ANDREW ROBERTS Celebrateds "CHURCHILL - WALKING WITH DESTINY" at Chartwell Booksellers (2018)

good evening welcome to Chartwell booksellers my name is Barry singer and I'm the proprietor of Chartwell booksellers every Churchill book that arrives newly published is an occasion we've seen many of them over 35 years of business but this is a special occasion for a very special biography an extraordinary feat of biography and we're very proud to be debuting it here because the book I think officially comes out today in the United States it is already out in Great Britain where it has entered the top ten bestseller list and where the Sunday Times has already called it called it the best biography ever written about Winston Churchill Andrew Roberts first came to my attention with his book eminence sure Chileans around the time that we opened the store I read all of his books as they have come out since then and they have all been wonders of writing skill and biographic craft his napoleon biography is also quite likely definitive I also have to say in Andrews behalf that of all the authors of Churchill books over all the years Andrew has actually been a customer as well and a really good one and I don't take that for granted I'm delighted to welcome him here this evening on this very special occasion for this very special biography of Winston Churchill ladies and gentlemen Andrew Roberts [Applause] ladies and gentlemen good evening and thank you very much indeed Barry for those kind words I'd like to take you back to the afternoon the evening about six o'clock in the evening of Friday the 10th of May 1940 when Winston Churchill kissed hand as Prime Minister and at an audience with their King George the 6th took over the reins of the British government earlier that morning of course Adolf Hitler had unleashed blitzkrieg on the West invading Belgium and Luxembourg and and Holland and so it was that very same day that he became Prime Minister and he very famously wrote in the last paragraph of the first of his war memoirs the volume first volume of his war memoirs the Gathering Storm I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial and what I've tried to do in this in this book is to unpack that to investigate that look into that more carefully to what extent is it true that Churchill's past life the various jobs to be held like Chancellor of the Exchequer twice of course he'd been First Lord of the Admiralty like Home Secretary and so on how much and a Ministry of munitions where he had been in charge of two and a half million people working in the munitions factories of the First World War how much was that genuinely a preparation for his hour and for his trial in May 1940 and the other part of the beginning part of that sentence also I wanted to look at very carefully this concept of him walking with destiny because it strikes me that Churchill's sense of a personal destiny is tremendously important to him he did believe that he was specifically destined to save Britain and save London save the Empire when he was a 16 year old schoolboy at Harrow school Churchill was almost entirely self educated owing to the fact that he had to be because he went to Harrow he was able to say to his best friend boy called Merlin Devin's that I can see great and terrible struggles awaiting he said there will be great upheavals in my life and I will be called upon to save London and save the country and save the Empire now he said this ladies and gentlemen at the age of 16 years old so it was a full half century before this this extraordinary act of self prophecy finally in fact came to fruition but nonetheless his belief in himself in that this great destiny of his was undimmed over all the years that that intervenes and in fact the number of clothes brushes with death that he experienced in his life only reinforced this sense of Destiny because he believed that over him as he called them beat invisible wings keeping a keeping an eye open to to protect him so that he was going to be able to fulfill his destiny at the age of ten twenty ten years old he was stabbed in the stomach by a penknife by a fellow pupil at school at his prep school the following year he was he nearly died of pneumonia and the doctors administered brandy to him at the age of eleven and both orally and rectally he might have thought ladies and gentlemen that would put you off brandy for life but in Winston Churchill's case it clearly clearly didn't he then survived a house fire he survived a near drowning on Lake Geneva he survived two plane crashes three car crashes very nearly of course he died here on on Fifth Avenue and 76th Street in fact on the front cover of this book the English version of this book which you can also see on the American version you can see the scar down the center of his forehead which came as a result of that of that terrible crash which he so nearly died it went bright red when he had arguments with the Chiefs of Staff during the Second World War one of the things that came as a result of his sense of personal destiny is that he was incredibly calm in moments of crises terrible crises the worst perilous moments that were ever to overcome my country and that saw Winston Churchill immensely calm because he always knew that he was going to save London and the and the country in the Empire and during the confidence motion in 1942 when it was pointed out how when hit theoretically at least his whole government might have been in danger and it was pointed out how bad the a.22 tank was he said that when the a20 to win the defects and the teething troubles of the a.22 tank became apparent to all it was appropriately rechristened the Churchill and the key line in that joke of course is the word appropriately because he understood that he had teething troubles and and defects himself very serious ones he'd got within suffrage wrong he'd got the abdication