Third World War starts. Kneejerk journalism: “Get local angle,” barks editor of the Dunkin Tri-Week Trumpeter. Reporter genuflects. Result, banner headline: “Put Aside Council Quarrels, Unite, Dunkin Mayor Urges.” So, not one to lightly break tradition, here’s the local angle on the greatest Englishman (by poll) and saviour of Western civilization: he visited Vancouver twice, caught a salmon in our harbour in 1900, imperialistically declared in 1929 that “British Columbia is a wonderful possession,” and was an unlikely green: “They cut the great trees, 200 or 300 feet high … The devastation of these beautiful trees was sad to see.”
Canada was an exceptional lure for future British prime minister Winston Churchill – for it was he.
Historian David Dilks notes Churchill never went to Australia, New Zealand or other British-linked lands, not to South Africa after 1900 or India after 1899 – but nine times to Canada, most grimly to the 1943 Quebec Conference. Mike Pearson (Lester B. to stuffy historians) wrote U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson concerning Churchill’s 1952 Ottawa visit: “The Old Gentleman was in good form here, but takes, as you no doubt found out, some time and some champagne to reach that form.”
Champagne commonly was his mid-morning tipple.
Hold on. This is a business newspaper, right? So, getting on with business: Churchill had an alarmingly dodgy side, “sinuously” escaped paying taxes he’d instituted himself as chancellor of the exchequer, and flatly diddled some publishers out of their copyright holdings – possibly elevating him to Saint Getting One Back for Our Side among authors, apparently a sizable throng, who despise their publishers.
Churchill was a sort of one-man Ponzi scheme in which he was both con man and victim. His habit was “mortgaging the future to provide cash flow in the present” for his colossal extravagance, historian Peter Clarke writes in “Mr. Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer” (coming soon, one hopes, to a library near you, reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Times Literary Supplement last month).
Churchill’s “regrettable” son Randolph – who came to Exhibition (now Hastings) Park in 1954 to inaugurate the Winston Churchill Stakes – jested that he had been born of “poor but honest parents.” The “poor” was ridiculous, but “even ‘honest’ is debatable,” Wheatcroft declares.
Overshadowed by his “very well, alone” triumph over Nazism, “The thing you have to remember is that he was a journalist,” Churchill’s last surviving child, Lady Soames, remarked. And high-priced. Age 24, he covered the Boer War for London’s Morning Post for 250 pounds a month, today equivalent to 10,000 pounds, $15,000-plus.
The narrative is not pretty. The productive Churchill got 333 pounds for pieces done by an underling whom he paid 25 pounds. He exploited gratitude. He played off publishers “with evasions and prevarications that came close to sharp practice or even deception.”
One publisher, Harrap, had an option on his future work; Churchill sold off film rights to which he had no entitlement. Anyone else – legal action, for sure. But Harrap surrendered: “It is distasteful to us, whether we are in the right or not, to litigate the matter with a man to whom every one of us is so much indebted.”
I well recall, as a boy, the astonishment in Canada when voters quickly dumped Churchill in July 1945 (before the Pacific War ended, 67 years ago this week). Inexplicable? Behind the mythology of Britons’ valiant wartime unity, the working class despised Tory privilege, another recent book claims.
The acerbic Wheatcroft, author of a tome slamming Labourite Tony Blair, concedes that Churchill was a “lovable rogue.” This account disturbingly emphasizes the noun. •
