0:00:05 > 0:00:10MUSIC: "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who
0:00:21 > 0:00:26Swinging London - the past sent packing -
0:00:26 > 0:00:28and good riddance, too.
0:00:36 > 0:00:39New was what counted. Britain minted fresh.
0:00:39 > 0:00:47No more bowing to tradition. The sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.
0:00:56 > 0:00:59CHOIR SINGS
0:00:59 > 0:01:02It is now 9.20.
0:01:02 > 0:01:05Ludgate Hill crowded this morning
0:01:05 > 0:01:09with thousands of people who've been pouring in since dawn
0:01:09 > 0:01:14to see the body of Winston Churchill on its way to St Paul's Cathedral,
0:01:14 > 0:01:17from which I'm talking at the moment.
0:01:18 > 0:01:23But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died,
0:01:23 > 0:01:27and, all of a sudden, London stopped swinging.
0:01:28 > 0:01:31Out from some timeless wintry fog
0:01:31 > 0:01:35shambled the hairy old beast - history -
0:01:35 > 0:01:37big with memories.
0:01:39 > 0:01:44People in the streets stood in the freezing cold
0:01:44 > 0:01:48as the coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.
0:01:49 > 0:01:55Royalty paid its respects to the Great Commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.
0:01:55 > 0:02:01The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes
0:02:01 > 0:02:05as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.
0:02:06 > 0:02:09Satire held its tongue.
0:02:11 > 0:02:15Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering,
0:02:15 > 0:02:18and started paying attention,
0:02:18 > 0:02:21caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling,
0:02:21 > 0:02:25a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.
0:02:25 > 0:02:30Something immense HAD happened - the death of a patriarch -
0:02:30 > 0:02:35the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.
0:02:35 > 0:02:41What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.
0:02:44 > 0:02:50But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.
0:02:50 > 0:02:55Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,
0:02:55 > 0:02:58a millstone round the neck of the future.
0:02:58 > 0:03:04What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the Sceptered Isle for us mods?
0:03:04 > 0:03:09No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston -
0:03:09 > 0:03:13rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap -
0:03:13 > 0:03:20Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.
0:03:24 > 0:03:31This, in 1984, is London - chief city of Airstrip One -
0:03:31 > 0:03:33a province of the state of Oceania.
0:03:35 > 0:03:41Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but not of pomp - it was the history of people,
0:03:41 > 0:03:45written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English -
0:03:45 > 0:03:48sharp and hard as granite.
0:03:50 > 0:03:56His history was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.
0:03:56 > 0:03:59It was the kind that asked hard questions.
0:03:59 > 0:04:04For all their differences, Orwell and Churchill had this in common -
0:04:04 > 0:04:09they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.
0:04:09 > 0:04:15Look at Churchill and at Orwell, and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.
0:04:15 > 0:04:20You'll see how our past shaped our future.
0:05:00 > 0:05:05MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory
0:05:10 > 0:05:15# Jolly boating weather
0:05:15 > 0:05:19# And a hay harvest breeze
0:05:21 > 0:05:26# Blade on the feather... #
0:05:26 > 0:05:30In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born,
0:05:30 > 0:05:35this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime,
0:05:35 > 0:05:40turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful
0:05:40 > 0:05:43than she's ever been before or since.
0:05:43 > 0:05:46He must've thought it would go on forever.
0:05:46 > 0:05:5390 years later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrap yard.
0:05:53 > 0:05:57But then history has a cruel way with optimism.
0:06:00 > 0:06:06There never was any chance really that Winston Churchill could escape history.
0:06:06 > 0:06:09He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim,
0:06:09 > 0:06:14the great limestone pile of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.
0:06:14 > 0:06:17Winston's father, Randolph -
0:06:17 > 0:06:22boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37,
0:06:22 > 0:06:27seemed set to be the latest Churchill to rise meteorically.
0:06:27 > 0:06:33But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.
0:06:33 > 0:06:38Finally, the Tories let him go. He never got back to power.
0:06:39 > 0:06:43His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess -
0:06:43 > 0:06:47glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious,
0:06:47 > 0:06:51perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.
0:06:53 > 0:06:56But Winston hardly knew his parents.
0:06:56 > 0:07:02As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.
0:07:02 > 0:07:09And, as with all boys of his class, he was off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.
0:07:11 > 0:07:14There he listened, quaking with fear,
0:07:14 > 0:07:19to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms birched.
0:07:22 > 0:07:28Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England
0:07:28 > 0:07:34came from doing 11 years of penal servitude in the public and private schools of England.
0:07:36 > 0:07:42Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life.
0:07:42 > 0:07:48One of them happened one day while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.
0:07:48 > 0:07:53Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy
0:07:53 > 0:07:56had the stuff of politics or the law.
0:07:56 > 0:08:01But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so,
0:08:01 > 0:08:07he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier. And that did it, really.
0:08:07 > 0:08:12Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.
0:08:12 > 0:08:15He'd take his father's broken sword,
0:08:15 > 0:08:19and make the name of Churchill glorious again.
0:08:19 > 0:08:25So Winston charged headlong into the fray - India, Africa, you name it,
0:08:25 > 0:08:29even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history,
0:08:29 > 0:08:34trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.
