The Two Winstons A History of Britain by Simon Schama


The Two Winstons

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MUSIC: "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who

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Swinging London - the past sent packing -

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and good riddance, too.

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New was what counted. Britain minted fresh.

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No more bowing to tradition. The sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.

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CHOIR SINGS

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It is now 9.20.

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Ludgate Hill crowded this morning

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with thousands of people who've been pouring in since dawn

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to see the body of Winston Churchill on its way to St Paul's Cathedral,

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from which I'm talking at the moment.

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But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died,

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and, all of a sudden, London stopped swinging.

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Out from some timeless wintry fog

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shambled the hairy old beast - history -

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big with memories.

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People in the streets stood in the freezing cold

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as the coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.

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Royalty paid its respects to the Great Commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.

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The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes

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as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.

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Satire held its tongue.

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Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering,

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and started paying attention,

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caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling,

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a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.

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Something immense HAD happened - the death of a patriarch -

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the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.

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What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.

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But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.

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Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,

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a millstone round the neck of the future.

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What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the Sceptered Isle for us mods?

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No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston -

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rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap -

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Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.

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This, in 1984, is London - chief city of Airstrip One -

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a province of the state of Oceania.

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Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but not of pomp - it was the history of people,

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written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English -

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sharp and hard as granite.

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His history was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.

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It was the kind that asked hard questions.

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For all their differences, Orwell and Churchill had this in common -

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they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.

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Look at Churchill and at Orwell, and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.

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You'll see how our past shaped our future.

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MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory

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# Jolly boating weather

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# And a hay harvest breeze

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# Blade on the feather... #

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In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born,

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this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime,

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turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful

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than she's ever been before or since.

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He must've thought it would go on forever.

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90 years later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrap yard.

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But then history has a cruel way with optimism.

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There never was any chance really that Winston Churchill could escape history.

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He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim,

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the great limestone pile of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.

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Winston's father, Randolph -

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boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37,

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seemed set to be the latest Churchill to rise meteorically.

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But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.

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Finally, the Tories let him go. He never got back to power.

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His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess -

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glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious,

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perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.

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But Winston hardly knew his parents.

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As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.

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And, as with all boys of his class, he was off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.

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There he listened, quaking with fear,

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to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms birched.

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Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England

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came from doing 11 years of penal servitude in the public and private schools of England.

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Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life.

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One of them happened one day while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.

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Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy

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had the stuff of politics or the law.

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But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so,

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he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier. And that did it, really.

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Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.

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He'd take his father's broken sword,

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and make the name of Churchill glorious again.

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So Winston charged headlong into the fray - India, Africa, you name it,

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even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history,

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trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.

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And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.

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It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion -

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the muse that fired everything he did -

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his politics, his speech making, his battle cry.

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Reading it, writing it, making it were all inseparable

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in the personality that was unfolding -

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ardent, impetuous, impassioned.

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And it was in the Empire that Winston began to write.

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Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers - and what stories!G

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It helped that he was socially shameless and physically fearless.

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There he was, a fleshy five foot seven, spinning a ripping yarn.

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He knew how to make the headlines, and he knew how to milk them.

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But Winston was never just gung ho for Winston.

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He believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire.

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But he knew next to nothing about what made that Empire really tick - money.

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MUSIC: "The Road To Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

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For while Churchill was humming the chorus of The Road To Mandalay,

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Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it -

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cashing in on tea, teak and, not least, narcotics.

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Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj.

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His job was to supervise the production of poppies and their export to Shanghai,

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ensuring, on behalf of the Empire,

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that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go understocked.

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In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son - Eric.

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Only later would he be known as George Orwell.

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A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England,

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while Richard stayed behind in Burma.

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Home was number 17 Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames - nostalgic, middle class, suburban.

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Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class and Eric Blair at the bottom,

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but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for boys destined to govern the Empire -

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exile to boarding school.

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GEORGE ORWELL: "Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's,

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"I began wetting my bed.

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"Nowadays, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.

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"It is a normal reaction in children who've been moved to a strange place.

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"In those days, however, it was seen as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose

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"and for which the proper cure was a beating.

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"Night after night, I prayed with a fervour never previously obtained in my prayers.

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" 'Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.

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" 'Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.' "

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St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Counties Gulag

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that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on,

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but it WAS his apprenticeship in contempt for the rituals of Empire.

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History lessons, he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.

