A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Episode 15 - The Two Winstons
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama tackles the 20th century through the lives of two men - Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Both men, so very different in almost every way, lived through and wrote about the key moments of British 20th-century life - the Depression, Empire, two world wars and the Cold War. What unites them, argues Schama, is one shared theme - forget history at your peril.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama tackles the 20th century through the lives of two men - Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Both men, so very different in almost every way, lived through and wrote about the key moments of British 20th-century life - the Depression, Empire, two world wars and the Cold War. What unites them, argues Schama, is one shared theme - forget history at your peril.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00Swinging London, the past sent packing and good riddance too.
00:29New was what counted, Britain minted fresh, no more bowing and scraping to tradition.
00:44The sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.
00:48It is now 9.20.
01:04Lugget Hill crowded this morning with thousands of people
01:09who have been pouring in since dawn to see the passing of the body of Winston Churchill
01:13on its way here to St Paul's Cathedral, from which I am talking at the moment.
01:20But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died
01:25and all of a sudden London stopped swinging.
01:29Out from some timeless wintry fog shambled the hairy old beast history,
01:36big with memories.
01:40People in the streets stood in the freezing cold
01:43as the enormous coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.
01:51Royalty paid its respects to the great commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.
01:58The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes
02:03as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.
02:07Satire held its tongue.
02:13Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering and started paying attention,
02:19caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling, a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.
02:27Something immense had happened, the death of a patriarch,
02:32the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.
02:37What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.
02:45But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried,
02:49disrespectful thoughts crept back in.
02:52Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,
02:56a millstone round the neck of the future.
02:59What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the sceptred isle for us mods?
03:07No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston.
03:11Rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap,
03:15Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.
03:26This, in 1984, is London,
03:29chief city of Airstrip One, a province of the state of Oceania.
03:36Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but it wasn't the history of pomp,
03:41it was the history of people, written not in purple rhapsodies,
03:45but Orwell's English, sharp and hard as granite.
03:51Orwell's history, then, was not the kind wallowed in self-congratulation.
03:57It was the kind that asked hard questions.
04:00But for all their differences, Orwell and Churchill did have this in common.
04:05They not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.
04:09Look at Churchill, look at Orwell,
04:12and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.
04:16You'll see how our past shaped our future.
05:10CHOIR SINGS
05:27In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born,
05:31this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime,
05:36turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful
05:40than she's ever been before or since.
05:44He must have thought it would go on forever.
05:4790 years later, when he died,
05:50it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrapyard.
05:54But then history has a cruel way with optimism.
05:59There never was any chance, really,
06:02that Winston Churchill could escape history.
06:05He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim,
06:08the great limestone pile of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.
06:13Winston's father, Randolph, boy wonder of the Tories,
06:17Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37,
06:20seemed set to be the latest Churchill to embark on a meteoric rise.
06:25But he was also a prima donna,
06:27forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.
06:31Finally, the Tories let him go.
06:34He never got back to power.
06:38His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess,
06:42glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious,
06:46perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.
06:49But Winston hardly knew his parents.
06:52As usual with little aristocrats,
06:55it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.
06:59And, as usual with boys of his class,
07:01he was packed off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.
07:08There he listened, quaking with fear,
07:11to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms splashed
07:15There he listened, quaking with fear,
07:17to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms soundly birched.
07:24Later, as Home Secretary,
07:26he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England
07:29came from doing 11 years of penal servitude
07:33in the public and private schools of England.
07:38Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations
07:41with his father in his entire life.
07:44One of them happened one day
07:46while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.
07:51Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy
07:55had the stuff of politics or the law.
07:58But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so,
08:02he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier.
08:07And that did it, really.
08:09Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.
08:13He'd pick up his father's broken sword
08:16and make the name of Churchill glorious again.
08:20So Winston charged headlong into the fray.
08:23India, Africa, you name it, he was there,
08:26even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history,
08:30trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.
08:36And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.
08:41It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore
08:44that history became Churchill's personal religion.