crisis wrong he got the gold-standard wrong and most seriously of course he had got the Dardanelles campaign wrong it was a brilliant idea absolutely fantastic strategic genius - if they had managed to get the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles straits and then to have knocked the Ottoman Empire out of the central powers it would have been an almost war winning stroke but of course in the implementation of the of the plan on the 18th of March 1915 it fell desperately down and we lost the Allies lost six ships in the course of that day and then of course he took it on the next month to attack on the 25th of April 1915 and they got bogged down in that long campaign which eventually was to cost 160,000 Allied killed and wounded so I'm not in any way suggesting that Winston Churchill got everything right he didn't he was a genius but he was a flawed genius but the great thing about him is that he was capable of he was one of those politicians who was capable of learning from his mistakes and the great mistake the great mistake of the dardanelles was and learnt from by him and he never once in the Second World War overruled the Chiefs of Staff when all three of the Chiefs of Staff agreed on a on a on a plan or a point of principle never once overruled them even though constitutionally of course he could have as Minister of Defense and and and Prime Minister you have therefore this man who believed that the Almighty was looking forward looking after him and Winston Churchill was not a Christian he never mentioned the word Jesus Christ in the 5.2 million words that he spoke all the 6.1 million words that he wrote but he did believe in an almighty but when you look carefully theologically at the duties of the Almighty they seem to have consisted really solely in taking chair care of Winston Churchill I'm often asked why if there are 1009 biographies of Winston Churchill I should bother to write a 1010 beyond obviously keeping Barry in keeping Barry in business we've all got to carry on writing by Barry Barry in business but beyond that really what's the what's the point of a 1010 and the answer is that in the last 10 years there has been a cornucopia of new sources about Winston Churchill that have come out it's it's quite extraordinary that so many important new sources haven't come up until now I was very fortunate to be asked by to be allowed by Her Majesty the Queen to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's Diaries and of course King George the sixth saw Winston Churchill every Tuesday of the Second World War they met at Buckingham Palace at the audience and they served themselves from the sideboard so the the incredibly secret things that they discussed wasn't weren't overheard by any servants the Prime Minister trusted the king with all of the great secrets of the war including the nuclear secret the ultra decrypt secrets where they were going to attack and when they were going to attack and who the ministers and and generals were who were going to be hired and fired it wasn't of course taken for granted that they were going to get on so well these two men Churchill hood of course supported Edward the eighth for Kings elder brother at the time of the abdication crisis and also the King had been a very big supporter of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement so it wasn't automatically taken for granted that they would but they did get on immediately especially even by the fall of France and the Battle of Britain certainly by the Blitz the king was referring in his diaries to Churchill as his friend and he was the only one of the four prime ministers of King George the sick who was referred to by his first name and it was very fortunate that they did get on because they they were able to trust each other perfectly you also as well as his wonderful Diaries have the diaries of Ivan my ski the Soviet ambassador 1932 to 43 you have the love letters of Pamela Harriman very racy she lived she had an extremely active romantic life during the Second World War and of course was married to Randolph Churchill Winston's son you have the verbatim accounts now of the cabinet war minutes and also you have no fewer than 41 sets of papers 41 sets of papers that have been deposited by people who worked with Churchill deposited at the Churchill College archives in in Cambridge University which is a wonderful resource for anybody so there is a space in fact there's virtually every single page of this book has got he has got quotations that will never have been seen in any biography of Winston Churchill before and what did they tell us all of these new sources and indeed the old ones well they tell us that Winston Churchill was an extraordinarily emotional man he was driven by his passions to a degree that very few other Victorian era politicians were he bursts into tears for example on no fewer than fifty occasions during the Second World War must have been very off-putting in the House of Commons to have seen in the house of to seen the Prime Minister burst into tears I'm not sure how we would feel if Teresa may were suddenly to burst it she's got every right to I hasten to add but if she was suddenly to just burst into tears in the House of Commons and but the reason for this for Churchill's emotionalism was that he was not the buttoned up Victorian era Stoke rat of his age in class and background at all he was in fact a throwback I see as a to an earlier era he to a he was a romantic Regency figure from the from the 19th century early 19th century somebody who didn't mind whole wearing his heart on his on his sleeve I don't believe that he was a depressive he got depressed undoubtedly he got depressed at moments like the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the fall of Tobruk in June 1942 and of course during the Dardanelles but that's a far cry from being a depressive who becomes