Steven Fielding-The Churchill Myths

225 Pages·2020·32.16 MB·English

The Churchill Myths

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

The Churchill Myths

STEVEN FIELDING
BILL SCHWARZ
RICHARD TOYE

1

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

3

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© Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz, and Richard Toye 2020

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First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933790

ISBN 978–0–19–885196–7

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Contents

List of Figures
vii

Introduction
1
The Meaning of Myths
3
History and the Churchill Myths
5
Brexit and the Churchill Myths
8
The Principles of the Book
11

1. Brexit May 1940
15
Digital Pasts
15
Men of Destiny
18
Brexit May 1940
27
Mythic Churchill
33
England’s Populism: 1940
49
England’s Populism: Brexit
56

2. The Churchill Syndrome
69
The Battle for Churchill’s Reputation
71
Bulldog
75
The Special Relationship
79
Between Europe and the Open Sea
82
Attack from the Right-Flank
86
Puffing on an Invisible Cigar
90
Boom or Bust?
95
The Changing Face of British Nostalgia
100

3. Persistence and Change in Churchill’s Mythic Memory
103
Precedents and Parallels
109
Celebrating the National Icon
111
A Transatlantic Churchill
119
The Long Road to Young Winston
124
Baiting the Myth
131
The Great Man
137
The Reassertion of a Deeper Myth
145
A Confusion of Churchills
151

Epilogue
159

Endnotes
163
Index
199

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

List of Figures

3.1 Churchill reluctantly accepts Sutherland’s ‘half-dead and
half-witted’ 80th birthday portrait
107

3.2 Richard Burton as a ‘great man’ but a ‘bad man’
108

3.3 ‘It wasn’t a funeral, Mary—it was a triumph’
116

3.4 Roberts-Jones’s ‘bulldog’ Churchill, Parliament Square
120

3.5 Churchill’s early years as a ‘Cinderella story’
130

3.6 Churchill rises from the dead in The Churchill Play
136

3.7 An anachronistic Churchill for our own times
138

3.8 Roberts-Jones’s Churchill defaced, May Day 2000
153

3.9 Churchill as the ‘beacon of hope’ in Doctor Who
156

3.10 A parodic—but still heroic?—Churchill
157

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

Introduction

This is not a book about Winston Churchill. It is not a book about the
historical figure of Churchill, who lived from 1874 to 1965 and served as
Britain’s prime minister during the Second World War and again
between 1951 and 1955. It is not about his politics, nor his rhetorical
imagination, nor about the man himself.
What the book does explore, however, is how memories of Churchill
have been variously deployed, especially since his death. In this respect
Churchill has proved in the past, and continues to prove in our own times,
that he was and remains ‘good to think with’ (to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
term). That is to say, he is a highly charged figure through whom many
Britons imagine their relationship with their past, present, and future.
If Churchill had been a comparable figure in France, historians and
media commentators, following Pierre Nora, would have readily under-
stood ‘him’, or rather his memory, as a lieu de mémoire: that is, as a site
where conflicting memories accumulate and carry sufficient weight that
they can create a publicly sanctioned shorthand for understanding—and
for intervening in—the relations between the past and the present.¹
There is no handy equivalent in the anglophone world. As authors of
this book we can say, though, that we are concerned with the place of
symbolic Churchill in the recasting of history. It should be noted that,
although we do not attempt to arbitrate between competing interpret-
ations of the historical Churchill, we do occasionally discuss whether
certain given claims about him can be said to have a factual basis.
Why do we, in the pages which follow, present ‘remembered
Churchill’ as a problem which needs to be discussed rather than a figure
to be celebrated? Are we ‘Churchill bashers’, or ‘detractors’, as his critics
are sometimes labelled? Are we amongst those who, it is often claimed,
like to run Britain down by carping at its former glories? In truth we

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