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REVIEW BY PATRICK MERCER
I thought I knew a fair bit about Winston Churchill, but I have just discovered that he had skin ‘about the size of a shilling’ taken from his arm and grafted on to a brother officer who had been slashed by a sword at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Then, in 1954, reading his friend’s obituary, Churchill mused to his doctor, ‘He will take my flesh with him, a kind of advance guard, into the next world.’
And there are not just anecdotes like this, but plenty of original analysis as well in Mirrors of Greatness, the excellent new book by David Reynolds. The author looks at the progress of Churchill’s life and career via a miscellany of people who tangentially or directly influenced both his development and the momentous events that framed a new world order.
Much of his interdependence with his father, Randolph, will be familiar from My Early Life, but Reynolds’ treatment of Churchill’s relationship with Lloyd George breaks new ground. Especially revealing, despite the fact that the two men came from starkly different backgrounds, was the way that Churchill accepted Lloyd George’s wartime dominance. Indeed, Violet Asquith said, ‘his was the only personal leadership I have ever known Winston to accept unquestioningly in his whole political career.’
The author makes a similar point about Churchill’s attitude towards Roosevelt. It is a fact that the two men’s cooperation led to the utter defeat of the Nazi regime, but their relations did not start well. When Roosevelt first met Churchill at a dinner for ministers for war in London in 1918, he noted, ‘I have always disliked him… he acted like a stinker’. Clearly, the events of 1939 imposed huge pressures on both men, but by March 1945 any malodorous behaviour by Winston seems to have been forgotten, with him telling Roosevelt that ‘our friendship is a rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders’.
Strikingly, despite the many convolutions of Churchill’s earlier career, there were a number of people who identified his potential. In the chapter on the tricky relationship with Neville Chamberlain, whose stance of appeasement towards Hitler had alienated Churchill, we find Leo Amery MP saying as early as 1931: ‘I imagine his game is to be a lonely and formidable figure available as a possible prime minister in a confused situation later on.’ Even more prescient were Stanley Baldwin’s words after he had decided not to include Churchill in his cabinet in 1935: ‘If there is going to be a war – and who can say there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war prime minister.’
That war came, and Churchill’s relationship with the great dictators is immensely well handled by Reynolds; these chapters are impossible to put down. In the slew of anti-Nazism which, even today, obscures proper analysis of that party’s rise to power, it is often forgotten that, in 1922, Hitler was dubbed the ‘German Mussolini’ by his colleagues. But, while Churchill despised Hitler, he began by admiring Mussolini before realising what a monster he became.
There was a similar epiphany for Churchill with Stalin, with whom he endured the worst crises of the war, attended all the momentous conferences, and drank the same vodka. He allowed himself to be referred to by the Russian as ‘my good friend’. By 1954, though, a different opinion prevailed, ‘Stalin, the dictator, who was carried away by the triumphs of victory and acted as if he thought he could secure for Russia and communism the domination of the world.’
The author unpicks de Gaulle, Gandhi, Attlee, Clementine Churchill, and rounds off one of the most entertaining yet forensic insights into the great man with a collection of observations by both the man himself and many others who knew him. This is a splendid book which will delight, amuse, and appal in equal measure: indeed, as Winston said of himself, ‘we are all worms, but I believe I am the glow worm!’
Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the leaders who shaped him
David Reynolds
William Collins, hbk (£25)
ISBN 978-0008439910
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