depressed as a result of the medical and chemical imbalance he wasn't one of those people any more than he was a manic depressive or a I have seen in some books bipolar the fact is that depression is a debilitating illness terrible and debilitating illness and Churchill chaired a thousand committees thousand meetings of the War Cabinet Defence Committee which is something at all times of day and night all the way through the war which he couldn't have done had he been a depressive or a manic recive neither in fact was he an alcoholic he did drink in enormous amounts there's no doubt about that in fact CP Scott the journalist CP Scott said that Winston Churchill couldn't be an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much and and I agree with him he was I agree with his own sense he had this oxlike Constitution he did drink a lot he liked to boast about how much he drank he said that he could drink Stalin under the table for example but actually when you look at his drinking he kept his blood alcohol level at a pretty straight level all the way through the through the war and there's only one occasion the Second World War was 2194 days long there's only one occasion in that whole period when he was very clearly as two and everybody noticed that he was drunk and on that occasion they just pretended it hadn't happened and held the meeting again the next morning when everyone was was clear-headed and so no decisions were taken as a result of Winston Churchill getting drunk and it's very important though to to go back to that point that he was somebody who learnt from his mistakes and he he told his wife Clementine that he would have made nothing if he had not made mistakes his father was a tremendously powerful influence on him of course his proud disdainful mercurial brilliant father and who never really understood Churchill never appreciated him never showed him the kind of affection that he that this young boy deserved and so for the rest of his life Churchill was in a sense attempting to to appeal to and to impress the shade of his long dead father his father of course died in 1895 aged 45 when Churchill was only twenty years old and and in that sense it's a tremendously sad story his mother also we have the beautiful gorgeous Jennie Jerome born of course in in Brooklyn and who took virtually no interest in him whatsoever until he was old enough to become a signatory on Trust Funds at which point she he certainly did start to take interest in her but up until then and as he obviously wrote in the my early life his autobiography she Xiang for me like the evening star brilliant but at a distance and one can see in his in her Diaries her 1884 Diaries when Winston Churchill was only ten years old that she only managed to find about six and a half hours to see him in the six months of nine first six months of nineteen over of 1884 when he was 10 years old he of course was broke almost all his life a result of having spent very much more than he he earns he don't he never believed in cutting back there was one occasion when he wrote to Clementine to say no more champagne at Chartwell and that lasted all of three days otherwise he always believed that the best way of dealing with being short of money and short of money in part because he employed 14 servants at Chartwell was to earn more and that's the reason that we have the 36 books that he wrote and the hundreds of articles that he wrote all of which of course are for sale here at Chartwell books and if we hadn't had he been better off we wouldn't have had these fantastic works of literature that really do bear rereading immediately after you've finished my but one of the things that happened as a result of Churchill being permanently broke is that when he wrote an article which he couldn't use he would do water or at least an editor wouldn't accept he would do what a lot of journalists do which is to just keep the article in a drawer for better days and of course when he became Prime Minister all editors were willing to publish anything that he wrote and so he brought out these old articles from the 1930s and sold them for the equivalent of 26,000 pounds per article and that's the reason the way you get an extraordinary thing in the seventh of 1942 where Churchill and it's a terrible time for the for the Allies in 1942 the Japanese have taken one-eighth of the planet the British are on retreat in the in the North African littoral the Russians are on retreat against the Nazis in Russia it's a bad time and that is the time that the Prime Minister brings out and publishes an article in the Sunday dispatch entitled are there men on the moon and and he concludes in this article that there yes there are probably men on the moon there are certainly aliens and they are bound to be UFOs as well again ladies gentlemen can you imagine if Teresa may were to publish an article entitled are there men on the moon concluding that in yes indeed there were one of the things that struck me most powerfully during the course of writing this book and this is the fifth book that I've written with Churchill in the title or the subtitle is the year and therefore I feel with regard to writing this book that all my past life has been a but a preparation for this hour and for this trial is the extraordinary courage physical courage that he showed when he took part in the charge of the 21st lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898 there were no fewer than 25% of his unit were casualties in that attack the following year in the Great Train ambush in South Africa in 1899 it was 34 percent of his Eunice unit who were killed and wounded at that time and he find and of course the following year he escaped from from the prisoner of war camp and crossed 300 miles of enemy territory extraordinarily brave thing to do but it continued on into the into the Second World War and in fact in the end