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"THE GOVERNMENT
 IS THE SERVANT
 OF THE PEOPLE
 AND NOT ITS MASTER"

Winston Churchill
Oslo 1948

Assaults on the Memory of Winston Churchill

By Andrew Roberts

Volume 14 Issue 1 Spring 2002

Historian Andrew Roberts spoke at the Eighteenth Annual Churchill Society Dinner.  The following is an excerpt from his speech “Assaults On the Memory of Sir Winston Churchill.” 

 “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”             - Winston Churchill

In a sense, of course, all history is a revision. It is a revision of what has been written before. In the 1950’s if anything the writing about Winston Churchill was over hagiographical and yet, what we’ve seen in the 1990’s is an over-reaction to that, to the point where books have been over-critical, vicious in many ways, too harsh to the memory of this great man. 

I want to talk to you about the state of the debate on Winston Churchill.  It seems to me there has been no effect at all on the settled view that has been understood by the English-speaking people, on the legacy of Winston Churchill.  The fact is they have been convinced of the greatness and the glory of this man.  No amount of revisionist work has been able to dent his position.

More and more people are going to Chartwell every year.  An American warship, the first to be named after someone who was not born as an American, has been named after him this year.  There is a 140-foot statue that is being built in his honour near the white cliffs of Dover.  His slippers went for auction and fetched a price, in Canadian dollars, of $20,000. 

Next year, possibly the year after, it depends on the builders, they are going to be breaking through in the cabinet war rooms an extra six rooms that have never been seen before by anybody. It was bricked up in 1945 and is now going to be opened in a few years time, which will be an expensive business. Mary Soames is the chairman of the fund that is going to raise money for this project.

At the end of the Century, Winston Churchill came second to Shakespeare as Man of the Millennium, a defeat that he would have taken better than the defeat in the 1945 general election. Nevertheless, he was considered, after Shakespeare, the greatest Englishman of the Millennium. That in itself says a lot about where he is standing in the level of appreciation of the British people.

He is still nevertheless very much an active political figure. It would be impossible to debate the concept of Europe and Britain’s proper place in the European Community, or improper place in my view, without going back to Winston Churchill, his views, to the remarks he made and the various stances he took.

The BBC described Winston Churchill as a warmonger, and as you can imagine, that brought an avalanche of protest from ordinary Britons who were disgusted by this slur on the great man’s name. 

Finally, we have seen since the end of September, that when politicians are attempting to grasp for the words to denounce the abomination that we saw that day, whose words do they go back to again and again?  You look at the speeches of President Bush or Mayor Giuliani and they again and again go to Winston Churchill.  They speak of “not flagging or not failing” they return to the great vocabulary that this man gave us for defiance in the face of overwhelming evil.  

However much the revisionists make their points they have not managed to even scratch the surface of this great man’s reputation.  Churchill revisionism is redundant.  He is like Napoleon, like Lincoln, like de Gaulle.  He is a man who is so well “bunked” that no amount of revision is going to make that much difference. The grievous inquest of history has sat and found him not guilty.  ¨