0:08:34 > 0:08:39And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.
0:08:41 > 0:08:47It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion -
0:08:47 > 0:08:50the muse that fired everything he did -
0:08:50 > 0:08:54his politics, his speech making, his battle cry.
0:08:54 > 0:08:58Reading it, writing it, making it were all inseparable
0:08:58 > 0:09:01in the personality that was unfolding -
0:09:01 > 0:09:05ardent, impetuous, impassioned.
0:09:06 > 0:09:11And it was in the Empire that Winston began to write.
0:09:11 > 0:09:15Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers - and what stories!G
0:09:15 > 0:09:20It helped that he was socially shameless and physically fearless.
0:09:20 > 0:09:25There he was, a fleshy five foot seven, spinning a ripping yarn.
0:09:27 > 0:09:32He knew how to make the headlines, and he knew how to milk them.
0:09:32 > 0:09:35But Winston was never just gung ho for Winston.
0:09:35 > 0:09:40He believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire.
0:09:40 > 0:09:46But he knew next to nothing about what made that Empire really tick - money.
0:09:46 > 0:09:51MUSIC: "The Road To Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling
0:09:53 > 0:09:58For while Churchill was humming the chorus of The Road To Mandalay,
0:09:58 > 0:10:03Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it -
0:10:03 > 0:10:08cashing in on tea, teak and, not least, narcotics.
0:10:08 > 0:10:12Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj.
0:10:12 > 0:10:18His job was to supervise the production of poppies and their export to Shanghai,
0:10:18 > 0:10:21ensuring, on behalf of the Empire,
0:10:21 > 0:10:26that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go understocked.
0:10:33 > 0:10:37In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son - Eric.
0:10:37 > 0:10:41Only later would he be known as George Orwell.
0:10:41 > 0:10:46A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England,
0:10:46 > 0:10:49while Richard stayed behind in Burma.
0:10:49 > 0:10:56Home was number 17 Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames - nostalgic, middle class, suburban.
0:11:02 > 0:11:09Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class and Eric Blair at the bottom,
0:11:09 > 0:11:17but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for boys destined to govern the Empire -
0:11:17 > 0:11:19exile to boarding school.
0:11:21 > 0:11:26GEORGE ORWELL: "Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's,
0:11:26 > 0:11:28"I began wetting my bed.
0:11:28 > 0:11:34"Nowadays, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.
0:11:34 > 0:11:39"It is a normal reaction in children who've been moved to a strange place.
0:11:39 > 0:11:45"In those days, however, it was seen as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose
0:11:45 > 0:11:48"and for which the proper cure was a beating.
0:11:48 > 0:11:54"Night after night, I prayed with a fervour never previously obtained in my prayers.
0:11:54 > 0:11:58" 'Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
0:11:58 > 0:12:02" 'Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.' "
0:12:03 > 0:12:08St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Counties Gulag
0:12:08 > 0:12:13that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on,
0:12:13 > 0:12:18but it WAS his apprenticeship in contempt for the rituals of Empire.
0:12:18 > 0:12:23History lessons, he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.
0:12:23 > 0:12:29"Orgies of dates, with keener boys leaping up and down in their places
0:12:29 > 0:12:33"in their eagerness to shout out the right answers,
0:12:33 > 0:12:39"and not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the events they were naming."
0:12:40 > 0:12:43The torments, the canings,
0:12:43 > 0:12:48the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,
0:12:48 > 0:12:52the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath,
0:12:52 > 0:12:57gave Eric a lifelong horror of dirt and a hatred of a fake service ethos
0:12:57 > 0:13:01for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.
0:13:05 > 0:13:11If you were rich, these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling class.
0:13:11 > 0:13:18But Eric was not rich, not part of the upper class - he got the canings without the promise of the perks.
0:13:18 > 0:13:22His weapon was an air of bloody-minded indifference,
0:13:22 > 0:13:28and when he came here to Eton, he refined that insouciance into an art form.
0:13:28 > 0:13:33If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets,
0:13:33 > 0:13:35he'd show up with his badge askew.
0:13:35 > 0:13:41If Blair was going to recite poetry, it'd be Stevenson's Suicide Club.
0:13:41 > 0:13:47Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.
0:13:50 > 0:13:54Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.
0:13:54 > 0:14:00He was drunk on words, and he wanted everyone to share the intoxication.
0:14:00 > 0:14:03Back home from the Empire in 1900,
0:14:03 > 0:14:07he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.
0:14:07 > 0:14:12Once he found out he had the gift of the gab, he let the eloquence rip,
0:14:12 > 0:14:19drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great trouper of the Edwardian stage.
0:14:20 > 0:14:27Unlike many politicians, he didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating societies.
0:14:27 > 0:14:31He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial North,
0:14:31 > 0:14:38on soap boxes, from the tops of buses, and in music halls, where he really had to earn the cheers.
0:14:39 > 0:14:45Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.
0:14:45 > 0:14:49When he defected to the Liberals in 1904,
0:14:49 > 0:14:55he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England.
0:14:55 > 0:15:03We don't usually think of him as a radical, but all sorts of reforms poured from his fertile mind -
0:15:03 > 0:15:09Labour Exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.
0:15:09 > 0:15:16But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism.