08:48The muse that fired everything he did,
08:51his politics, his speech-making, his battle cry.
08:55Reading it, writing it, making it
08:58were all inseparable in the personality that was unfolding.
09:02Argent, impetuous, impassioned.
09:06And it was in the empire that Winston began to write.
09:09Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers.
09:12And what stories!
09:14It helped, of course, that he was socially shameless
09:17and physically fearless.
09:19There he was, a fleshy five-foot-seven,
09:22spinning a ripping yarn.
09:27He knew how to make the headlines and he knew how to milk them.
09:31But Winston was never just making headlines.
09:34Winston was never just gung-ho for Winston.
09:37Almost all his life, he believed in the greatness and goodness
09:40of the British Empire.
09:42But he knew next to nothing about what made that empire really tick.
09:47Money.
09:49MUSIC PLAYS
09:57For while Churchill was humming the chorus of the Road to Mandalay,
10:01Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it,
10:05cashing in on tea, teak and, not least, narcotics.
10:10Blair worked for the opium department of the Raj.
10:14His job was to supervise the production of poppies
10:17and their export to Shanghai,
10:19ensuring, on behalf of the empire,
10:22that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go understocked.
10:28MUSIC CONTINUES
10:34In 1903, Richard's wife Ida gave birth to a son, Eric.
10:39Only later would he be known as George Orwell.
10:42A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England,
10:47while Richard stayed behind in Burma.
10:50Home was No. 17, Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames.
10:54Nostalgic, middle-class, suburban.
10:59MUSIC CONTINUES
11:04Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class
11:09and Eric Blair at the bottom,
11:11but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage
11:14for all small boys destined to govern the empire,
11:18exile to boarding school.
11:25Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's, I began wetting my bed.
11:30Nowadays, I believe bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.
11:35It is a normal reaction in children
11:37who've been removed from their homes to a strange place.
11:41In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime
11:45which the child committed on purpose
11:47and for which the proper cure was a beating.
11:50Night after night, I've prayed,
11:52with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers.
11:56Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
11:59Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
12:06St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Countess Gulag
12:11that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on,
12:14but there's no doubt that it was his apprenticeship
12:17in contempt for the rituals of empire.
12:20History lessons he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.
12:26Orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places
12:30in their eagerness to shout out the right answers
12:33and, at the same time, not feeling the faintest interest
12:36in the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming.
12:40The torments, the canings,
12:42the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,
12:46the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath,
12:49left Eric with a lifelong horror of dirt
12:52and a burning hatred of the fake service ethos
12:56for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.
13:04If you were rich, all these ordeals were a tribute
13:07If you were rich, all these ordeals were a trial by fire,
13:10a kind of admission card to the ruling class.
13:13But Eric was not rich, he was not part of the upper class,
13:16he got the canings without the promise of the perks.
13:20His weapon against them was an air of bloody-minded indifference
13:24and when he came here to Eton,
13:26he refined that insouciance into an art form.
13:32If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets,
13:35he'd show up with his badger skew.
13:37If Blair was going to recite poetry,
13:39he was going to be Stevenson's suicide club.
13:43Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.
13:52Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.
13:56He was drunk on words
13:58and he wanted everyone else to share the intoxication.
14:02Back home from the Empire in 1900,
14:04he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.
14:09And once he had discovered he'd got the gift of the gab,
14:12he let the eloquence rip, drafting and rehearsing his speeches
14:16like some great trooper of the Edwardian stage.
14:22Unlike many politicians,
14:24Churchill didn't learn the art of public speaking
14:27from posh debating societies.
14:29He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial north
14:33on soapboxes, from the tops of buses and in musicals,
14:37where he really had to earn the cheers.
14:42Winston's irrepressible activism
14:44made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.
14:47When he defected to the Liberals in 1904,
14:50he joined a party joyously hammering the nails
14:54into the coffin of Victorian England.
14:57We don't usually think of Churchill as a radical,
15:00but all sorts of social reforms poured from his fertile mind.
15:04Labour exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.
15:11But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle
15:15to his grandstanding egotism.
