GUEST REVIEWER HIS DOCTOR’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF CHURCHILL

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31107, 9 July 1966, Page 4

GUEST REVIEWER HIS DOCTOR’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF CHURCHILL

This review of Lord Moran’s controversial book about Sir Winston Churchill is reprinted from “The Times.” Controversy about the book has turned largely on the ethical question of a doctor’s discussion of his patient In an article elsewhere in “The Press” Sir Winston Churchill’s son, Mr Randolph Churchill criticises the book on other grounds.

Churchill. The Struggle for Survival 1940/65. Taken from the diaries of Lord Moran. Constable. 798 pp. Index.

The first thing to be said about Lord Moran’s book is that it is too long. His subject is of absorbing and historical interest. There was much that he alone could contribute. Even so, interest palls and concentration falters. In the beginning this is because many of the events Lord Moran describes have been exhausted of any surprise or novelty by other people. At the end the story becomes mournfully repetitive.

The next point to be made is that Lord Moran can write. Keen observation is not the only gift a diarist needs. He must also be able to communicate. Lord Moran is not a natural writer; he has studied and schooled himself in the craft until his style has become worthy of its purpose. The final preliminary consideration is whether he should have written at all. About this there can be no doubt. In generations to come, in many lands, men and women will want to know what kind of a man Churchill was. What would we not give to have similarly intimate, reliable testimony about Caesar or Napoleon? How eagerly we snap up every personal revelation about Pitt.

Whether Lord Moran should have been so quick to publish is another matter. There is not much in his volume to embarrass anyone still living. It is the fact of publishing while so many concerned are; still alive, and Churchill himself barely 18 months’ dead,; that is embarrassing. In 1955. Lord Moran said to Churchill,' “I sometimes wonder how I! shall come out of this in 50 years’ time.” The answer is, much better than, in the eyes of many people, he does now. Posterity takes little account of medical etiquette. Long before that Lord Moran’s book will also have got into perspective. Lives of Churchill will abound. Other diaries of those who were connected with him will have been published. Lord Moran’s title will then have its full force. “The struggle for survival 1940-1965” will be seen as no more than it is—the testimony of Churchill’s doctor. The constant talk of pills; and pulse rates, of strokes! and trivial ailments of the! gradually descending veil of senility, will fall into place.! Churchill will seem less of a; hypochondriac. The truth is that, if any man who has a personal physician had his conversations with that physician similarly recorded he would sound much the same. But there will then have been placed alongside Lord Moran’s recollections those of other men who had dealings with Churchill of an altogether different kind, from them all will appear a picture of the man in the round. This is not to decry Lord Moran’s theme. It is a high and moving one. The world saw Churchill as indomitable —as he was—and seemingly impervious to physical affliction —as he was not. As early as December, - 1941, when Churchill was in Washington just after Pearl Harbour, he had to use great force to open a stiff window. He had a first warning. He suffered a slight heart attack. Thirteen years later, on Churchill’s eightieth