papers of the British edition of this book you can see all the places that he in the front they're all the places he crossed the Atlantic and went westwards and then in the back of the book all of the places that he went in the other direction to Cairo and to Tehran and to Moscow in all he travelled a hundred and ten thousand miles outside the United Kingdom as Prime Minister during the Second World War he did it very largely either crossing in ships across u-boat infested Atlantic or he went in planes unpressurized cabins of course freezing cold in his late sixties and early seventies and very often within the radius of the Luftwaffe and he did it on one of his flights across the Atlantic his plane was struck by lightning and they feared that the instrumentation would go down in which case he'd have been a goner and so you have this tremendous bravery on top of of course going to watch battles on top of going up onto the air ministry roof in the in the Blitz and and also of course he had a heart attack minor heart attack when he was in the White House in December 1941 and he had a series of strokes of pneumonia as well and nearly died from two of those during the Second World War there's a moment in May 1943 where his doctor came to him asking for a blood sample during one of his pneumonia attacks and Churchill said well yes you can take some blood from my ear or from my finger and I also have an almost infinite expanse of ass the the reasons I think that Winston Churchill was able to be the first of and the foremost of all of the Prime Minister's who a sort of first and foremost of all of the British politicians and indeed for much of the 1930s the only politician who was to able who was able to see Hitler and the Nazis for what they were I think break down into three great categories the first of course was that he was a phyllo see might he liked Jews he went on holiday with Jews he grew up with Jews his friend his father liked Jews he believed that the Jews gave the ethics for Western civilization and he felt comfortable in their company and he represented a Jewish constituency in Manchester Northwest as a as a young man he was a Zionist he had of course signed the Balfour Declaration who had not signed it but it supported the Balfour Declaration and this gave him I I think an early warning system that was denied to many of the anti-semites who were on the back benches of the and in the front benches of the Conservative Party and indeed other political parties at the time so that was one of the reasons he was able to spot the Nazis for what they were so early another was that he was in historian and he recognized that Hitler's attempt to her Gemini's Europe fell very much in the Great continuum of threats to the United Kingdom and ones that just as so many of the earlier threats had been defeated that this one needed to be defeated too he was able to see it therefore in its historical context their context of philip ii of spain and the armada his own great ancestor John Churchill 1st Duke of Marlborough being able to stop in the Wars of Spanish Succession louis xiv trying to take over the continent then napoleon then the kaiser and of course he himself today being veterans day and the day after the can the commemoration the of the centenary of the end of the great war we should remember winston churchill going off into no-man's land as the battalion commander of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers 30 times during the First World War getting so close to the enemy trenches that he could actually hear the Germans speaking in their trenches and and so the Kaiser of course was another person who had attempted to hegemonies Europe and he saw Hitler in his proper historical context he was also able to see Hitler and the Nazis for them fanatics that they were because he had seen finatus clothes himself he'd seen it on the Northwest Frontier he'd seen it in the Sudan he had in in both cases of course religious fanaticism but also in both cases he was able to see the kind of people that Hitler and the Nazis were in a way that Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain never were able to so you have therefore ladies and gentlemen a man with great foresight foresight in the Second World War after the Second World War as much as before it in his great iron curtain speech in May 1946 when he warned against Stalin and Soviet Communism that was Jack showed just as much foresight as it did beforehand before the the Second World War a man who made terrible mistakes but managed to learn from them and a man who was tremendously eloquent he worked incredibly hard on his speeches he wasn't just by luck the greatest in my view at least the greatest orator of the 20th century he was somebody who put enormous amount of practice into his public speaking and spending hours and hours practicing these speeches he wrote all his own speeches he never employed a spin doctor he never listened to a focus group he was somebody who when he spoke you knew it came from him and that I think also is a tremendously important aspect of Churchill and part of his eloquence came from as he said as he told a friend during the Second World War came from his belief in using short words short sentence concentrating on clarity and also concentrating on whenever he could using words from Old English and you see this in particular in the peroration of his great speech that we shall fight on the beaches of June 1940 where he talks about fighting with growing confidence in the air and ending of course in the peroration we shall never surrender if you look at those 141 words of that last paragraph you see that all but two of them come from Old English those two being the word confidence which comes from the Latin and surrender which comes from the French come on ladies and gentlemen you've got to enjoy them thank you so you have therefore a man who