15:17As Home Secretary, he was a bit too eager to treat politics like battles,
15:22a bit too trigger-happy, deploying troops against strikers,
15:26treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.
15:31It made sense then to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence
15:36where it could do some good.
15:38At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.
15:44Three years later, the world was at war.
15:47Gallipoli, 1915.
15:5052,000 Allied troops perish in Turkey,
15:54a bloody fiasco and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.
16:01Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government
16:06to its burnt-out meteor.
16:08Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence,
16:13the Tories paid him back for his treachery by booting him out of office.
16:18Stung by the humiliation and torture by guilt
16:22for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli,
16:25Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions.
16:30HE SINGS
16:39Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders,
16:43using his old army connections
16:45so that a politician could demote himself to a Tommy.
16:51On 23 November 1915, he wrote to his wife, Clemmie.
17:00My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.
17:04I've spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.
17:09Filth and rubbish everywhere.
17:11Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.
17:15Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.
17:19In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous wraths
17:22creep and glide to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns.
17:30Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill.
17:35He'd served his time.
17:37Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.
17:44Eric Blair was too young for the trenches,
17:47but while at Eton, he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.
17:51When the war was over, he may have felt guilty,
17:54like a lot of his generation.
17:56Guilt for missing the slaughter.
18:00The next step after Eton should have been Oxford,
18:03but like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.
18:09His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship,
18:13but even if Eric had had the chance,
18:15it's likely he would have rejected
18:17the smoothly-moneyed escalator through privilege.
18:21Instead, it was off to the trenches.
18:24Instead, it was off to the colonies.
18:32There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.
18:36He might even have shared some of Churchill's idealism
18:39about the do-good empire.
18:42Five years in the Burmese police,
18:44perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,
18:48smartly cured him of that.
18:52Doing his job as efficiently as he could,
18:55rounding up petty criminals,
18:57looking the other way when they were beaten,
18:59he wore his power like a hair shirt.
19:02The Burmese he caught and jailed, he knew,
19:05didn't think of themselves as criminals,
19:07but as victims of foreign conquerors.
19:11All over the empire, there were men who hated their part in it
19:15as heartily as he did,
19:17but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence
19:20and cowardice of acquiescence.
19:25One incident more than any other
19:27brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.
19:31An elephant had broken its chains
19:33and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.
19:37Blair picked up his rifle.
19:40Would you like all the handouts? No, rouse no-one.
19:44I'll try and get him myself.
19:47When he found the beast
19:49peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth,
19:52it was obvious there was no reason to kill it,
19:55except the huge crowd expected him to.
20:01I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly.
20:06And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands,
20:10that I first grasped the hollowness,
20:12the futility of the white man's dominion in the east.
20:16Here was I, the white man with his gun,
20:19standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,
20:22seemingly the lead actor of the piece.
20:25But in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.
20:42When I pulled the trigger,
20:44I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,
20:47but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
20:52In that instant, in too short a time one would have thought
20:55even for the bullet to get there,
20:57a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.
21:01He neither stirred nor fell,
21:03but every line of his body had altered.
21:07In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.
21:12I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.
21:16I often wondered whether any of the others grasped
21:19that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
21:34In 1927, Blair went home,
21:37where a sniff of the English air
21:39convinced him he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.
21:46Home was here at Southwold, a Suffolk seaside town
21:50so full of Anglo-Indian retirees
21:53that it was known as a little raj by the sea.
21:56Eric's sister Avril kept a tea shop,
21:59mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.
22:04When Eric announced to the family
22:06that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer,
22:11you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.
22:21And what was the England that Eric had come home to?
22:25A country he'd later described as resembling a family,
22:29a rather stuffy Victorian family
22:32where rich relations are kowtowed to
22:35and poor relations are horribly sat upon,
22:38where the young are thwarted
22:40and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles
22:44and bedridden aunts.
22:47A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.
22:53May 1926, the general strike.
22:56Newspapers ceased printing on the stroke of midnight.
22:59One of those in control was Winston Churchill.
