to political change

in India. Rose is far better at explaining Churchill's success in 1940,

and his achievement thereafter.

When asked to explain what Churchill did to win the war, Attlee said,

''Talk about it. In Cabinet he talked about practically nothing else.''

This point is made by Rose who is firm about Churchill's role in

maintaining public morale, quoting in this context Ed Murrow the

American war correspondent who said: ''Churchill has mobilised the

English language and sent it into battle.'' Churchill made 25 broadcasts

between May 1940 and December 1941. Rose points out that it has been

estimated they were heard by 70% of the population. The effect cannot be

overestimated.

Ponting has two main weaknesses -- his stance and his scholarship.

Though he does notice, as Churchill did himself, that being born in 1874

meant that Churchill would, probably, be as fixed in that time as a fly

in amber, he sees him too much through the eyes of our time. A quick

point to note is how Ponting sees Churchill's attitude to race and

colour. Like Lincoln (even though he freed the slaves), Churchill

assumed white superiority was indisputable. Darwin appeared to confirm

that opinion. It was the commonplace of Churchill's time, as it was of

FDR's when the pair of them supposed that the Japanese were not racially

up to managing aerial technology: the duo learned quickly, the hard way,

in 1941.

Churchill was ahead of his time in his open attitude to Jews (Ponting

is wrong, incidentally, about the Aliens Act of 1906 not passing

Parliament; it did but was not operated by the incoming Liberal

Government of that year); but his early ideas about the undeserving poor

and the supposedly racially-inadequate were common -- shared exactly by

Sydney Webb, the man who wrote Clause Four into the Labour Party

constitution.

Ponting is shaky on naval history. De Robeck, not de Roebuck, was the

man at the Dardanelles. Two, not four, battle-cruisers were enough to

destroy the German Pacific fleet off the Falklands. Jutland was not ''at

best a draw'' but a clear British victory with the German fleet, which

twice narrowly escaped annihilation, fleeing to harbour from which it

ventured forth again only three times, and timorously, for the morale of

its leaders and their men had been destroyed by Ponting's ''draw''.

He gives the impression that Churchill's hatred of Bolshevism was not

justified, but most readers will know better, especially now that the

record is far clearer than it was four years ago when Ponting started to

write. He falls for the Soviet propagandist view of the allied

intervention in the Russian Civil War, now thoroughly discredited by the

most recent academic studies. There were no British ''armies'' (his word

at one point) involved. And the White leaders were intent neither on

restoring Czarist rule nor upsetting the land settlement (though the

last was upset, to the cost of the peasants, by the Bolsheviks).

He is shaky in the thirties where it is safe to say he often does not

know enough. For example, when he castigates Churchill for exaggerating

the threat the Luftwaffe posed to the RAF; he imagines that its pilots

would have had to be trained after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

That would indeed have taken much time. Enough had, however, like the

panzer troop cadres, been trained in Russia by the Bolsheviks in the

1920s during the Weimar Republic.

Rose's book is shorter than Ponting's and its tone is very different,

although it is far from hagiography. It is a professional academic's

work; it has a feeling of balance about it. Thus when dealing with

Churchill's misjudgments in the Balkans in 1941 and his unjustified

impatience with the desert generals (which led to the sackings of Wavell

and Auchinleck), Rose's assessment is, ''these failings were not merely

a consequence of Churchill's positive combative nature; they were also a

concomitant of the rapidly changing war situation''.

Rose notices Churchill's failings and identifies the elements of

paradox in his presiding over the decline of the Empire he tried so hard

to maintain. Ponting has a bitter and censorious tone (on Churchill's

drinking, for example) but both notice his extravagance with money and

his perpetual self-indulgence.

Rose enjoys academic precision, and opposes it, albeit unconsciously,

to Ponting's repetitive debunking. Of the two approaches, Rose's is the

more assured; and he can even thrill, using Churchill's language, as in

recalling ''Advance Britannia'', his magnificent response to the

exultant London crowd on VE Day in 1945. But those who hate Churchill

still, as many did in 1945, will prefer Ponting, though his account of

the old man in his dotage is as kind as any.

* Churchill, by Clive Ponting. Sinclair Stevenson. #20 (pp 900);

Churchill by Norman Rose. Simon and Schuster. #20 (pp 435).