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"Orgies of dates, with keener boys leaping up and down in their places

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"in their eagerness to shout out the right answers,

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"and not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the events they were naming."

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The torments, the canings,

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the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,

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the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath,

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gave Eric a lifelong horror of dirt and a hatred of a fake service ethos

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for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.

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If you were rich, these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling class.

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But Eric was not rich, not part of the upper class - he got the canings without the promise of the perks.

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His weapon was an air of bloody-minded indifference,

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and when he came here to Eton, he refined that insouciance into an art form.

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If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets,

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he'd show up with his badge askew.

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If Blair was going to recite poetry, it'd be Stevenson's Suicide Club.

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Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.

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Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.

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He was drunk on words, and he wanted everyone to share the intoxication.

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Back home from the Empire in 1900,

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he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.

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Once he found out he had the gift of the gab, he let the eloquence rip,

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drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great trouper of the Edwardian stage.

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Unlike many politicians, he didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating societies.

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He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial North,

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on soap boxes, from the tops of buses, and in music halls, where he really had to earn the cheers.

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Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.

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When he defected to the Liberals in 1904,

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he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England.

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We don't usually think of him as a radical, but all sorts of reforms poured from his fertile mind -

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Labour Exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.

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But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism.

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As Home Secretary, he was too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy -

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deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.

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It made sense, then, to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence where it could do some good.

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At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.

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Three years later, the world was at war.

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Gallipoli, 1915 -

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52,000 allied troops perish in Turkey.

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A bloody fiasco, and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.

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Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.

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Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence,

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the Tories paid back his treachery by booting him out of office.

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Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli,

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Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions

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MUSIC: "The Pretty Ploughboy" by Lesley Nelson-Burns

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Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders,

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using his old army connections

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so that a politician could demote himself to a tommy.

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On the 23rd November 1915, he wrote to his wife Clemmie.

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"My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.

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"I spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.

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"Filth and rubbish everywhere.

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"Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.

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"Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.

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"In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide

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"to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns."

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Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill. He'd served his time.

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Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.

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Eric Blair was too young for the trenches,

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but while at Eton he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.

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When the war ended, he may have felt guilty, like many of his generation, guilt for missing the slaughter.

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The next step after Eton should have been Oxford,

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but, like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.

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His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.

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But even if he'd had the chance, it's likely he'd have rejected the moneyed escalator through privilege.

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Instead, it was off to the colonies.

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There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.

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He might've even shared Churchill's idealism about the do-good Empire.

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Five years in the Burmese police,

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perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,

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smartly cured him of that. Doing his job as efficiently as he could,

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rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.

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Those he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't see themselves as criminals,

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but victims of foreign conquerors.

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All over the Empire, there were men who hated it as heartily as he did,

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but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.

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One incident, more than any other, brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.

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An elephant had broken its chains and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.

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Blair picked up his rifle.

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-Shall I call the hunters?

-No, rouse no-one.

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I'll try and get him myself.

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When he found the beast, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth,

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it was obvious there was no reason to kill it, except the crowd expected him to.

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"I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly,

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"and it was at this moment, as I stood with the rifle in my hands,

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"that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.

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"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,

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"seemingly the lead actor of the peace.

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"But, in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.

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"When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,

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"but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.

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"In that instant, in too short a time even for the bullet to get there,

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"a mysterious, terrible change came over the elephant.

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"He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.

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"In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.

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"I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.

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"I often wondered, had any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool?"

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MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory

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In 1927, Blair went home, where a sniff of the English air

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convinced him he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.

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Home was here at Southwold -

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a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees

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that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.

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Eric's sister Avril kept a teashop, mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.

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When Eric announced to the family that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer,

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you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.

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And what was the England that Eric had come home to?

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A country he'd later describe as resembling a family,

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a rather stuffy Victorian family

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where rich relations are kowtowed to, and poor relations are horribly sat upon,

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where the young are thwarted, and power is in the hands

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of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

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A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.

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'May 1926, the General Strike. Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight...'

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One of those in control was Winston Churchill.

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After 20 years away from the Tories,

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he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike.

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Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,

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which only made Eric all the more determined to expiate the sins of empire.

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In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place, he couldn't wait to lose his.

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Most people who were restless with their lot in life wanted to rise above their station.

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Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.

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There was something almost Franciscan about his nose dive into squalor.