0:15:16 > 0:15:23As Home Secretary, he was too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy -
0:15:23 > 0:15:29deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.
0:15:31 > 0:15:37It made sense, then, to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence where it could do some good.
0:15:37 > 0:15:42At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.
0:15:43 > 0:15:47Three years later, the world was at war.
0:15:47 > 0:15:49Gallipoli, 1915 -
0:15:49 > 0:15:5352,000 allied troops perish in Turkey.
0:15:53 > 0:15:58A bloody fiasco, and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.
0:16:01 > 0:16:07Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.
0:16:07 > 0:16:12Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence,
0:16:12 > 0:16:17the Tories paid back his treachery by booting him out of office.
0:16:17 > 0:16:24Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli,
0:16:24 > 0:16:29Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions
0:16:29 > 0:16:34MUSIC: "The Pretty Ploughboy" by Lesley Nelson-Burns
0:16:38 > 0:16:42Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders,
0:16:42 > 0:16:45using his old army connections
0:16:45 > 0:16:50so that a politician could demote himself to a tommy.
0:16:50 > 0:16:56On the 23rd November 1915, he wrote to his wife Clemmie.
0:16:57 > 0:17:02"My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.
0:17:02 > 0:17:06"I spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.
0:17:06 > 0:17:09"Filth and rubbish everywhere.
0:17:09 > 0:17:14"Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.
0:17:14 > 0:17:17"Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.
0:17:17 > 0:17:22"In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide
0:17:22 > 0:17:27"to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns."
0:17:32 > 0:17:38Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill. He'd served his time.
0:17:38 > 0:17:44Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.
0:17:44 > 0:17:48Eric Blair was too young for the trenches,
0:17:48 > 0:17:53but while at Eton he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.
0:17:53 > 0:18:00When the war ended, he may have felt guilty, like many of his generation, guilt for missing the slaughter.
0:18:00 > 0:18:04The next step after Eton should have been Oxford,
0:18:04 > 0:18:10but, like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.
0:18:10 > 0:18:15His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.
0:18:15 > 0:18:22But even if he'd had the chance, it's likely he'd have rejected the moneyed escalator through privilege.
0:18:22 > 0:18:26Instead, it was off to the colonies.
0:18:29 > 0:18:34There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.
0:18:34 > 0:18:39He might've even shared Churchill's idealism about the do-good Empire.
0:18:39 > 0:18:42Five years in the Burmese police,
0:18:42 > 0:18:47perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,
0:18:47 > 0:18:53smartly cured him of that. Doing his job as efficiently as he could,
0:18:53 > 0:19:00rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.
0:19:00 > 0:19:05Those he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't see themselves as criminals,
0:19:05 > 0:19:08but victims of foreign conquerors.
0:19:09 > 0:19:15All over the Empire, there were men who hated it as heartily as he did,
0:19:15 > 0:19:21but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.
0:19:21 > 0:19:28One incident, more than any other, brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.
0:19:28 > 0:19:35An elephant had broken its chains and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.
0:19:35 > 0:19:38Blair picked up his rifle.
0:19:38 > 0:19:41- Shall I call the hunters? - No, rouse no-one.
0:19:41 > 0:19:44I'll try and get him myself.
0:19:46 > 0:19:52When he found the beast, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth,
0:19:52 > 0:19:58it was obvious there was no reason to kill it, except the crowd expected him to.
0:20:00 > 0:20:04"I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly,
0:20:04 > 0:20:09"and it was at this moment, as I stood with the rifle in my hands,
0:20:09 > 0:20:15"that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.
0:20:15 > 0:20:22"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,
0:20:22 > 0:20:26"seemingly the lead actor of the peace.
0:20:26 > 0:20:30"But, in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.
0:20:41 > 0:20:46"When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,
0:20:46 > 0:20:51"but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
0:20:51 > 0:20:56"In that instant, in too short a time even for the bullet to get there,
0:20:56 > 0:21:00"a mysterious, terrible change came over the elephant.
0:21:00 > 0:21:05"He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.
0:21:05 > 0:21:10"In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.
0:21:11 > 0:21:15"I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.
0:21:15 > 0:21:22"I often wondered, had any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool?"
0:21:26 > 0:21:31MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory
0:21:32 > 0:21:39In 1927, Blair went home, where a sniff of the English air
0:21:39 > 0:21:43convinced him he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.
0:21:43 > 0:21:47Home was here at Southwold -
0:21:47 > 0:21:52a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees
0:21:52 > 0:21:55that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.
0:21:55 > 0:22:02Eric's sister Avril kept a teashop, mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.
0:22:02 > 0:22:10When Eric announced to the family that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer,
0:22:10 > 0:22:13you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.
0:22:20 > 0:22:24And what was the England that Eric had come home to?
0:22:24 > 0:22:28A country he'd later describe as resembling a family,
0:22:28 > 0:22:30a rather stuffy Victorian family
0:22:30 > 0:22:36where rich relations are kowtowed to, and poor relations are horribly sat upon,
0:22:36 > 0:22:41where the young are thwarted, and power is in the hands
0:22:41 > 0:22:45of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
0:22:45 > 0:22:50A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.
0:22:50 > 0:22:57'May 1926, the General Strike. Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight...'
