Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

C H U R C H I L L P R O C E E D I N G S
GREAT MAN THEORY...
in 1931 when he wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life.”
In doing so I believe we will find that Churchill viewed
the future of Britain with the confidence that all would
come right.
Speaking before the United States Congress on the
day after Christmas 1941, Churchill famously remarked,
“I am a child of the House of Commons.” Indeed he
was—not just a product of the British Parliament, but a
historian and lifelong student of that institution. “I was
brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy,”
he told the Congress. “‘Trust the people’—that
was his message.” 4
As a young army officer in India, Churchill passed
the time reading verbatim records of Parliamentary
debates. He committed to memory long extracts of
speeches made by the great political figures of the
Victorian era, including his father, and eventually produced
a lengthy and admirable biography of Lord
Randolph Churchill.
Later, between the world wars, as part of his effort
to make a living by his pen, Churchill generated a
number of sketches of leading political figures whom he
had observed or personally known. Written during the
same era as the essays that appear in Thoughts and
Adventures, many of these were collected in Great
Contemporaries, soon to be out in a new edition.
At the same time Churchill wrote and published
The World Crisis, a multi-volume memoir of the First
World War and its aftermath. He then turned to a vast
biography of his ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of
Marlborough. This involved a detailed study of British
politics during the era immediately preceding the development
of the office of prime minister. Finally, in the
years just before the outbreak of the Second World War,
Churchill wrote most of what would be published after
the war as A History of the English Speaking Peoples, an
account that terminates at the point Churchill’s own
political career began.
Congress, 26 December 1941: “I may confess, however, that I
do not feel quite like a fish out of water in a legislative
assembly where English is spoken.” (Cover, Finest Hour 112.)
Thus, well before Churchill himself assumed a position
in the eyes of most of the world as one of
history’s Great Men, he had given much study to
the role of leading figures in the development of parliamentary
democracy up to and including his own time.
Tracing through these writings, we find the foundation
upon which Churchill stood as he contemplated the
future in Thoughts and Adventures.
Politics during the life of the First Duke of
Marlborough was a dodgy occupation. Failure could still
result in imprisonment or permanent exile abroad. The
Duke’s patron, Queen Anne, still presided over the
Cabinet in person, and exercised the Royal Veto.
Necessarily the situation changed under her successor,
the non-English-speaking George I, but even Sir Robert
Walpole had spent time in the Tower of London before
virtually creating the position of prime minister during
the reign of George II.
Churchill describes Walpole as “the first Great
House of Commons man in British history”—high
praise indeed and not to be skimmed over lightly. 5 To
achieve such recognition himself, and to do so as prime
minister, was Churchill’s lifelong ambition. It is from
this point, then, that one should start to study Winston
Churchill’s examination of how leading personalities
could shape events through the mechanism of
Parliament—even as that mechanism underwent dramatic
systemic change.
Churchill ranked William Pitt the Elder “with
Marlborough as the greatest Englishman in the century
between 1689 and 1789.” 6 Today, reading Churchill’s
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