23:02After 20 years away from the Tories,
23:04he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
23:08busy crushing the general strike.
23:13Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,
23:17which only made Eric all the more determined
23:20to expiate the sins of empire.
23:23In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place,
23:27he couldn't wait to lose his.
23:29Most people who were restless with their lot in life
23:33wanted to rise above their station.
23:36Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.
23:44There was something almost Franciscan
23:47about his nosedive into squalor.
23:50It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability.
23:54It was the calculated bodily embrace
23:57of everything that repelled the fastidious Eric.
24:00Muck, indescribably evil smells.
24:05When he sold his clothes and bought a tramps kit,
24:08he was making a point, at least to himself,
24:11that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.
24:16It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus
24:21to show that nothing human was beneath her.
24:25For two years, Blair did the cook's tour of destitution.
24:29Comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.
24:34In the bathroom of one especially horrible Doss house, or Spike,
24:39he finally got down to basic truths.
24:44It was a disgusting sight.
24:46All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed.
24:50The grime, the rents and patches,
24:52the bits of string doing duty for buttons,
24:55the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,
24:58some of the mere collections of holes held together by dirt.
25:02The room became a press of steaming nudity.
25:06The sweaty odours of the tramps competing
25:09with the sickly sub-fecal stench native to the Spike.
25:16He didn't have to do it, of course.
25:18He wasn't that hard up.
25:20But there was never anything second-hand about Blair,
25:23any more than there was about Churchill.
25:25Both were doers, not lookers.
25:27Whether in the trenches or the Doss houses,
25:30they needed to live what they talked about.
25:36In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book,
25:40Down and Out in Paris and London.
25:43But the name on the cover was not Blair, but George Orwell.
25:47A pseudonym.
25:49There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George.
25:53And Orwell, a river in Suffolk,
25:55connected him to the English landscape.
25:58But the landscape through which George Orwell would travel
26:01was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,
26:04but gutters and gasworks.
26:07In the years of the slump,
26:09Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades.
26:13Orwell had declared war on the Empire,
26:16Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.
26:20Our myth was that the British Empire was founded
26:23on the playing fields of Eton.
26:25But Orwell had been on the playing fields of Eton
26:28and he knew better than anyone that the British Empire
26:31was founded on fields of coal.
26:33The Germans and the Americans could fool around
26:36with chemicals and electricals,
26:38but our bedrock was coke and nutty slag.
26:41But then, in the 30s, that bedrock caved in.
26:45Export demand collapsed, mines were shut.
26:48Whole towns coughed and died.
26:51And so did the British Empire.
26:53And so did the British Empire.
26:55And so did the British Empire.
26:57Whole towns coughed and died.
27:03This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the Empire,
27:07had finally come to.
27:09From the gyarrow of the venerable bead
27:11to the gyarrow of the hunger marches.
27:15Never had the country been so bitterly divided.
27:22IN THE SOUTH, THEY BUILT MODEL VILLAGES
27:25miniature collieries, miniature farms and miniature plough teams
27:28coming over the hill.
27:30In Wales, Scotland and the north of England,
27:33that hill would have been a slag heap
27:35and it wouldn't have been a ploughboy,
27:37but desperate scramblers,
27:39searching for coal waste with their bare hands.
27:44Orwell, who cherished the countryside
27:46with an unsentimental, almost feral passion,
27:49now headed for this underworld,
27:51the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.
27:54When his publisher asked him to write a book on life
27:57in the industrial north, Orwell grabbed the chance
28:01and set out on the road to Wigan Pier.
28:10What he found was a town broken by depression,
28:13coated in grime which befouled everything,
28:16black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him,
28:20a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.
28:24And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell,
28:26being employed was purgatory.
28:29Get up at 3.45 in the morning,
28:32crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages,
28:35sometimes for miles,
28:37as far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.
28:44When he wasn't down the pits,
28:45Orwell was here in Wigan Public Library.
28:48Here's his name in the visitor's book,
28:50E. A. Blair, 72, Warrington Lane, Wigan.
28:54He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet,
28:58wages, rents and prices.