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It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability,

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it was the calculated embrace of all that repelled the fastidious Eric -

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muck, indescribably evil smells.

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When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit,

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he was making a point, at least to himself,

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that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.

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It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.

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For two years, Blair did a Cook's tour of destitution -

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comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.

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In the bathroom of one especially horrible doss house, or spike,

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he finally got down to basic truths.

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"It was a disgusting sight.

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"All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed,

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"the grime, the rents and patches, the string doing duty for buttons,

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"the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,

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"some of them holes held together by dirt.

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"The room became a press of steaming nudity,

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"the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly sub-faecal stench native to the spike."

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He didn't have to do it, of course. He wasn't that hard up.

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But there was nothing second-hand about Blair, or Churchill.

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Both were doers, not lookers.

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Whether in the trenches or the doss houses, they needed to live what they talked about.

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In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, Down And Out In Paris And London,

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but the name on the cover was not Blair, but pseudonym George Orwell.

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There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George,

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and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, linked him to the English landscape.

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But the landscape through which Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,

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but gutters and gasworks.

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MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake

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In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades -

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Orwell declared war on the Empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.

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Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.

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But Orwell had been there, and he knew better.

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He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.

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The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals,

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but our bedrock was coke and nutty slack.

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But then, in the '30s, that bedrock caved in.

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Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.

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This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the Empire, had finally come to -

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from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.

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Never had the country been so bitterly divided.

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In the South, they built model villages with miniature collieries,

0:27:190:27:24

miniature farms and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.

0:27:240:27:29

In Wales, Scotland and the North of England,

0:27:290:27:32

that hill would've been a slagheap, and there wouldn't be a ploughboy,

0:27:320:27:37

but desperate scramblers looking for coal waste with their bare hands.

0:27:370:27:42

Orwell, who cherished the countryside with an unsentimental, almost feral, passion,

0:27:420:27:48

now headed for this underworld, the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.

0:27:480:27:53

When his publisher asked him to write about the industrial North,

0:27:530:27:58

Orwell grabbed the chance, and set out on the Road to Wigan Pier.

0:27:580:28:03

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

0:28:030:28:07

What he found was a town broken by depression,

0:28:080:28:13

coated in grime which befouled everything -

0:28:130:28:16

black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him, a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.

0:28:160:28:23

And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory -

0:28:230:28:29

get up at 3.45am, crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages, sometimes for miles.

0:28:290:28:36

As far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.

0:28:360:28:41

When he wasn't down the pits, Orwell was here, in Wigan public library.

0:28:410:28:46

His name's in the visitors' book -

0:28:460:28:49

EA Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.

0:28:490:28:53

He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet - wages, rents and prices.

0:28:530:29:00

The Road To Wigan Pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day from right and left.

0:29:020:29:08

Conservatives thought it was Bolshevik trash,

0:29:080:29:11

but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic,

0:29:110:29:16

a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.

0:29:160:29:24

None of this prevented The Road To Wigan Pier from being a massive best seller. Why?

0:29:240:29:31

Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it.

0:29:310:29:36

Instead, he made a real work of literature.

0:29:360:29:40

When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses,

0:29:400:29:46

you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression -

0:29:460:29:50

someone who could make you hear, see and feel

0:29:500:29:53

the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.

0:29:530:29:58

You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.

0:29:580:30:03

One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley

0:30:050:30:10

laud fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.

0:30:100:30:14

To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley

0:30:140:30:21

ended up cheering him. A fight was coming,

0:30:210:30:24

and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain,

0:30:240:30:31

were too gutless to join in. What was THEIR message?

0:30:310:30:35

Peace in our time, or do your business somewhere else

0:30:350:30:39

while we get on with hoeing the garden(!)

0:30:390:30:42

'This is the BBC Home Service. Hello, children. That's a familiar voice...'

0:30:420:30:48

Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.

0:30:480:30:52

Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.

0:30:520:30:59

All very regrettable no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.

0:30:590:31:05

But the world out there was turning very ugly.

0:31:070:31:10

Fascism was spreading across Europe. A cloud fell over the village green.

0:31:100:31:16

It was time to make a choice. Orwell made his.

0:31:160:31:20

In December 1936, he set off for Spain.

0:31:200:31:24

Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified Balaclava,

0:31:270:31:32

the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.

0:31:320:31:38

All that police training in Burma had a use after all.