0:22:57 > 0:23:00One of those in control was Winston Churchill.
0:23:00 > 0:23:03After 20 years away from the Tories,
0:23:03 > 0:23:10he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike.
0:23:12 > 0:23:16Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,
0:23:16 > 0:23:22which only made Eric all the more determined to expiate the sins of empire.
0:23:22 > 0:23:28In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place, he couldn't wait to lose his.
0:23:28 > 0:23:34Most people who were restless with their lot in life wanted to rise above their station.
0:23:34 > 0:23:39Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.
0:23:43 > 0:23:48There was something almost Franciscan about his nose dive into squalor.
0:23:48 > 0:23:53It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability,
0:23:53 > 0:23:58it was the calculated embrace of all that repelled the fastidious Eric -
0:23:58 > 0:24:01muck, indescribably evil smells.
0:24:02 > 0:24:07When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit,
0:24:07 > 0:24:10he was making a point, at least to himself,
0:24:10 > 0:24:15that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.
0:24:15 > 0:24:23It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.
0:24:24 > 0:24:29For two years, Blair did a Cook's tour of destitution -
0:24:29 > 0:24:33comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.
0:24:33 > 0:24:39In the bathroom of one especially horrible doss house, or spike,
0:24:39 > 0:24:41he finally got down to basic truths.
0:24:44 > 0:24:46"It was a disgusting sight.
0:24:46 > 0:24:51"All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed,
0:24:51 > 0:24:56"the grime, the rents and patches, the string doing duty for buttons,
0:24:56 > 0:24:59"the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,
0:24:59 > 0:25:03"some of them holes held together by dirt.
0:25:03 > 0:25:06"The room became a press of steaming nudity,
0:25:06 > 0:25:13"the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly sub-faecal stench native to the spike."
0:25:17 > 0:25:21He didn't have to do it, of course. He wasn't that hard up.
0:25:21 > 0:25:26But there was nothing second-hand about Blair, or Churchill.
0:25:26 > 0:25:28Both were doers, not lookers.
0:25:28 > 0:25:36Whether in the trenches or the doss houses, they needed to live what they talked about.
0:25:36 > 0:25:43In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, Down And Out In Paris And London,
0:25:43 > 0:25:48but the name on the cover was not Blair, but pseudonym George Orwell.
0:25:48 > 0:25:52There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George,
0:25:52 > 0:25:57and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, linked him to the English landscape.
0:25:57 > 0:26:04But the landscape through which Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,
0:26:04 > 0:26:06but gutters and gasworks.
0:26:06 > 0:26:10MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake
0:26:13 > 0:26:19In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades -
0:26:19 > 0:26:25Orwell declared war on the Empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.
0:26:25 > 0:26:31Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.
0:26:31 > 0:26:35But Orwell had been there, and he knew better.
0:26:35 > 0:26:40He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.
0:26:40 > 0:26:46The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals,
0:26:46 > 0:26:49but our bedrock was coke and nutty slack.
0:26:49 > 0:26:53But then, in the '30s, that bedrock caved in.
0:26:53 > 0:26:59Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.
0:27:00 > 0:27:06This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the Empire, had finally come to -
0:27:06 > 0:27:12from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.
0:27:12 > 0:27:16Never had the country been so bitterly divided.
0:27:19 > 0:27:24In the South, they built model villages with miniature collieries,
0:27:24 > 0:27:29miniature farms and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.
0:27:29 > 0:27:32In Wales, Scotland and the North of England,
0:27:32 > 0:27:37that hill would've been a slagheap, and there wouldn't be a ploughboy,
0:27:37 > 0:27:42but desperate scramblers looking for coal waste with their bare hands.
0:27:42 > 0:27:48Orwell, who cherished the countryside with an unsentimental, almost feral, passion,
0:27:48 > 0:27:53now headed for this underworld, the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.
0:27:53 > 0:27:58When his publisher asked him to write about the industrial North,
0:27:58 > 0:28:03Orwell grabbed the chance, and set out on the Road to Wigan Pier.
0:28:03 > 0:28:07TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
0:28:08 > 0:28:13What he found was a town broken by depression,
0:28:13 > 0:28:16coated in grime which befouled everything -
0:28:16 > 0:28:23black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him, a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.
0:28:23 > 0:28:29And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory -
0:28:29 > 0:28:36get up at 3.45am, crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages, sometimes for miles.
0:28:36 > 0:28:41As far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.
0:28:41 > 0:28:46When he wasn't down the pits, Orwell was here, in Wigan public library.
0:28:46 > 0:28:49His name's in the visitors' book -
0:28:49 > 0:28:53EA Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.
0:28:53 > 0:29:00He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet - wages, rents and prices.
0:29:02 > 0:29:08The Road To Wigan Pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day from right and left.
0:29:08 > 0:29:11Conservatives thought it was Bolshevik trash,
0:29:11 > 0:29:16but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic,
0:29:16 > 0:29:24a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.
0:29:24 > 0:29:31None of this prevented The Road To Wigan Pier from being a massive best seller. Why?
0:29:31 > 0:29:36Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it.
0:29:36 > 0:29:40Instead, he made a real work of literature.
0:29:40 > 0:29:46When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses,
0:29:46 > 0:29:50you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression -
0:29:50 > 0:29:53someone who could make you hear, see and feel
0:29:53 > 0:29:58the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.