29:03The road to Wigan Pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day
29:07from right and left.
29:09Conservatives, of course, thought it was a piece of Bolshevik trash,
29:13but socialist intellectuals attacked it
29:15for being too grimly pessimistic,
29:17taking the picture of the working class as broken by misery
29:21rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.
29:26None of this prevented the road to Wigan Pier
29:29from being a massive bestseller.
29:31Why? Well, Orwell took the usual political position paper
29:36and junked it.
29:38Instead, he made a real work of literature.
29:42When you follow him into the soot-choked mines
29:44and the freezing dampness of the terrace houses,
29:47you know you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression,
29:51someone who could make you hear, see and feel
29:55the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.
30:00You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.
30:07One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Moseley
30:11talk about fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.
30:17To Orwell's horror, the working-class audience
30:19who'd started out booing Moseley ended up cheering him.
30:25A fight was coming, and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin,
30:29and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain,
30:32were too gutless to join in.
30:34What was their message?
30:36Peace in our time, or please go away and do your business
30:39or do something else while we get on with hoeing the garden.
30:44This is the BBC Home Service.
30:46Hello, children, everywhere.
30:48That's one of the most familiar voices...
30:50Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.
30:54Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals
30:58doing beastly things to each other.
31:01All very regrettable, no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.
31:06But the world out there was turning very ugly.
31:10Fascism was spreading across Europe.
31:12A huge cloud was falling over the village green.
31:16It was time to make a choice.
31:18Orwell made his.
31:20In December 1936, he set off for Spain.
31:26Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified balaclava,
31:33the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling
31:36the anti-fascist recruits.
31:39All that police training in Burma had a use after all.
31:42But after four months at the front, Orwell,
31:45unmissably conspicuous at six foot two, took a bullet through the neck.
31:52He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.
31:56He'd seen at first hand how his comrades had been brutally crushed,
32:00not just by Franco, but also by the Communists.
32:04The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate Communism,
32:07especially Stalin's brand.
32:12It was because Orwell hoped for a homegrown British social revolution
32:17and because he was sick of hearing excuses for Stalin,
32:20while his coffeehouse commissars prepared to forgive him for everything
32:24just because he wasn't Hitler,
32:26that he decided to write the real history of the Bolshevik Revolution.
32:31In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,
32:36the barnyard fable.
32:43On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth
32:48in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.
32:53However, the actual details of the story
32:55did not come to me for some time,
32:57until one day I saw a little boy driving a huge cart-horse
33:01along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn.
33:06It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength,
33:11we should have no power over them.
33:26Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,
33:30but already Orwell was beginning to reinvent the art of political writing.
33:35Tending to his goats and chickens at his freezing cottage in Hertfordshire,
33:40fighting off the early signs of tuberculosis,
33:44he set about purging the language of the pompous preaching
33:47of the official left and the nauseous sentimentality
33:51of the Romantic right.
33:56As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,
33:59Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds
34:02of his ruinously expensive mansion in Kent,
34:05brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.
34:09For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party
34:13as a posturing has-been, embarrassingly devoted to lost causes
34:18like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.
34:22So, instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing,
34:26and as he wrote thousands of pages on his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough,
34:31thousands more on the history of the English-speaking peoples,
34:35keeping company with the vanished generations
34:38who'd faced invasion before,
34:40so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.
34:45First, the little Englanders,
34:47stuck in their dream world of Sunday hunts and Gymkhanas,
34:51had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not,
34:54Britain would share Europe's fate.
34:59There are those who say,
35:01let us ignore the continent of Europe.
35:04Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments
35:07to spew in its own juice,
35:10to fight out its own quarrels,
35:12Now, there would be much to be said for this plan
35:15if only we could unfasten the British islands
35:18from their rock foundations
35:20and could tow them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
35:25Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.
35:32Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers.
35:36Men like Neville Chamberlain,
35:39who seriously imagined that Hitler and the Nazis were reasonable men
35:43with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated
35:47after the last war,
35:49and who would stop at reasonable demands.