0:31:380:31:42

But after four months at the front, Orwell, conspicuous at six foot two,

0:31:420:31:47

took a bullet through the neck.

0:31:470:31:50

He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.

0:31:510:31:55

He'd seen his comrades brutally crushed,

0:31:550:31:59

not just by Franco, but also by the communists.

0:31:590:32:02

The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism, especially Stalin's brand.

0:32:020:32:09

It was because Orwell hoped for a home-grown British revolution,

0:32:110:32:16

and because he was sick of excuses for Stalin -

0:32:160:32:19

all those coffee house commissars prepared to forgive him just because he wasn't Hitler -

0:32:190:32:25

that he wrote the real history of the Bolshevik revolution.

0:32:250:32:30

In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,

0:32:300:32:35

the barnyard fable.

0:32:350:32:38

"On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth

0:32:420:32:47

"in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.

0:32:470:32:51

"However, the details of the story did not come to me for some time,

0:32:510:32:57

"until one day I saw a boy driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path,

0:32:570:33:03

"whipping it if it tried to turn.

0:33:030:33:05

"It struck me that if only animals became aware of their strength,

0:33:050:33:10

"we should have no power over them."

0:33:100:33:13

Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,

0:33:260:33:31

but already Orwell was reinventing the art of political writing.

0:33:310:33:36

Tending to his goats and chickens at his cold cottage in Hertfordshire,

0:33:360:33:41

fighting off the early signs of TB, he set about purging the language

0:33:410:33:47

of the pompous preaching of the official left

0:33:470:33:50

and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.

0:33:500:33:54

As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,

0:33:560:34:00

Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his mansion in Kent,

0:34:000:34:05

brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.

0:34:050:34:09

For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been,

0:34:090:34:16

embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.

0:34:160:34:22

So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing,

0:34:220:34:27

and as he wrote thousands of pages on the Duke of Marlborough,

0:34:270:34:32

thousands more on the History Of The English-speaking Peoples -

0:34:320:34:37

keeping company with generations who'd faced invasion before -

0:34:370:34:42

so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.

0:34:420:34:47

First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of Sunday hunts and gymkhanas,

0:34:470:34:53

had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain WOULD share Europe's fate.

0:34:530:34:59

WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe.

0:34:590:35:06

' "Let us leave it, with its hatred and its armaments,

0:35:060:35:09

' "to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels."

0:35:090:35:15

'There would be much to be said for this plan

0:35:150:35:18

'if we could unfasten Britain from its rock foundation,

0:35:180:35:23

'and could tow it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

0:35:230:35:28

'Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.'

0:35:280:35:33

Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers -

0:35:330:35:38

men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that the Nazis

0:35:380:35:44

were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war,

0:35:440:35:51

and who would stop at reasonable demands.

0:35:510:35:54

The appeasers were like men who thought you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two,

0:35:540:36:02

in the hope that, by the time it got to you, it would be full.

0:36:020:36:07

In 1938, Hitler, who'd already annexed Austria,

0:36:090:36:13

threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.

0:36:130:36:18

Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister, ran to Munich and served it up.

0:36:180:36:24

I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,

0:36:240:36:29

and here is the paper

0:36:290:36:32

which bears his name upon it as well as mine.

0:36:320:36:37

CHEERING

0:36:370:36:40

For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,

0:36:420:36:46

but the deepest stain on our history -

0:36:460:36:50

the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption

0:36:500:36:54

that democracies were, by definition, spineless.

0:36:540:36:58

CHURCHILL: 'All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.

0:36:580:37:04

'Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.

0:37:040:37:08

'We have passed an awful milestone in our history,

0:37:080:37:12

'when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged,

0:37:120:37:16

'and the terrible words have, for the time being,

0:37:160:37:19

'been pronounced against the Western democracies,

0:37:190:37:23

' "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." '

0:37:230:37:27

When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,

0:37:310:37:35

Hitler went and occupied Prague, Chamberlain took it personally,

0:37:350:37:41

realising that he, and the country, had been royally had.

0:37:410:37:45

On the 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

0:37:480:37:54

Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.

0:37:540:37:58

-NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN:

-'This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin

0:37:580:38:02

'handed the German government a final note

0:38:020:38:06

'stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock

0:38:060:38:12

'that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

0:38:120:38:17

'a state of war would exist between us.