birthday, Lord Moran listed the major events of his fifteen years’ medical stewardship. In that time Churchill had had:— (i) heart attack in Washington (ii) three attacks of pneumonia (iii) two strokes, in 1949 and 1953 (iv) two operations, one of which found the abdomen full of adhesions and lasted two hours (v) senile pruritis, perhaps the most intractable of all skin troubles (vi) a form of conjunctivitis unlikely to clear up without a small operation. In addition, for 10 years Churchill had not had natural sleep apart from sedatives. What Lord Moran could not know when he made that entry on that day was that Churchill was to battle on against decay for 10 years more. Because of its theme, and because the largely unknown drama in Churchill's struggle for survival came during his second term as Prime Minister, Lord Moran's book commands much more attentive interest after 1945 than before. From 1940 to his triumphant emergence as the destroyer of Hitler and i Nazism—and he can claim more individual credit for I this than can any other man —Churchill was acting on a world stage. Only the great I things mattered. Controversies were vital and their outcome could affect the whole .future of mankind. The I antagonists, and sincere and idevoted men working closely together were bound to become antagonists as they fought for the ideas they believed essential to victory, had their Boswells or left their own justifications for Posterity. North Africa, Teheran, Poland, Yalta, Greece—these have been trawled over time and time again. Churchill himself has left his full record. There are no large fish left for Lord Moran’s particular mesh of net to bring up. From the election of 1945 onwards, it is a different story. Churchill is beginning to enter the shadows, both politically and physically. Problems abound. Speculation is largely untrammelled. Conjectures can as yet find no certainty. How could Churchill, who had been so unerring a voice of the spirit of the English people thoughout the war, have so hopelessly miscalculated the mood of the English people immediately on its close? His first election broadcast was lamentable. It was not a solitary aberration. Again and again he failed to find the right touch. Lord Moran records that the 8.8. C. had asked him to take 20 minutes only for his first election broadcast. “I insisted,” said I Churchill, “on at least half lan hour.” Lord Moran’s dairy goes on: “This is a sign of the times. While the GerI man War lasted he could wander on as long as he i liked.” It was not the 8.8. C. t but the Labour Party who were insisting that 20 minutes was as much as the nation would want any election : broadcast to last And before ‘the campaign had ended 1 Churchill had become so unsure that he was hard put to fill his allotted time.

The return to power in 1951 was both a triumph and a tragedy. In 1945 it looked as if Labour were in for a lifetime. Churchill seemed likely to go down to history as the great leader the British nation would trust only in war. Future histori-

ans will be able to judge whether it would have been better if indeed it had been so. The second entry into No. 10 Downing Street removed the pang Churchill had felt when, after leading the nation to the greatest victory in its long history, he had been so summarily flung out. The second tenure of the Prime Ministership was a sad anti-climax. But before this there had been the six years from 1945 to 1951 to get through. On January 4, 1946, Lord Moran noted. When a man Is In the seventies, he throws off the effects ot a surgical operation very slowly, very Imperfectly. He appears to recover, but things are not the same as they were, and in the end his life may be shortened. The result of the General Election last summer left a mark on Winston which I can only liken to the scar of a major operation. It is true that he came safely out of hospital and went abroad for a period of convalescence, and that now he has come back ready for work. But it is a different Winston. The supreme self-confidence of the war years has been undermined, something of the old "elan” has evaporated. The wound appears to have healed, but there is left an ugly scar.

Those who had even minor dealings with Churchill in those early postwar years were surprised how sensitive and apprehensive of affront he was. Yet they were years with moments of greatness, the Fulton speech and appreciation of the hydrogen bomb among the most notable of them. In the years 1945 to 1955 Churchill became a powerful occulting lighthouse, throwing beams of vision into what seemed a darkening future. And slowly, inexor-

ably the shadows were gathering around himself. It is for this period 1945 to 1955, from rejection to final resignation, that Lord Moran’s diaries are most valuable. It is from these 350 pages future historians will most fruitfully harvest. The second Prime Ministership, from 1951 to 1955, assumes sad and heroic proportions. Churchill muffed some things in those years others he did not deign to attend to. His colleagues began to wish him gone. Yet there was not only an aura of greatness around himself, it was on the great issues his mind concentrated. “When he is troubled about England’s survival,” Lord Moran noted, “he appears to take on another dimension.”

This is Lord Moran’s book, and the review should end with him. Churchill was a far more intolerant man than Dr. Johnson and would have never stomached a Boswell. But Lord Moran is a manysided man and his diaries reflect this. He notes Churchill’s first reading of Trollope, when over 70, his reciting of Byron and Pope, his reactions to “Jane Eyre,” and “Wuthering Heights.” Lord Moran, as his “Anatomy of Courage” showed, is as interested in the mind as in the body. Again and again he pondered the enigma of Churchill’s character. And while when Churchill retired in 1955, he noted, “It has been a great effort to keep him going,” he nowhere gets the order of precedence wrong. It had been a collaboration, but in this, as in other matters, Churchill fought his own battles.