35:52The appeasers, Churchill thought,
35:54were like men who imagined you could satisfy a ravenous wolf
35:58by throwing it a sheep or two
36:00in the hope that by the time it got to you, it would be full.
36:04In 1938, Hitler, who had already annexed Austria,
36:08threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.
36:13Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister,
36:16ran to Munich and served it up.
36:20I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,
36:26and here is the paper.
36:29For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,
36:33but the deepest stain on our long history.
36:36The most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption
36:40that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
36:44Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister,
36:47ran to Munich and served it up.
36:50I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,
36:54and here is the paper.
36:56The most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption
37:00that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
37:06All is over.
37:08Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.
37:11Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
37:15We have passed an awful milestone in our history.
37:19When the whole equilibrium of Europe had been deranged,
37:24thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.
37:34When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,
37:37Hitler went ahead and occupied Prague,
37:40Chamberlain took it personally,
37:42realising that he and the country had been royally had.
37:48On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
37:54Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.
37:59This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
38:03handed the German government a final note,
38:07stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,
38:13that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
38:18a state of war would exist between us.
38:22I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received
38:28and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
38:38Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice
38:40announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.
38:46The evacuation of children began.
38:55None of this meant for a minute
38:57that Chamberlain was going to hand the reins over to Churchill.
39:00For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,
39:03Churchill was still mistrusted by the vast majority of his party.
39:08But the swing in public opinion towards him had been so great,
39:12it seemed prudent to include him in the government.
39:15And on the day war was declared,
39:17Churchill was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.
39:23But as if in a rerun of Gallipoli,
39:25Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster
39:28when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway
39:33backfired horribly.
39:39Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.
39:43Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution
39:46made it seem as though he, at least, was doing his best.
39:50Next to Neville Chamberlain, gaunt, weary,
39:53presiding over a front bench of old geezers,
39:56Churchill, though an old geezer himself,
39:59seemed like a red-hot volcano, a lava flow of plans and strategies.
40:05Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low.
40:09And on 10 May 1940, he was finally forced to resign.
40:16The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's long history.
40:21Two vital questions were at stake.
40:24Who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister
40:27and how would he deal with the Nazi war machine?
40:32Not only the survival of our national independence,
40:35but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.
40:42Two kinds of men, two kinds of England,
40:45were now in play for the leadership of the country.
40:48In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax,
40:52was the England of the counties, solid, sensible,
40:55a good egg and a cool head.
40:58And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.
41:02But in the best judgement of his life, Halifax turned the job down.
41:06In the pit of his stomach,
41:08he knew he didn't have what it took to be a war leader.
41:11Winston had seen the face of battle.
41:14Halifax had only hunted foxes.
41:20On Friday, May 10th, Churchill went to the palace
41:23and emerged as the new Prime Minister.
41:25On the same day came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.
41:32Now, of course, we all know that a finest hour was waiting in the wings.
41:37But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,
41:42when Britain came closer than at any other time in its history
41:46to being overwhelmed.
41:48Belgium and Holland were going under
41:50and France was soon about to join their fate.
41:53A quarter of a million British troops were trapped in northern France
41:57with hardly any hope of a safe exit.
42:01Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union
42:04were about to ride to our rescue.
42:06And hardly anyone who counted
42:09thought we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.
42:16Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons
42:20and made a short speech, shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.
42:28I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the government,
42:33I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
42:40We have before us an ordeal of the most vivid kind.
42:44We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
42:50You ask, what is our policy?
42:53I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air
42:57with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.
43:02To wage war against a monster of tyranny
43:05never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
43:11That is our policy.
43:13You ask, what is our aim?
43:17I can answer in one word, victory.
43:20Victory at all costs.
43:22Victory in spite of all terror.
43:25Victory, however long and hard the road may be.
43:29For without victory, there is no survival.
43:38We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation
43:41and to the great prince, girding on his rusty armour,
43:44pulling the shaky country together.
43:46But the truth was very different.
43:49The military men assumed Churchill would have to eat his words before long.
