Never Give In Read Online

We were all taken to Bergen Belsen – I was the only survivor. I was liberated by the British Army, in fact by the man you see standing beside me, who is today my husband.’ I found it a profoundly proud, yet humbling, moment.

The Orator with his editor, 10 Downing Street, 1952.

With his pugnacity and puckish sense of humour, Winston Churchill commanded the attention of the British nation and was successful in persuading his fellow countrymen that – though every other major nation of Europe had surrendered to the invading Nazi hordes – Britain could, and would, fight on alone. There may have been greater orators, in the traditional sense of an ability to stand up on a soapbox and – without a note or a microphone – command and move a crowd of 10 or 20,000. Most obviously the names of Gladstone and Lloyd George spring to mind, though even in that league Winston Churchill was in the forefront.

But where he came into his own was in his command of the House of Commons and, most of all, in his radio broadcasts on the BBC to the people of Britain and the wider world. Here technology came to his aid in the nick of time. For many centuries, ever since William Caxton invented his printing press in the year 1474, the only means of mass communication had been through newspapers which, by the early twentieth century, had fallen into the hands of a handful of media tycoons who, individually and collectively, wielded immense political power. However, in 1924 – just fifteen years before the outbreak of the Second World War – Stanley Baldwin became the first British Prime Minister ever to make a radio broadcast. At the time there were barely 125,000 radio sets in Britain. However by 1940 this number had risen to close on 10 million, almost one to every home and certainly to every pub in the land.

This technological breakthrough gave Churchill a direct link to the masses of the people, and proved invaluable. The style that he adopted, and which proved so effective, was to address them not as unseen masses, but as individuals - he envisioned his audience as a couple and their family, gathered round their coal fire in the ‘cottage-home’. In this way he succeeded in forging a personal bond at grassroots level with the ordinary man and woman in the street; and it was this that was to see him – and them – through five years of the cruellest war the world has ever known. Though, at the time, there were no facilities for the broadcasting of Parliament, the British Broadcasting Corporation would, in the case of his more important parliamentary speeches, arrange for him to redeliver them before their microphones, so that they could be heard, not only throughout Great Britain, but across Occupied Europe, as well as throughout the United States and the farthest outposts of the British Commonwealth and Empire.

In embarking on this work I have been anxious to draw together into a single manageable volume what I regard as the best and most important of my grandfather’s speeches, spanning more than sixty years of his active political life, from his first political speech in 1897 to his acceptance of United States Honorary Citizenship from President John F. Kennedy in 1963. At the outset, I had no idea of the magnitude of the task upon which I was embarking. I knew that my grandfather was prolific as a writer, with some 30 volumes of history and biography to his credit, I was also aware of his phenomenal output as an artist, with nearly 500 completed canvases – some of a remarkably high quality – at his home at Chartwell in Kent by the time of his death.

However, I had no idea of the sheer scale of the speeches he painstakingly composed, rehearsed and delivered. The great majority were brought together by my late parliamentary colleague, Robert Rhodes James, in his Winston Churchill: The Complete Speeches 1897–1963, published in 1974, an 8-volume work comprising more than 8,000 closely printed pages – 12,500 pages in any self-respecting typeface – totalling some 5 million words.

Time and again on the American lecture circuit I have been asked: ‘Who was your grandfather’s speechwriter?’ My reply is simple: ‘He was a most remarkable man, by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill.’ In an age when front-rank politicians, almost without exception, have a raft of speechwriters, my reply provokes amazement. My aunt, Mary Soames, the last survivor of my grandfather’s children, recently told me:

My father never, at any stage of his life, employed the services of a speechwriter. At various points in his career, in dealing with Departmental matters, he would be supplied by officials with various notes and statistics, especially in relation to technical or legal matters.

Furthermore, there was a gentleman called George Christ (pronounced ‘Krist’) - whom my father insisted on summoning with the words: ‘Send for Christ!’ – who was an official at Conservative Central Office, and who would supply suggestions of points he might consider including in his Addresses to the Conservative Party Annual Conference, during the years he was Party Leader.

But it was my father – and he alone – who drafted all his major speeches especially, of course, those to the House of Commons. Jane Portal (Lady Williams), who was one of his private secretaries at the time, tells of how my father, already 80 years old and in the final months of his second Premiership, delivered himself, in the space of 7 to 8 hours, of a lengthy and detailed speech on the Hydrogen Bomb.

The late Sir John Colville, one of my grandfather’s private secretaries in the wartime years, told me shortly before his death: ‘In the case of his great wartime speeches, delivered in the House of Commons or broadcast to the nation, your grandfather would invest approximately one hour of preparation for every minute of delivery.’ Thus he would devote thirty hours of dictation, rehearsal and polishing to a half-hour speech. Therein, no doubt, lies the explanation as to how they came to move the hearts of millions in the greatest war of history and why, even to this day, they have such emotive power.

My task of reducing Churchill’s phenomenal output of speeches – spanning his more than sixty years of active political life – to a single volume, thereby making many of them readily available for the first time to the general reader, has been a daunting one. I have had to be ruthless with the editing in order to reduce the corpus of his speeches to a mere 5 per cent of the whole. Some – especially the great war speeches – I reproduce in full; others have been pruned with varying degrees of severity, while a large number, for want of space, have had to be omitted entirely. My aim throughout has been to set before the reader the very best of Winston Churchill’s speeches while, at the same time, setting them in the context of the long span of his roller-coaster career, with its deep troughs and dazzling peaks.

This work leads the reader through “Winston Churchill’s early career, from his election to Parliament at the age of 26, through his defection in 1904 from the Conservative to the Liberal Party and his meteoric rise to the front ranks of politics, becoming in rapid succession Colonial Under-Secretary (1906), President of the Board of Trade (1908), Home Secretary (1910). We see him as a political firebrand, proposing the abolition of the House of Lords, and then as a social reformer, laying the early foundation stones of the Welfare State, before becoming First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–15), where it fell to him to prepare the British Navy for war.

We trace the anguish of his resignation from the Admiralty, when he was made the scapegoat for the failure of the Dardanelles landings on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula. Churchill saw this as the gateway, not only to defeating Germany’s ally, Turkey, and sustaining Britain’s ally, Russia, but as the means of attacking Germany from the rear, which he believed could shorten the war by one, or even two, years. It was probably the most brilliant strategic concept of the First World War. But for reasons largely outside his control, it failed and there was a general belief that he was finished politically. Weighed down with sorrow at being deprived of the chance to contribute his undoubted talents to directing the fortunes of war, he headed for the trenches of Flanders – that narrow stretch of land straddling the French and Belgian border, where one quarter of a million British and Commonwealth soldiers perished – to serve as a front-line soldier. If he could not have a post of power, then at least he would have a post of honour.

Reappointed to office as Minister of Munitions (1917-19) and Secretary of State for War and Air, under Lloyd George, he then became Colonial Secretary. In 1922 at the Cairo Conference he was responsible for the creation of the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq and for setting the Hashemite rulers, Abdullah and Feisal, on their respective thrones in Amman and Baghdad, as well as for delineating, for the first time, the political boundaries of Biblical Palestine.

We follow him as he re-crosses the floor of the House of Commons to rejoin the Conservative Party, and through his tenure, under Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.