has insight who has clarity of vision who has foresight who has the physical courage and the moral courage to go out there and say what he believes and also has the eloquence to put it in words that will live as long as the English language and the English tongue survive and those have got to be the great values as he said of courage courage is rightly esteemed the greatest of all the virtues because it guarantees all the others and when you have all of those in one person you have somebody who was able to do even better than he had predicted for himself and prophesied for himself as a 16 year old schoolboy because he didn't just save London and his country in the Empire he actually also managed to save civilization itself thank you very much [Applause] now we've got a bit of time before you all rush off to buy my book back there we have a few few minutes for questions I can't thank you enough greatly appreciated would you mind sharing with us how you wrote this book your your own journey did you have any help how long did it take where did you actually work is that possible yes of course I'd be tonight's time I'm happy you're interested I certainly didn't have any hope help I've never employed a research assistant in my life I have no intention ever of doing that it's it this is all my own work and I feel I rather fear the use of research assistants because one is always worried that they will have plagiarized whoever they're researching and therefore you would plagiarize them and you would wind up being accused of plagiarizing that whoever it was that they were working on so it's far too risky in my view to use research assistance and as far as where I work I work in my study at home it has a little over a thousand books on Winston Churchill all over the walls piled up under the desk it's absolutely everywhere on all of the windowsills and you name it so actually once I finally managed to put this book behind me I'm going to have an almost empty study which my wife is very much looking forward to to seeing my own working times are rather strange I I get all my information together all the evidence together before I write a word I'm not one of these people who can write in in in bits after having gone off to a research place and then and then bring it all together at the end I have to in order for me to feel that I have an overarching theme and to know where the themes fit into each of the chapters I need to have got everything together before I write a word and so as a result I I get up of this this book took me four years to do the research in a sense thirty years of course because I've been writing about Churchill for thirty years but for years to do the research and then I the entire book in 100 days averaging five thousand five hundred words a day every day I start at four o'clock in the morning and nothing something else my wife doesn't like very much and and I go through and then in the afternoon I rink a disgusting drink called Red Bull which keeps me awake all afternoon shaking like this and and it means that I can get the number of words done so in in a hundred days little over three months it was all done and I was able to send it off to the to the publishers sir sorry no this gentleman and then the gentleman behind you thank you very much in your BBC I think was radio for you had a five-part series on Churchill's passions I think they were his sense of Destiny father as friendships his emotion in his wit I was wondering if any one of those or perhaps another source what was behind his remarkable energy his his exuberance his enthusiasm his joy thank you yes a very good question he was he was quite the most energetic I thought Napoleon was the most energetic person that I'd ever come across in my study was actually Churchill is even more energetic he only took eight days holiday during the whole of the Second World War and in fact he worked on two of those those days he he the reason his energy sprung from the fact as he himself wrote in his book painting as a pastime from the fact that he loved what he did he absolutely adored politics he loved writing he loved journalism and history he bounced out of bed in the morning rubbing his hands with glee at the idea of having a day that he was going to be able to fill with his bricklaying or his painting or whatever it was that he was going to be doing that day he was also a huge multitasker he was able to dictate while having a bath have the papers read to him whilst whilst he was sitting up in bed answering answering telegrams and so on he also extended his day of course by having a nap afternoon and he found that that the 45 minutes to an hour that he spent asleep actually extended his day by two hours which annoyed lots of his staff because of course they couldn't take naps in the afternoon in the same way that he did but no there was a Giada vivre about him which was completely infectious gentle now so there were many times in Churchill's life when he was very hard up for money but there always seemed to be somebody to come along to rescue him including the American financier Bernard Baruch so why were people why were these men these wealthy men so willing to put up money to save Churchill financially was it because do you think that they saw the greatness in him or were there other reasons yes that's absolutely right he Bernard Baruch is a good example of that he covered his losses at the time of the of the great crash and and Churchill made terrible losses he lost the equivalent of half a million pounds in today's money on the one day of the of the great crash in October 1929 he also had a great friend in Sir Henry strakosh a an industrialist who also picked up his his losses and then of course his in 1941 another great friend of his sir a Bailey died and left him the equivalent of 1 million pounds in his will now the former historian david irving points out that that