43:54The civil servants, who'd always hated his operatics,
43:57rolled their eyes at yet another theatrical performance.
44:01And the politicians, men like Halifax,
44:04believed that sooner or later
44:06Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.
44:12It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.
44:19Churchill was having none of it.
44:21In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,
44:24he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his entire life
44:29to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.
44:36The battle for Britain, then, started.
44:39Not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,
44:42but here, behind the closed doors of the cabinet war room.
44:46In combat were Halifax and Churchill,
44:49two men with very different ideas of how to save the country.
44:58In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking
45:02an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire
45:05that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.
45:09The very thought, he said, of a jackboot forcing its way
45:13into this countryside, this true fragment of undying England,
45:17was an insult and an outrage.
45:20Churchill would not have disagreed.
45:24But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York
45:27or for some unreal dream of village England.
45:31He wasn't fighting for Britain at all,
45:33understood just as a piece of geography.
45:36He was fighting for what he thought was the meaning of being British,
45:40and that meaning was an idea, a precious idea,
45:43we'd given to the world, freedom and the rule of law.
45:47Without it having to endure in existence by permission of the Führer,
45:52all we had was a mock Britain, not worthy of the name, really,
45:56let alone of our long history.
45:59It's better to die fighting than to live with the shame
46:03of being a slave state.
46:07When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on 28th May,
46:12he was greeted not with polite nods but a thunder of fists on the table.
46:17There would be no British Vichy,
46:19and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.
46:24In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up
46:27to just how close a shave this whole episode had been.
46:32And yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe
46:36that made the difference between surrender and survival.
46:40All the qualities which generally made him so impossible,
46:43his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point,
46:47his romantic belief in British history,
46:51were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.
46:59In the days ahead, Churchill learned that against all predictions,
47:03a quarter of a million British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk
47:07in 1,000 little ships,
47:09the core of the army that would return almost exactly four years later.
47:15It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later,
47:19in June 1940, which was, as one MP said,
47:23worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years.
47:30We shall go on to the end.
47:33We shall fight in France.
47:35We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
47:38We shall fight with growing confidence
47:41and growing strength in the air.
47:45We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
47:49We shall fight on the beaches.
47:51We shall fight on the landing grounds.
47:54We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
47:58We shall fight in the hills.
48:00We shall never surrender.
48:05This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell,
48:09for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,
48:12was so relieved that at last Britain had a leader who realised,
48:16as he wrote, that wars were won by fighting.
48:21Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,
48:25though one loved the empire and the other detested it,
48:28both understood that those differences were nothing
48:31compared with what separated them,
48:33both from the Nazis and the defeatists.
48:38Orwell's TB at this stage was still undiagnosed,
48:41but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application
48:44to join the army to be rejected.
48:47Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC
48:51and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.
48:56During the months of the Blitz,
48:58there were the two of them in the thick of the action,
49:01drawn like small boys to danger.
49:04Orwell, someone said, felt at home amidst the bombs,
49:07the bravery and the danger.
49:09Churchill was supposed to sleep somewhere safe,
49:12like the cabinet war rooms,
49:14but to the horror of his staff, he kept going back to Number 10.
49:18Sometimes he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.
49:28Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history
49:32for why we were fighting, but they were different visions.
49:36Churchill's was more like a Shakespearean history play,
49:40with the war leader stalking through the night camp,
49:43drinking the affection of ordinary people.
49:46George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes,
49:51air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service,
49:54and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the levellers and the chartists.
50:00The working people of Britain were not taking on the Luftwaffe
50:04in order to make the nation safe for the likes of Lord Halifax
50:08and the owners of country houses,
50:10but to create a nation that would finally help the miners of Wigan
50:14and millions like them have their share of the common decencies of life.
50:21The trouble was the way that war had to be won,
50:24not by the People's Army of Old England,
50:27but by the People's Army of the United States and the Soviet Union.
50:33Somewhere in the pit of his stomach,
50:35Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell.
50:39But if being a junior partner to America
50:42was the price to be paid for defeating fascism, so be it.
50:49Churchill was, in any case, less of a little Englander than Orwell.