0:29:58 > 0:30:03You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.
0:30:05 > 0:30:10One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley
0:30:10 > 0:30:14laud fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.
0:30:14 > 0:30:21To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley
0:30:21 > 0:30:24ended up cheering him. A fight was coming,
0:30:24 > 0:30:31and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain,
0:30:31 > 0:30:35were too gutless to join in. What was THEIR message?
0:30:35 > 0:30:39Peace in our time, or do your business somewhere else
0:30:39 > 0:30:42while we get on with hoeing the garden(!)
0:30:42 > 0:30:48'This is the BBC Home Service. Hello, children. That's a familiar voice...'
0:30:48 > 0:30:52Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.
0:30:52 > 0:30:59Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.
0:30:59 > 0:31:05All very regrettable no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.
0:31:07 > 0:31:10But the world out there was turning very ugly.
0:31:10 > 0:31:16Fascism was spreading across Europe. A cloud fell over the village green.
0:31:16 > 0:31:20It was time to make a choice. Orwell made his.
0:31:20 > 0:31:24In December 1936, he set off for Spain.
0:31:27 > 0:31:32Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified Balaclava,
0:31:32 > 0:31:38the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.
0:31:38 > 0:31:42All that police training in Burma had a use after all.
0:31:42 > 0:31:47But after four months at the front, Orwell, conspicuous at six foot two,
0:31:47 > 0:31:50took a bullet through the neck.
0:31:51 > 0:31:55He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.
0:31:55 > 0:31:59He'd seen his comrades brutally crushed,
0:31:59 > 0:32:02not just by Franco, but also by the communists.
0:32:02 > 0:32:09The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism, especially Stalin's brand.
0:32:11 > 0:32:16It was because Orwell hoped for a home-grown British revolution,
0:32:16 > 0:32:19and because he was sick of excuses for Stalin -
0:32:19 > 0:32:25all those coffee house commissars prepared to forgive him just because he wasn't Hitler -
0:32:25 > 0:32:30that he wrote the real history of the Bolshevik revolution.
0:32:30 > 0:32:35In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,
0:32:35 > 0:32:38the barnyard fable.
0:32:42 > 0:32:47"On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth
0:32:47 > 0:32:51"in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.
0:32:51 > 0:32:57"However, the details of the story did not come to me for some time,
0:32:57 > 0:33:03"until one day I saw a boy driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path,
0:33:03 > 0:33:05"whipping it if it tried to turn.
0:33:05 > 0:33:10"It struck me that if only animals became aware of their strength,
0:33:10 > 0:33:13"we should have no power over them."
0:33:26 > 0:33:31Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,
0:33:31 > 0:33:36but already Orwell was reinventing the art of political writing.
0:33:36 > 0:33:41Tending to his goats and chickens at his cold cottage in Hertfordshire,
0:33:41 > 0:33:47fighting off the early signs of TB, he set about purging the language
0:33:47 > 0:33:50of the pompous preaching of the official left
0:33:50 > 0:33:54and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.
0:33:56 > 0:34:00As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,
0:34:00 > 0:34:05Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his mansion in Kent,
0:34:05 > 0:34:09brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.
0:34:09 > 0:34:16For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been,
0:34:16 > 0:34:22embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.
0:34:22 > 0:34:27So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing,
0:34:27 > 0:34:32and as he wrote thousands of pages on the Duke of Marlborough,
0:34:32 > 0:34:37thousands more on the History Of The English-speaking Peoples -
0:34:37 > 0:34:42keeping company with generations who'd faced invasion before -
0:34:42 > 0:34:47so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.
0:34:47 > 0:34:53First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of Sunday hunts and gymkhanas,
0:34:53 > 0:34:59had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain WOULD share Europe's fate.
0:34:59 > 0:35:06WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe.
0:35:06 > 0:35:09' "Let us leave it, with its hatred and its armaments,
0:35:09 > 0:35:15' "to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels."
0:35:15 > 0:35:18'There would be much to be said for this plan
0:35:18 > 0:35:23'if we could unfasten Britain from its rock foundation,
0:35:23 > 0:35:28'and could tow it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
0:35:28 > 0:35:33'Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.'
0:35:33 > 0:35:38Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers -
0:35:38 > 0:35:44men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that the Nazis
0:35:44 > 0:35:51were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war,
0:35:51 > 0:35:54and who would stop at reasonable demands.
0:35:54 > 0:36:02The appeasers were like men who thought you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two,
0:36:02 > 0:36:07in the hope that, by the time it got to you, it would be full.
0:36:09 > 0:36:13In 1938, Hitler, who'd already annexed Austria,
0:36:13 > 0:36:18threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.
0:36:18 > 0:36:24Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister, ran to Munich and served it up.
0:36:24 > 0:36:29I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,
0:36:29 > 0:36:32and here is the paper
0:36:32 > 0:36:37which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
0:36:37 > 0:36:40CHEERING
0:36:42 > 0:36:46For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,
0:36:46 > 0:36:50but the deepest stain on our history -
0:36:50 > 0:36:54the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption
0:36:54 > 0:36:58that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
0:36:58 > 0:37:04CHURCHILL: 'All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.