0:38:170:38:21

'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,

0:38:210:38:27

'and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'

0:38:270:38:33

Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice

0:38:360:38:39

announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.

0:38:390:38:45

The evacuation of children began.

0:38:450:38:48

None of this meant Chamberlain would hand the reins over to Churchill.

0:38:530:38:58

For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,

0:38:580:39:03

Churchill was still mistrusted by most of his party.

0:39:030:39:07

But the swing in public opinion towards him was so great it seemed prudent to have him in government,

0:39:070:39:13

and, on the day war was declared, he was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.

0:39:130:39:21

But, as if in a rerun of Gallipoli, Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster

0:39:210:39:27

when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway backfired horribly.

0:39:270:39:33

Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.

0:39:380:39:43

Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution made it seem like he at least was doing his best.

0:39:430:39:49

Next to Neville Chamberlain - gaunt, weary, presiding over a front bench of old geezers -

0:39:490:39:56

Churchill, though an old geezer himself,

0:39:560:39:59

seemed like a red hot volcano - a lava flow of plans and strategies.

0:39:590:40:04

Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low,

0:40:050:40:10

and, on the 10th May 1940, he was finally forced to resign.

0:40:100:40:15

The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's history.

0:40:160:40:21

Two vital questions were at stake -

0:40:210:40:24

who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister and how would HE deal with the Nazi war machine?

0:40:240:40:31

Not only the survival of our national independence,

0:40:310:40:35

but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.

0:40:350:40:40

Two kinds of men, and of England, were now in play for the leadership of the country.

0:40:400:40:46

In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties -

0:40:460:40:53

solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.

0:40:530:40:57

And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.

0:40:570:41:01

But, in the best judgment of his life, Halifax turned the job down.

0:41:010:41:06

In the pit of his stomach he knew he couldn't be a war leader.

0:41:060:41:11

Winston had seen the face of battle, Halifax had only hunted foxes.

0:41:110:41:16

On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the Palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.

0:41:180:41:24

On the same day, came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.

0:41:240:41:30

Now, of course, we all know that the "finest hour" was waiting in the wings.

0:41:300:41:36

But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,

0:41:360:41:41

when Britain came closer than at any other time in history to being overwhelmed.

0:41:410:41:47

Belgium and Holland were going under and France would join them.

0:41:470:41:52

250,000 British troops were trapped in Northern France

0:41:520:41:57

with hardly any hope of a safe exit.

0:41:570:42:00

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue,

0:42:000:42:06

and hardly anyone who counted thought that we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.

0:42:060:42:14

Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech,

0:42:150:42:21

shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.

0:42:210:42:26

'I would say to the House, as I said to those who joined the government,

0:42:270:42:32

'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

0:42:320:42:38

'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

0:42:380:42:44

'We have before us many months of struggle and suffering.

0:42:440:42:48

'You ask, "What is our policy?"

0:42:480:42:52

'I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might,

0:42:520:42:58

'with all the strength that God can give us. To wage war against a monstrous tyranny

0:42:580:43:04

'never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.

0:43:040:43:10

'That is our policy. You ask, "What is our aim?"

0:43:100:43:15

'I can answer in one word, victory.

0:43:150:43:18

'Victory at all costs.

0:43:180:43:21

'Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be.

0:43:210:43:28

'For without victory there is no survival.'

0:43:280:43:31

We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation

0:43:350:43:39

into the great prince girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.

0:43:390:43:46

But the truth was very different.

0:43:460:43:48

The military men assumed he would have to eat his words.

0:43:480:43:53

The civil servants, who always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes

0:43:530:43:59

at another theatrical performance. And politicians, like Halifax,

0:43:590:44:03

believed that, sooner or later, Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.

0:44:030:44:10

It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.

0:44:110:44:16

Churchill was having none of it. In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,

0:44:160:44:23

he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his life

0:44:230:44:27

to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.

0:44:270:44:32

The battle FOR Britain then, started not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,

0:44:350:44:41

but here behind the closed doors of the Cabinet War Room.

0:44:410:44:45

In combat were Halifax and Churchill, men with very different ideas of how to save the country.

0:44:450:44:52

In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire

0:44:560:45:03

that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.

0:45:030:45:08

"The very thought," he said, "of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside -

0:45:080:45:14

"this fragment of undying England - was an insult and an outrage."

0:45:140:45:19

Churchill would not have disagreed.

0:45:190:45:21

But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York or for some unreal dream of village England.