50:53He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America
50:56as much as Orwell flinched at it.
50:59For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive, transatlantic thing.
51:04For Orwell, democracy American-style
51:07was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.
51:13For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear.
51:17If war had meant dying together, peace was going to mean living together,
51:21not in the slums of Britain,
51:23but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.
51:28Newspapers carried the astonishing news to an amazed public.
51:32Let's face it, whoever imagined such a result?
51:35Labour landslide.
51:37In the general election,
51:39Churchill received the thanks of the nation
51:42by being handed a tremendous drubbing.
51:44Labour took office with a huge mandate for reform.
51:49The socialist press greeted the triumph
51:52as the coming of the New Jerusalem.
51:58But instead of joining the Hallelujah Chorus,
52:01Orwell, like Churchill, was profoundly worried about a new world order,
52:06where we would be slaves in another way.
52:11From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
52:17an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
52:21Behind that line,
52:23by wall and garrison,
52:25of the ancient states of Cyprus and Eastern Europe.
52:32Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly...
52:36To clear his head of the static hum of post-war London,
52:40Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,
52:45to the very edge of the kingdom, the Hebridean island of Jura.
52:49No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.
52:54And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find,
52:57typing in bed with a machine on his knees,
53:00knowing he hadn't much longer to live,
53:03that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him and to Britain,
53:07the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.
53:11As Churchill issued his grim warnings,
53:14Orwell created a common old garden playman's Winston,
53:18Winston Smith.
53:20The year was 1948.
53:29In our world, there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,
53:32no laughter but the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy,
53:35no art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,
53:38but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
53:42If you want a picture of the future,
53:45imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
53:54When we think of 1984,
53:56most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience
54:00ruled by Big Brother, an upside-down world of doublespeak,
54:05where war is peace and lies are truth.
54:08But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical
54:13when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,
54:17a guerrilla action fought not with guns and barricades
54:21but by literally taking liberties,
54:24reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity,
54:27a walk in the country, an act of love,
54:30the singing of an old nursery rhyme.
54:34Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,
54:37prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were all absolutely normal.
54:42The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.
54:47The greatest horror of 1984
54:50is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.
54:57Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,
55:01the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom
55:04in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.
55:08It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist.
55:12On the face of it, such an impossible couple,
55:15the most unlikely of allies.
55:19George Orwell died in 1950. He was 46.
55:23The very last thing he wrote for publication
55:26was about Winston Churchill,
55:28a review of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour.
55:31Though you'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's warrior heroics,
55:36he bestows on the book the greatest compliment he could think of,
55:40that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.
55:46And it was a verdict shared by the thousands who line the streets of London
55:51when Churchill finally died in 1965.
55:58But then, when it counted, neither Churchill nor Orwell
56:02did the predictable thing, toed the party line.
56:05More important was their common belief
56:08that if Britain was to have a distinctive future
56:11in the age of super states,
56:13it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,
56:17the history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
56:23But the history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
56:27It's written not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living.
56:32It's our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are.
56:36And it tells us to let go of the past, even as we honour it,
56:40to lament what ought to be lamented,
56:43to celebrate what should be celebrated.
56:46And if, in the end, that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,
56:51well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell
56:54would have minded that very much.
56:56And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
57:01There were three ravens sat on a tree
57:06Downer, down, hey, downer, down
57:11They were as black as they might be
57:15Wither, down, down, down
57:20Then one of them said to his mate
57:25Where shall we now our breakfast stay
57:29Wither, down, dairy, dairy, down, down
57:39She lifted up his bloody head
57:44Downer, down, hey, downer, down
57:50And kissed his wounds that were so red
57:54Wither, down, down, down
57:58She knocked him over by the hand
58:03And carried him to the grave
58:08Wither, down, dairy, dairy, down, down
58:17Downer
58:27Downer
58:40She buried him before the bride
58:48But, daring, she was dead herself
58:55And even soon died
58:59God send every gentleman
59:05Such hopes, such hopes
59:10And such a loved one
59:35© transcript Emily Beynon