some of these people who helped churchill out were jewish and therefore he implies that there was a sort of conspiracy going on that they were financing Churchill's simply because Churchill was a Philo C might and Zionist there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that whatsoever and in fact when we're Irving also claims that Jews were doing this in order to advance their own personal interests I think that that's comprehensively exploded by the fact that sir a Bailey gave his money in his will so therefore his own personal interests were hardly likely to be advanced by by that it was exactly as you mentioned he and these people admire Churchill they saw him as somebody who was going to be taking on and fighting the Nazis he was almost the only person in the 1930s who did have this foresight and so when it looked like on two occasions chart without manner his great beautiful house in Kent needed to go up for sale or if he had in fact been declared bankrupt he would have had to have left the House of Commons which could have been a complete disaster for the anti appeasement struggle these various generous and rich men stepped forward but it wasn't just Jews when in 1948 it he needed to sell chart wall it was a group of his closest friends some of them were Jewish but but the great majority weren't who stepped forward and and bought chart wool for him so this was a man who as I think the earlier question mentioned his friendship his capacity for friendship one of the BBC shows that I made about this concept of the capacity for friendship you see it in the membership of the other Club which was founded in 1911 amongst Churchill's friends is something that is one of the most attractive features about Churchill's personality he had a capacity for friendship he stuck by friends even when they indeed especially when they had bad times come to them and so when on the 7th and 8th of May 1940 during the norway debate the seven major speeches that were made to bring down the Chamberlain government which of course led to Churchill's Premiership no fewer than six of them came from members of the other club who therefore were long-standing friends sometimes for thirty years of winston churchill's my question is about Lord Halifax in your ferrer and your sympathetic biography of him you suggest correct me if I'm wrong that the approaches to Italy and so forth in the spring of 1940 were at least reasonable have your views changed at all or I don't think I thought that they were reasonable I think that Lord Halifax thought that they were reasonable now in retrospect of course they would have been completely disastrous if we'd made peace or gone down that route at all in in 1914 I do say this in my book the holy Fox it would have been demoralizing if that fact become had become known and if we'd actually made peace with Hitler in 1940 it would have been absolutely disastrous for for Britain and also ultimately I think also for the United States and the rest of civilization not least because Hitler would have been able to have used the whole of the Luftwaffe in his attack on Russia as it was he only used fifty to seventy percent of it because he had to keep the rest of it back to protect against our bombing raids from the RAF if he had managed to use the whole of the RAF sorry the Luftwaffe in his attack on Leningrad which he subjected of course to a thousand a long grueling siege he got to the subway stations of Moscow he captured Stalingrad he could well have pushed the Russians beyond the Urals and that would have been something that would have been utterly disastrous for Britain in the long term so no Lord Halifax his attempt to explore peace were in many ways Churchill preventing that stopping that was a greater act than anything else he did in the Second World War in my view you'll get it all in all of this is covered in Chapter chapter 20 of this of this book very important here it's an it's an absolutely key pivotal moment of the history of the 20th century in my view so I know there's conflicting opinions about this but what was his view on a united Europe European Union and how would he go about the Briggs and negotiations and well into the fact that he died half a century before the brexit referendum I think that I'm gonna be allowed off the second of those of those questions however and with regard to his views on Europe and he very much was in favor of Europe uniting he was the major figure behind the European movement he was the person who said at the Zurich conference let Europe unite he didn't want as he put it to turn ever again to fight gall and and so in the Zurich speech and various other speeches The Hague speech the Strasbourg speech he did want Europe to come together however it's pretty clear from all of those speeches that he didn't want the United Kingdom to be part of it and so he and you can see in his in his peacetime Premiership between October 1951 and April 1955 that he made no movements towards and this was just prior of course for the Treaty of Rome where the Common Market was set up and he made absolutely no movements towards joining the iron and steel trade Confederation or the European army or any of the any of the groups that were you'd have had to have joined in order to have been part of the Treaty of Rome so you have to really choose between his his public statements in favor of European unity but without Britain being a member and his actual actions as well on top of that in which he made sure that Britain didn't go any closer to to joining the economic community but he was very much in favor of all of the rest of Europe uniting in order to prevent another war just a question excuse me just the question about his family did you get any insight into the support Clementine is his children any different interpretations yes well not not different interpretations but much deeper interpretation really