As a politician and war leader, Winston Churchill (1875-1965) has been the subject of too many biographies, studies, television programmes and documentaries to list. As a writer, however, while there is plenty of material, it is probably slightly less concentrated on. It was, however, for this latter aspect of his work that he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1953 – for literature. Churchill bought the country house of Chartwell near Westerham in 1922, and lived there, on and off, till his death over four decades later. These two aspects more than qualify him to be considered a Kent writer.
Nor was writing something that he did accidentally or as a side-line. His career started as a journalist with him producing a series of books about his escapades in Africa from 1899, and a biography of his father in 1906. He even produced `Savrola’. a novel – one of the few fictional works that he wrote – in 1900. In that year, he was first elected to parliament, and managed to balance his two careers throughout the rest of his life, largely through being prolific in the periods in which he was either out of office, or had no cabinet responsibilities.
The main works that Churchill wrote from the 1920s were multi-volume treatments of contemporary history, interspersed with biographies. Of these, the best known today are the six volumes of `The World Crisis’ about the First World War, something he worked on in the south of France when he lost his seat in 1923 (he was re-elected a year later), and then the companion work, `The Second World War,’ produced after his government were voted out of power in the 1945 election, and published from 1948 to 1953. The final volumes appeared in the time when he was serving again as Prime Minister from 1950. From 1956 to 1958, he also produced a `History of the English Speaking Peoples’ in four volumes, which was made, somewhat unsuccessfully, into a television series in the 1970s.
It is hard to look at these works and separate them from the immensity of Churchill’s image and prestige in other areas. For the works on the Second World War, this is particularly difficult, because of his very clear role in the events he was describing. Churchill was prolific, producing an estimated 10 million words. He also worked across genres, in journalism and reportage, history and biography (though curiously he never produced a first hand account of his own experiences as leader in the War) and in the 1930s in his so-called time in the political wilderness wrote columns (sometimes ghost written) for newspapers.
Was his literary output significant beyond its link to the events of Churchill’s life, and his achievements in other areas? Perhaps the best answer to this has been supplied by the historian David Cannadine in his `In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain’ (Allan Lane, London, 2002). Cannadine writes here of the importance of oratory and rhetoric in Churchill’s career:
`From almost his earliest years, Churchill was enthralled by the art and craft of oratory, and determined to succeed at it himself. He wanted to be an heroic historical figure, commanding great events, and stirring men’s souls, and he saw speech-making as the way to achieve these ends’ (87).
Cannadine goes on:
`Churchill was a true artist with words. For a self-educated man, no less than for a career politician, his vocabulary was uncommonly large and varied. From the time when he was an otherwise unpromising schoolboy at Harrow, he took an almost sensuous delight in military metaphors, arresting alliterations, polished phrases, apt antithesis, and explosive epigrams’ (92)
All of this meant that he acquired `the most rhetorical style of any statesman in British history’ (92) . The fact is that as a public figure, more than was usual, words did matter to him, This marks him out from the many that have followed in his steps and tried to invoke his name and his legacy.
His final words in the House of Commons, on his retirement in 1955, are probably as good as any others he produced to cite as an example of his ability to blend sound and meaning in a way that he became uniquely associated with. It is likely that, as with most of his later speeches, these were dictated and worked on in the quiet confines of his estate at Chartwell in Kent:
`The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will allow tormented generations to march forth, serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.’