0:45:220:45:29

He wasn't fighting for Britain at all just as a piece of geography.

0:45:290:45:34

He was fighting for the meaning of being British, and that was an idea,

0:45:340:45:39

a precious idea we'd given to the world - freedom and the rule of law.

0:45:390:45:44

Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Fuhrer, would be a mock Britain.

0:45:440:45:52

Not worthy of the name really, let alone of our long history.

0:45:520:45:56

Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.

0:45:560:46:03

When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on the 28th May,

0:46:050:46:10

he was greeted not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.

0:46:100:46:15

There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.

0:46:150:46:21

In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been,

0:46:240:46:31

and yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe

0:46:310:46:36

that made the difference between surrender and survival.

0:46:360:46:40

The qualities which made him so impossible -

0:46:400:46:44

his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history -

0:46:440:46:50

were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.

0:46:500:46:55

In the days ahead, Churchill learned that, against all predictions,

0:46:570:47:02

250,000 British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk in 1,000 little ships -

0:47:020:47:08

the core of the army that'd return almost exactly four years later.

0:47:080:47:14

It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later, in June 1940,

0:47:140:47:20

which was, as one MP said, "Worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years."

0:47:200:47:27

'We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France.

0:47:300:47:34

'We shall fight on the seas and oceans.

0:47:340:47:38

'We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.

0:47:380:47:44

'We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.

0:47:440:47:48

'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.

0:47:480:47:53

'We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

0:47:530:47:57

'We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!'

0:47:570:48:02

This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell,

0:48:040:48:08

for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,

0:48:080:48:12

was so relieved that Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote,

0:48:120:48:17

"that wars were won by fighting."

0:48:170:48:19

Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,

0:48:190:48:24

though one loved the Empire and the other detested it, both understood

0:48:240:48:30

that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them from the Nazis and the defeatists.

0:48:300:48:37

Orwell's TB, at this stage, was still undiagnosed,

0:48:380:48:42

but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.

0:48:420:48:48

Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.

0:48:480:48:55

During the months of the Blitz,

0:48:560:48:58

there were the two of them, in the thick of the action, drawn like small boys to danger.

0:48:580:49:04

"Orwell," someone said, "felt at home amidst the bombs, bravery and the danger."

0:49:040:49:10

Churchill should've slept somewhere safe like the Cabinet War Rooms,

0:49:100:49:15

but, to the horror of staff, he want back to Number Ten.

0:49:150:49:19

Sometimes, he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.

0:49:190:49:24

Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting,

0:49:280:49:34

but they were different visions.

0:49:340:49:37

Churchill's was Shakespearean, with the war leader stalking through the night camp,

0:49:370:49:43

drinking the affection of ordinary people.

0:49:430:49:47

George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes -

0:49:470:49:51

air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service -

0:49:510:49:55

and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the Levellers and the Chartists.

0:49:550:50:00

The workers of Britain didn't take on the Luftwaffe

0:50:000:50:04

to make the nation safe for Halifax and the owners of country houses,

0:50:040:50:09

but to create a nation that'd help the miners of Wigan,

0:50:090:50:14

and millions like them, have some of the common decencies of life.

0:50:140:50:19

The trouble was the way that war had to be won - not by the people's army of old England,

0:50:200:50:26

but by the people's army of the United States and the Soviet Union.

0:50:260:50:31

Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell,

0:50:310:50:39

but if being a junior partner to America was the price to be paid for defeating fascism, so be it.

0:50:390:50:46

Churchill was, in any case, less of the Little Englander than Orwell.

0:50:480:50:53

He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America as much as Orwell didn't.

0:50:530:50:58

For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive transatlantic thing.

0:50:580:51:03

For Orwell, democracy American-style was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.

0:51:030:51:11

For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear -

0:51:120:51:17

if war meant dying together, peace meant living together,

0:51:170:51:21

not in the slums of Britain, but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.

0:51:210:51:27

RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Newspapers carry the astonishing news to an amazed public!

0:51:270:51:34

'Labour landslide!'

0:51:340:51:36

In the general election,

0:51:360:51:39

Churchill was thanked by the nation by being handed a terrible drubbing.

0:51:390:51:43

Labour took office with a mandate for reform.

0:51:430:51:47

The socialist press greeted the triumph

0:51:470:51:51

as the coming of the New Jerusalem.