his his daughter Mary Soames his wartime diaries are a very moving actually they are the dog they're the story of a eighteen and nineteen year old girl who is desperately in love with her father who worships him who who quotes him admiring Lee and and jokingly on occasion but obviously admires him so much for what he's doing for the country in 1940 and 41 and there are quotations from it here that therefore will not have appeared in any other book on Winston Churchill before as as with so many of these of these new sources but overall it's a sad story of course Randolph Churchill was a terrible drunk really from Oxford onwards he couldn't with Winston Churchill as Churchill said alcohol is my servant and not my master and he also said that he'd taken more out of alcohol than alcohol had taken out of him well I'm afraid this was not true of Randolph who was who was a hopeless drunk on okay than many occasions and also one of his daughters committed suicide and another one also became an alcoholic so although he loved his family very much Mary of course was a wonderful lady and and there's no nothing against her but nonetheless it was not it's a very difficult thing to be the child of a great man you know it's it's a well-known phenomenon although he himself was the son of a great man in in Lord Randolph Churchill so he himself was somebody who was able to get beyond that that famous problem what if any relationship did the Churchill have with David ben-gurion in the years 45 to 47 before Israel was founded and he he was as you know a great supporter of Israel of the concept of Israel he saw he was a supporter of the Balfour Declaration he was he of course also denounced very aggressively the stern gang and ear gun and the and the organization that killed his friend Lord Moyne he was close to climb Weitzman and admired Weitzman enormously and he welcomed the creation of the State of Israel I think had he won the 1945 general election you wouldn't have had the kind of ill-tempered transfer of power that you got in in 1948 you certainly wouldn't have got the anti-semitic Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary causing as much trouble as he did at the time of that equally he was exhausted by 1945 he wasn't about to maybe winning that losing that election was to to save his life because he was completely played out by that time thank you you mentioned that he was the son of a great man and this brings something to my mind do you think it affected him somehow and made him gave him a greater impetus to become a great man that his father died so young when he himself was just barely 20 yes it's um it's an it's a continuing factor in his life this this attempt as I think I mentioned in the speech to to impress the shade of his of his dead father it's he talked about his father endlessly he wrote his father's bio graffiti wrote he sought out his father's friends he adopted his father's political stance he called his son Randolph it was a his father and then in 1947 he had this weird psychological moment where he actually believed he had met the ghost of his father and he wrote about that in a book called the dream a short story called the dream and a no point in that meeting of his father did he tell his father that he had been instrumental in helping win the Second World War so his father the ghost goes away still thinking that his son was merely a painter rather than a straight statesman and a greater statesman than he himself the father had ever been of a great woman and he comments about that relationship yes it mattered to him enormously that she had effectively ignored him as he grew up had spent so little time only six and a half hours in six months in in 1884 and and that yet he rather liked his father he didn't let it it grate on him he he didn't get psychologically affected by his mother's lack of interest in him and they became friends almost like brother and sister friends when later in life he was he and she had to work out the family finances owing to the fact that they were both magnificent spenders especially especially his mother and so it became something of a of a friendship and then he was he was affected when she died very young as a result of falling downstairs and breaking her ankle than it being going gangrenous and her very suddenly dying would it be fair for history to judge Churchill as believing that the British race was superior and if so I should how might that impact our evaluation of him and some of his policies yes he very much did believe that he was of course ten years old he was at school at the time that Charles Darwin was still alive so people did however ludicrous and obscene it might be to today's mind of course people did believe in a hierarchy of the races it was considered to be scientific fact and it was something that he certainly did believe in it was pretty central of course to his being a imperialist and his belief in the British Empire which is something that he dedicated himself to he was a paternalist imperialist he wanted to to bring up the what he saw as the native peoples in the British Empire as much as he could he wasn't the sort of extermination imperialist of the Adolphe Hitler kind by any means but yes a belief that not only the British were superior to other non-whites but he also believed that the British were superior to Germans for example and that was a belief that was absolutely central in 1940 and he told the French Prime Minister in June 1940 that he believed that we would that the British people would because of their innate toughness and their and their courage would be able to see through the Second World War and win it and frankly although today of course we despise such what we would call racism at the time it was totally useful that the Prime Minister had such a intense belief in the capabilities of the British people so as you mentioned Churchill was