0:37:04 > 0:37:08'Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
0:37:08 > 0:37:12'We have passed an awful milestone in our history,
0:37:12 > 0:37:16'when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged,
0:37:16 > 0:37:19'and the terrible words have, for the time being,
0:37:19 > 0:37:23'been pronounced against the Western democracies,
0:37:23 > 0:37:27' "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." '
0:37:31 > 0:37:35When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,
0:37:35 > 0:37:41Hitler went and occupied Prague, Chamberlain took it personally,
0:37:41 > 0:37:45realising that he, and the country, had been royally had.
0:37:48 > 0:37:54On the 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
0:37:54 > 0:37:58Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.
0:37:58 > 0:38:02- NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN:- 'This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
0:38:02 > 0:38:06'handed the German government a final note
0:38:06 > 0:38:12'stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock
0:38:12 > 0:38:17'that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
0:38:17 > 0:38:21'a state of war would exist between us.
0:38:21 > 0:38:27'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,
0:38:27 > 0:38:33'and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'
0:38:36 > 0:38:39Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice
0:38:39 > 0:38:45announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.
0:38:45 > 0:38:48The evacuation of children began.
0:38:53 > 0:38:58None of this meant Chamberlain would hand the reins over to Churchill.
0:38:58 > 0:39:03For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,
0:39:03 > 0:39:07Churchill was still mistrusted by most of his party.
0:39:07 > 0:39:13But the swing in public opinion towards him was so great it seemed prudent to have him in government,
0:39:13 > 0:39:21and, on the day war was declared, he was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.
0:39:21 > 0:39:27But, as if in a rerun of Gallipoli, Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster
0:39:27 > 0:39:33when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway backfired horribly.
0:39:38 > 0:39:43Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.
0:39:43 > 0:39:49Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution made it seem like he at least was doing his best.
0:39:49 > 0:39:56Next to Neville Chamberlain - gaunt, weary, presiding over a front bench of old geezers -
0:39:56 > 0:39:59Churchill, though an old geezer himself,
0:39:59 > 0:40:04seemed like a red hot volcano - a lava flow of plans and strategies.
0:40:05 > 0:40:10Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low,
0:40:10 > 0:40:15and, on the 10th May 1940, he was finally forced to resign.
0:40:16 > 0:40:21The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's history.
0:40:21 > 0:40:24Two vital questions were at stake -
0:40:24 > 0:40:31who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister and how would HE deal with the Nazi war machine?
0:40:31 > 0:40:35Not only the survival of our national independence,
0:40:35 > 0:40:40but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.
0:40:40 > 0:40:46Two kinds of men, and of England, were now in play for the leadership of the country.
0:40:46 > 0:40:53In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties -
0:40:53 > 0:40:57solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.
0:40:57 > 0:41:01And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.
0:41:01 > 0:41:06But, in the best judgment of his life, Halifax turned the job down.
0:41:06 > 0:41:11In the pit of his stomach he knew he couldn't be a war leader.
0:41:11 > 0:41:16Winston had seen the face of battle, Halifax had only hunted foxes.
0:41:18 > 0:41:24On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the Palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.
0:41:24 > 0:41:30On the same day, came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.
0:41:30 > 0:41:36Now, of course, we all know that the "finest hour" was waiting in the wings.
0:41:36 > 0:41:41But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,
0:41:41 > 0:41:47when Britain came closer than at any other time in history to being overwhelmed.
0:41:47 > 0:41:52Belgium and Holland were going under and France would join them.
0:41:52 > 0:41:57250,000 British troops were trapped in Northern France
0:41:57 > 0:42:00with hardly any hope of a safe exit.
0:42:00 > 0:42:06Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue,
0:42:06 > 0:42:14and hardly anyone who counted thought that we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.
0:42:15 > 0:42:21Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech,
0:42:21 > 0:42:26shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.
0:42:27 > 0:42:32'I would say to the House, as I said to those who joined the government,
0:42:32 > 0:42:38'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
0:42:38 > 0:42:44'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
0:42:44 > 0:42:48'We have before us many months of struggle and suffering.
0:42:48 > 0:42:52'You ask, "What is our policy?"
0:42:52 > 0:42:58'I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might,
0:42:58 > 0:43:04'with all the strength that God can give us. To wage war against a monstrous tyranny
0:43:04 > 0:43:10'never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
0:43:10 > 0:43:15'That is our policy. You ask, "What is our aim?"
0:43:15 > 0:43:18'I can answer in one word, victory.
0:43:18 > 0:43:21'Victory at all costs.
0:43:21 > 0:43:28'Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be.
0:43:28 > 0:43:31'For without victory there is no survival.'
0:43:35 > 0:43:39We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation
0:43:39 > 0:43:46into the great prince girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.
0:43:46 > 0:43:48But the truth was very different.
0:43:48 > 0:43:53The military men assumed he would have to eat his words.
0:43:53 > 0:43:59The civil servants, who always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes
0:43:59 > 0:44:03at another theatrical performance. And politicians, like Halifax,
0:44:03 > 0:44:10believed that, sooner or later, Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.
0:44:11 > 0:44:16It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.
0:44:16 > 0:44:23Churchill was having none of it. In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,
0:44:23 > 0:44:27he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his life
0:44:27 > 0:44:32to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.