0:51:510:51:54

But instead of joining the hallelujah chorus,

0:51:560:52:00

Orwell, like Churchill, was worried about a new world order

0:52:000:52:06

where we would be slaves in another way.

0:52:060:52:09

CHURCHILL: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

0:52:090:52:15

'an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.

0:52:150:52:20

'Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient...'

0:52:200:52:24

-VOICE ON RADIO:

-'Baileys, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.

0:52:240:52:30

'Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly, gradually becoming...'

0:52:300:52:35

To clear his head of the static hum of postwar London,

0:52:350:52:39

Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,

0:52:390:52:44

to the very edge of the kingdom - the Hebridean island of Jura.

0:52:440:52:49

No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.

0:52:490:52:53

And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find, typing in bed with the machine on his knees,

0:52:530:52:59

knowing he hadn't long to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain -

0:52:590:53:07

the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.

0:53:070:53:11

As Churchill issued his grim warnings,

0:53:110:53:14

Orwell created a common or garden plain man's Winston - Winston Smith.

0:53:140:53:20

The year was 1948.

0:53:200:53:23

In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,

0:53:280:53:32

no laughter but that of triumph.

0:53:320:53:35

No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,

0:53:350:53:39

but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.

0:53:390:53:43

If you want a picture of the future,

0:53:430:53:46

imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

0:53:460:53:51

When we think of 1984,

0:53:530:53:56

most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother,

0:53:560:54:02

a world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth.

0:54:020:54:07

But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical

0:54:070:54:12

when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,

0:54:120:54:17

a guerrilla action fought, not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties,

0:54:170:54:23

reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity -

0:54:230:54:27

a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.

0:54:270:54:33

Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,

0:54:330:54:37

prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were absolutely normal.

0:54:370:54:41

The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.

0:54:410:54:46

The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.

0:54:460:54:53

Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,

0:54:550:55:00

the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.

0:55:000:55:08

It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist, on the face of it, such an impossible couple -

0:55:080:55:14

the most unlikely of allies.

0:55:140:55:16

George Orwell died in 1950. He was 46.

0:55:180:55:22

The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Churchill -

0:55:220:55:27

a review of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour.

0:55:270:55:30

You'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's heroics,

0:55:300:55:35

but he bestows the greatest compliment he could -

0:55:350:55:39

that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.

0:55:390:55:45

And it was a verdict shared by those who lined the streets of London

0:55:450:55:50

when Churchill finally died in 1965.

0:55:500:55:54

But then, when it counted,

0:55:560:55:59

neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing - toed the party line.

0:55:590:56:05

More important was their belief that if Britain was to be distinctive in the age of super-states,

0:56:050:56:11

it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,

0:56:110:56:16

that which tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.

0:56:160:56:21

But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.

0:56:220:56:27

It's written, not to revere the dead, but inspire the living.

0:56:270:56:32

It's our cultural bloodstream - the secret of who we are.

0:56:320:56:36

And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented,

0:56:360:56:42

to celebrate what should be celebrated.

0:56:420:56:46

And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,

0:56:460:56:51

well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much.

0:56:510:56:57

And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.

0:56:570:57:00

# There were three ravens sat on a tree

0:57:000:57:05

# Down a-down, hey down, a-down

0:57:050:57:09

# They were as black as they might be

0:57:110:57:15

# With a down, down, down

0:57:150:57:19

# Then one of them said to his mate

0:57:190:57:24

# "Where shall we now our breakfast take?"

0:57:240:57:28

# With a down, derry, derry down, down

0:57:280:57:35

# She lifted up his bloody head

0:57:370:57:42

# Down a-down, hey down, a-down

0:57:420:57:48

# And kissed his wounds that were so red

0:57:490:57:53

# With a down, down, down

0:57:530:57:57

# She got him up upon her back

0:57:570:58:01

# And carried him to earthen lake

0:58:010:58:07

# With a down, derry, derry down, down

0:58:070:58:12

# She buried him before the prime

0:58:410:58:47

# Ah, derry

0:58:480:58:51

# She was dead herself ere evensong time

0:58:510:58:57

# God, send every gentleman

0:58:590:59:04

# Such hawks, such hounds

0:59:040:59:08

# And such a land. #

0:59:080:59:13

Subtitles by Raymond Morrison BBC Broadcast 2002

0:59:160:59:20

E-mail us at [email protected]

0:59:200:59:23

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