a very emotional man and I find it interesting that both Hitler and Churchill were soldiers foot soldiers in World War one it seems to me that Hitler developed more of a hatred for the Allied forces than Churchill did towards the Germans so was he able to compartmentalize this better and be more clinical with his decision actually funnily enough that's a good question but funnily enough and the British army didn't hate the Germans at all and they there if anything they there was a sort of live and let live attitude when they weren't actually fighting full-scale against each other it was it was not a war of hatred on the on the British side it's almost remarkable actually how little hatred there was in the in the Great War but you're right about Adolf Hitler's stance as a result he he did come with a profound loathing learnt a profound loathing of the French the Americans and thee and the British as a result of his wartime experiences and although he won the Iron Cross in the First World War and cross first class actually if you look at the latest books on Hitler's first world war experiences as a as a regimental Runner and pretty much all of the regimental runners got the answer across first class it was handed out to to all of them and he was not running whilst whilst the whilst the shells were falling he was running to and from the the front line when the shells weren't falling in fact and it wasn't the Iron Cross also wasn't quite like the victim across it was much more like the Military Medal and so I think quite a lot of there's been made about about Hitler's first world war experiences and how how supposedly brave he was he really wasn't any braver than pretty much everybody else in his unit whereas Churchill you know went into no-man's land when he didn't have to on on 30 occasions which was which was really truly remarkably brave so thank you for the nice talk I enjoyed it a lot I have a question if we find ourselves the world that is in a very dangerous situation such as world war children do you think we have a leader such as Churchill who would have foresight or were devoid of that at the moment well you have to remember is that you have to get into the wall beforehand because Winston Churchill would not have become Prime Minister under any other circumstance except for a world war indeed a sec except for a world war that we weren't even winning that is a key prerequisite to Churchill becoming Prime Minister you'll see from chapters 19 and 20 of this book quite how much had to happen for the Conservative Party to put up with Churchill let alone choose him they didn't choose him he was chosen by a group of four people himself included and under almost any other circumstances he would not have been Prime Minister so so the world war is a is a prerequisite for him coming to the fore and if you look at British politics in history actually it's it's very much the case that Prime Minister's do come to the fore during the wars they Wars are very rarely ended by the same prime minister who started them Lord Palmerston of course took over from Lord Aberdeen during the Crimean War Lloyd George took over from Herbert Asquith during the Great War Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlain so we do have a history really of getting Wars badly wrong at the beginning and then having somebody else come in and clean up the mess later on so last question Nick can we make this may be the last question and then I'll I'd be very happy to come and sign a few books for anybody who'd be interested in getting one it seems that over time the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt deteriorated did Churchill's disappointed in that did he comment on it very often what was his reaction yes the question for anybody who didn't hear it at the back was about the relationship between Churchill and FDR it was a proper friendship it was something that that worked incredibly well especially in 1940 in 41 he admired Churchill admired Roosevelt very much he they were of course were both our sock rats in their own countries they were people who were on the left of their own of their political spectrums and and saw common cause in a lot of of that and also they agreed on the Germany first policy which was the great prerequisite really for seeing eye to eye strategically but by the I think it's fair to say that by the fall of 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt no longer saw eye to eye strategically and on on a number of other post-war issues as well and so by the time of of Roosevelt's death in April 1945 the relationship had really broken down there are 372 more letters from Churchill to Roosevelt than there are replies from Roosevelt to Churchill which is a it's a sign of quite how much the relationship had broken down and so although there was a personal still a personal friendship and they were able to get on and make jokes and all the rest of it actually when it came to policy the the kind of closeness that they had by that stage had broken down but that did not that didn't mean that when Churchill said goodbye to Roosevelt after the Yalta Conference when they were in Alexandria and said goodbye for the last time and of course by that stage Churchill saw that Roosevelt was was was was frail and and not necessarily dying but although it turned out that of course he was Churchill was deeply affected on their final goodbyes because he suspected that it was indeed going to be a final goodbye ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed thank you Andrew we have some time to spend with Andrew at the shop I'm delighted to say so please join us and we'll continue thank you for coming [Music] you

Channel: Chartwell Booksellers

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Keywords: Winston Churchill

Id: dl5cGDKhzAY

Length: 59min 2sec (3542 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2018