0:44:35 > 0:44:41The battle FOR Britain then, started not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,
0:44:41 > 0:44:45but here behind the closed doors of the Cabinet War Room.
0:44:45 > 0:44:52In combat were Halifax and Churchill, men with very different ideas of how to save the country.
0:44:56 > 0:45:03In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire
0:45:03 > 0:45:08that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.
0:45:08 > 0:45:14"The very thought," he said, "of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside -
0:45:14 > 0:45:19"this fragment of undying England - was an insult and an outrage."
0:45:19 > 0:45:21Churchill would not have disagreed.
0:45:22 > 0:45:29But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York or for some unreal dream of village England.
0:45:29 > 0:45:34He wasn't fighting for Britain at all just as a piece of geography.
0:45:34 > 0:45:39He was fighting for the meaning of being British, and that was an idea,
0:45:39 > 0:45:44a precious idea we'd given to the world - freedom and the rule of law.
0:45:44 > 0:45:52Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Fuhrer, would be a mock Britain.
0:45:52 > 0:45:56Not worthy of the name really, let alone of our long history.
0:45:56 > 0:46:03Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.
0:46:05 > 0:46:10When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on the 28th May,
0:46:10 > 0:46:15he was greeted not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.
0:46:15 > 0:46:21There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.
0:46:24 > 0:46:31In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been,
0:46:31 > 0:46:36and yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe
0:46:36 > 0:46:40that made the difference between surrender and survival.
0:46:40 > 0:46:44The qualities which made him so impossible -
0:46:44 > 0:46:50his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history -
0:46:50 > 0:46:55were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.
0:46:57 > 0:47:02In the days ahead, Churchill learned that, against all predictions,
0:47:02 > 0:47:08250,000 British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk in 1,000 little ships -
0:47:08 > 0:47:14the core of the army that'd return almost exactly four years later.
0:47:14 > 0:47:20It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later, in June 1940,
0:47:20 > 0:47:27which was, as one MP said, "Worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years."
0:47:30 > 0:47:34'We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France.
0:47:34 > 0:47:38'We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
0:47:38 > 0:47:44'We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
0:47:44 > 0:47:48'We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.
0:47:48 > 0:47:53'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.
0:47:53 > 0:47:57'We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
0:47:57 > 0:48:02'We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!'
0:48:04 > 0:48:08This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell,
0:48:08 > 0:48:12for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,
0:48:12 > 0:48:17was so relieved that Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote,
0:48:17 > 0:48:19"that wars were won by fighting."
0:48:19 > 0:48:24Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,
0:48:24 > 0:48:30though one loved the Empire and the other detested it, both understood
0:48:30 > 0:48:37that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them from the Nazis and the defeatists.
0:48:38 > 0:48:42Orwell's TB, at this stage, was still undiagnosed,
0:48:42 > 0:48:48but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.
0:48:48 > 0:48:55Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.
0:48:56 > 0:48:58During the months of the Blitz,
0:48:58 > 0:49:04there were the two of them, in the thick of the action, drawn like small boys to danger.
0:49:04 > 0:49:10"Orwell," someone said, "felt at home amidst the bombs, bravery and the danger."
0:49:10 > 0:49:15Churchill should've slept somewhere safe like the Cabinet War Rooms,
0:49:15 > 0:49:19but, to the horror of staff, he want back to Number Ten.
0:49:19 > 0:49:24Sometimes, he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.
0:49:28 > 0:49:34Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting,
0:49:34 > 0:49:37but they were different visions.
0:49:37 > 0:49:43Churchill's was Shakespearean, with the war leader stalking through the night camp,
0:49:43 > 0:49:47drinking the affection of ordinary people.
0:49:47 > 0:49:51George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes -
0:49:51 > 0:49:55air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service -
0:49:55 > 0:50:00and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the Levellers and the Chartists.
0:50:00 > 0:50:04The workers of Britain didn't take on the Luftwaffe
0:50:04 > 0:50:09to make the nation safe for Halifax and the owners of country houses,
0:50:09 > 0:50:14but to create a nation that'd help the miners of Wigan,
0:50:14 > 0:50:19and millions like them, have some of the common decencies of life.
0:50:20 > 0:50:26The trouble was the way that war had to be won - not by the people's army of old England,
0:50:26 > 0:50:31but by the people's army of the United States and the Soviet Union.
0:50:31 > 0:50:39Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell,
0:50:39 > 0:50:46but if being a junior partner to America was the price to be paid for defeating fascism, so be it.
0:50:48 > 0:50:53Churchill was, in any case, less of the Little Englander than Orwell.
0:50:53 > 0:50:58He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America as much as Orwell didn't.
0:50:58 > 0:51:03For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive transatlantic thing.
0:51:03 > 0:51:11For Orwell, democracy American-style was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.
0:51:12 > 0:51:17For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear -
0:51:17 > 0:51:21if war meant dying together, peace meant living together,
0:51:21 > 0:51:27not in the slums of Britain, but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.
0:51:27 > 0:51:34RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Newspapers carry the astonishing news to an amazed public!
0:51:34 > 0:51:36'Labour landslide!'
