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Steven Fielding-The Churchill Myths PDF

225 Pages·2020·32.16 MB·English
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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 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz, and Richard Toye 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933790 ISBN 978–0–19–885196–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi 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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 17/6/2020, SPi

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