Stephen Bayley: What the British Can Still Learn from Churchill

Stephen Bayley, in the London Independent (5-15-05):

With the shortcomings " moral, oratorical, practical, symbolic " of our present crop of national leaders very much in mind, it is interesting to reflect on that famous photograph of our most revered warrior chieftain. He stands pin-striped and pugnacious, bow-tied beneath a dark Homburg. I dare say he has enjoyed a glass or two of his favourite Pol Roger champagne (and it was his habit to start the day with a whisky and soda in bed: 'I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me,' he once said). Clamped in his jaw is one of the eight to 10 Romeo y Julieta cigars he smoked every day (a habit he picked up on furlough in Cuba in 1895, later maintaining a store of 3,000 or so at his house in Kent). Additionally, a nice touch, this, he is holding a Thompson M1928 sub-machinegun.

I find myself in the subterranean gloom of the new Churchill Museum, an addition to the Cabinet War Rooms (a colony of the Imperial War Museum) far below The Foreign Office. This is the first time an English museum has been devoted to a politician. A week after the anniversary of VE Day, a week after the General Election with its deadly toxic fall-out of spent personalities, it is an instructive " even moving " place for the student of memorials and symbolism. The English have a squeamishness about shrines and memorials, happily addressed by the fine, strict modernist museum by Dinah Casson and Roger Mann: all rusted steel, sans serif, crisp edges and polished concrete. Churchill has been given the special treatment he deserves, but there is something uneasy about the project. Conventional shrines seem to us superstitious, even cloyingly sentimental. You think of Giuseppe Sacconi's saccharine Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome, an appalling architectural atrocity, quite inaccessible to English taste....

... Churchill's rhetoric is, of course, the magnificent soundtrack of 1940 to 1945 but, to provide a contemporary version of appeasement, we must concede that some of the rhetoric was delusory. German historians do not, for instance, recognise such a thing as the Battle of Britain, at least not as a precise episode with a beginning and an end. Richard Overy, Professor of Modern History at King's College, London, has said that 'The RAF did not repel invasion for the apparently simple reason that the Germans were never coming'. Early in 1940 the RAF had about the same number of fighter aircraft as the Luftwaffe. Late in 1940 it had more. That stuff about the 'few' was what Peter Mandelson later called a 'presentational device'. The Battle of Britain with its start and finish dates was established not in the skies of Kent, but by an Air Ministry pamphlet published in March, 1941.

Still, Churchill provided the romance and the myth, the legendary dimension, necessary for motivation. And the English enjoy the Second World War so much because, to use " as we inevitably do " a phrase of Churchill's, it was our finest hour, while it was Germany's direst. A sense of common purpose, gloriously and poetically realised, briefly united a country normally fragmented by ruinous social and cultural divisions. The Germans, meanwhile, needed to escape their shame. While they were awfully good at Blitzkrieg, they proved to be even better at Wirtschaftswunder. Germany's finest hour was the Fifties and Sixties when its industrial ingenuity triumphed after its military ambitions failed. The wonderful democratic BMW Neue Klasse saloon cars of 1961 are a finer memorial to Germany than the BMW801TS engine that powered the deadly Focke-Wulf 190F. In contrast, a De Havilland Mosquito makes us feel prouder than an Austin Allegro.

But there is more to Churchill than the Second World War. His gastronomy and good manners, his lack of snobbery, his wit, an eloquence inspired by Gibbon, the love of craft and his belief that painting makes you happy. A memorial to this politician makes clear what we have lost. If we are going to have memorials to politicians, let them be to figures of Churchill's stature. Even a Dinah Casson and Roger Mann installation could not dignify John Prescott. So, no Prescott Shrine. But it might be an idea to have him stuffed.