0:51:36 > 0:51:39In the general election,
0:51:39 > 0:51:43Churchill was thanked by the nation by being handed a terrible drubbing.
0:51:43 > 0:51:47Labour took office with a mandate for reform.
0:51:47 > 0:51:51The socialist press greeted the triumph
0:51:51 > 0:51:54as the coming of the New Jerusalem.
0:51:56 > 0:52:00But instead of joining the hallelujah chorus,
0:52:00 > 0:52:06Orwell, like Churchill, was worried about a new world order
0:52:06 > 0:52:09where we would be slaves in another way.
0:52:09 > 0:52:15CHURCHILL: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
0:52:15 > 0:52:20'an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
0:52:20 > 0:52:24'Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient...'
0:52:24 > 0:52:30- VOICE ON RADIO: - 'Baileys, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.
0:52:30 > 0:52:35'Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly, gradually becoming...'
0:52:35 > 0:52:39To clear his head of the static hum of postwar London,
0:52:39 > 0:52:44Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,
0:52:44 > 0:52:49to the very edge of the kingdom - the Hebridean island of Jura.
0:52:49 > 0:52:53No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.
0:52:53 > 0:52:59And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find, typing in bed with the machine on his knees,
0:52:59 > 0:53:07knowing he hadn't long to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain -
0:53:07 > 0:53:11the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.
0:53:11 > 0:53:14As Churchill issued his grim warnings,
0:53:14 > 0:53:20Orwell created a common or garden plain man's Winston - Winston Smith.
0:53:20 > 0:53:23The year was 1948.
0:53:28 > 0:53:32In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,
0:53:32 > 0:53:35no laughter but that of triumph.
0:53:35 > 0:53:39No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,
0:53:39 > 0:53:43but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
0:53:43 > 0:53:46If you want a picture of the future,
0:53:46 > 0:53:51imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
0:53:53 > 0:53:56When we think of 1984,
0:53:56 > 0:54:02most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother,
0:54:02 > 0:54:07a world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth.
0:54:07 > 0:54:12But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical
0:54:12 > 0:54:17when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,
0:54:17 > 0:54:23a guerrilla action fought, not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties,
0:54:23 > 0:54:27reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity -
0:54:27 > 0:54:33a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.
0:54:33 > 0:54:37Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,
0:54:37 > 0:54:41prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were absolutely normal.
0:54:41 > 0:54:46The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.
0:54:46 > 0:54:53The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.
0:54:55 > 0:55:00Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,
0:55:00 > 0:55:08the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.
0:55:08 > 0:55:14It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist, on the face of it, such an impossible couple -
0:55:14 > 0:55:16the most unlikely of allies.
0:55:18 > 0:55:22George Orwell died in 1950. He was 46.
0:55:22 > 0:55:27The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Churchill -
0:55:27 > 0:55:30a review of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour.
0:55:30 > 0:55:35You'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's heroics,
0:55:35 > 0:55:39but he bestows the greatest compliment he could -
0:55:39 > 0:55:45that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.
0:55:45 > 0:55:50And it was a verdict shared by those who lined the streets of London
0:55:50 > 0:55:54when Churchill finally died in 1965.
0:55:56 > 0:55:59But then, when it counted,
0:55:59 > 0:56:05neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing - toed the party line.
0:56:05 > 0:56:11More important was their belief that if Britain was to be distinctive in the age of super-states,
0:56:11 > 0:56:16it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,
0:56:16 > 0:56:21that which tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
0:56:22 > 0:56:27But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
0:56:27 > 0:56:32It's written, not to revere the dead, but inspire the living.
0:56:32 > 0:56:36It's our cultural bloodstream - the secret of who we are.
0:56:36 > 0:56:42And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented,
0:56:42 > 0:56:46to celebrate what should be celebrated.
0:56:46 > 0:56:51And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,
0:56:51 > 0:56:57well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much.
0:56:57 > 0:57:00And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
0:57:00 > 0:57:05# There were three ravens sat on a tree
0:57:05 > 0:57:09# Down a-down, hey down, a-down
0:57:11 > 0:57:15# They were as black as they might be
0:57:15 > 0:57:19# With a down, down, down
0:57:19 > 0:57:24# Then one of them said to his mate
0:57:24 > 0:57:28# "Where shall we now our breakfast take?"
0:57:28 > 0:57:35# With a down, derry, derry down, down
0:57:37 > 0:57:42# She lifted up his bloody head
0:57:42 > 0:57:48# Down a-down, hey down, a-down
0:57:49 > 0:57:53# And kissed his wounds that were so red
0:57:53 > 0:57:57# With a down, down, down
0:57:57 > 0:58:01# She got him up upon her back
0:58:01 > 0:58:07# And carried him to earthen lake
0:58:07 > 0:58:12# With a down, derry, derry down, down
0:58:41 > 0:58:47# She buried him before the prime
0:58:48 > 0:58:51# Ah, derry
0:58:51 > 0:58:57# She was dead herself ere evensong time
0:58:59 > 0:59:04# God, send every gentleman
0:59:04 > 0:59:08# Such hawks, such hounds
0:59:08 > 0:59:13# And such a land. #
0:59:16 > 0:59:20Subtitles by Raymond Morrison BBC Broadcast 2002
0:59:20 > 0:59:23E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk