Churchill and the First Englishman Sir Mortimer and Magnus

SPEECH INAUDIBLE

'Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the greatest archaeologist of our time.

'Now aged 84, he lives an active and hospitable retirement

'close to London's Trafalgar Square and his beloved British Academy.

'He's been a star in everything he's ever set his hand to.

'Now he has time to look back with wit and affection

'on the great men and events he's known or admired.'

Are you a student of Benjamin Disraeli?

-No.

-You're not.

I am.

I find that Benjamin Disraeli on my table by my bedside,

it lightens my day for me, or my night for me.

He...he produces

exactly the things I've been trying to say myself

for so long.

And lately, I've picked up his, I think it's his last novel.

A novel of his old age - Lothair.

And there I opened the book at a page which has

a direct bearing on what you've just been saying.

On this page he is talking about

a little man called Pinto,

Portuguese of some sort.

But a pet of society in the period he's writing off.

And he...

..gives an idea of the sort of conversation that he imagines,

or had heard, taking place in his time.

After all, nearly everything that he wrote in his novels is, for us,

an inheritance from the age of conversation.

And in this particular book, his hero, I think, his hidden hero

is a little man called Pinto.

And Pinto he describes in what I think is a perfectly delightful

and eloquent manner.

"He was not of intellectual Croesus

"but his pockets were full of sixpences."

And he gives one or two of the sixpences as examples.

And one of them is this,

"He would sometimes remark, when a man fell into his anecdotage,

"it was a sign for him to retire from the world."

'Well, in spite of his professed aversion to anecdotage,

'Sir Mortimer himself is a marvellous storyteller.

'He relishes the quality of greatness in others

'and not least the faults that he believes

'that no genius worthy of the name can ever be without.'

So, the genius can still make an infinite number of mistakes

and still be a genius?

Well, yes, well, look at Churchill.

There's a whole book about his mistakes -

Churchill: A Study In Failure.

It's a sensible book too, a sensible book.

But of course, it leaves out all that matters about Churchill.

What matters is what happens in between his failures.

And his failures themselves were stimulating.

It's rather a curious story.

If...if it bores you just put a finger up and I'll stop.

Perhaps.

It happened this way -

in the year 1938...

..I received a formidable document from the University of Bristol...

..inviting me to accept an honorary doctorate, you see.

The first time it had happened to me.

Of course, as you get older and go down the slope

these things happen as a matter of course and they just happen.

But this was the first.

And it...it so happened

that Winston Churchill was, at that time,

the Chancellor of Bristol University.

He had been for some years.

And if he took on a job of that sort he always did it.

He would always turn up at the great ceremonial occasions.

And so, when in due course I appeared in the Great Hall,

in the line of the stalls, you know, sitting in between...

This made me laugh internally, I can tell you.

Sitting between a future Prime Minister and

our greatest living poet.

And here was little me in between.

-Why? Why on earth?

-That was between Churchill and who?

No, no. That was between,

um, Anthony...

-Anthony Eden.

-Anthony Eden.

Between Anthony Eden, who hadn't been then Prime Minister,

he was going to be eventually,

and with T.S. Eliot.

There were other...a few other people to make the row up.

And there was I but I couldn't make out why on Earth they'd picked on me,

little me.

I was a very shy... I am by nature a very shy man,

as you may have discovered.

HE LAUGHS

Up on the dais sat the Chancellor,

in his Chancellor's robes.

And the one thing of course that Churchill loved above all else

was dressing up.

And in due course, we walked up the little stairs

and knelt on a cushion and the Chancellor threw out our hood

and he set it on your shoulders and you made an honest man.

Well, it came to my turn.

I went up and knelt on the cushion.

And I imagine that the Chancellor was intended to say something like,

"Bristol expects that every man will do his duty,"

or something of that sort.

Instead he said, "I want to see you. Meet me afterwards in the anteroom."

This was in a hoarse whisper

while the hood settled on my shoulders.

And I went down.

Well afterwards I appeared in the anteroom.

"Ah, you're going back to town, yes?" "Yes," I said.

"Would you come with me?"

"Yes." HE MURMURS QUIETLY

"Well, OK, I've had enough of this, let's get in the car

"and go to the station."

And outside there was a Daimler car as long as a train you know,

waiting for him. We got in.

When we got to the station, this was 1938, before the war.

There was a great crowd.

Churchill always magnetised a great crowd in some sort of mysterious way.

And there was the Chief Constable and all the rest of it.

The station platform was cleared.

We walked across it and we got into a carriage, a whole carriage,

not a compartment but a carriage

marked - "the Right Honourable Winston Churchill".

I didn't, I still didn't know, I hadn't a clue what was happening,

what it was all about.

We sat down opposite each other as I'm sitting down opposite you.

And he produced from his pocket...

..a pair of eye shades with elastic.

And he proceeded to drape it round his massive forehead.

"When I travel by train, I always sleep for half an hour."

You see he was building up a little bit of reserve, there.

And he put it round his head

and left it up there.

And then he leaned over to me and said, "Now I'm going to tell you.

"I'm writing a history of the English speaking people.

"I've got the Danes,

"very difficult people the Danes.

"Let us talk about the Danes."

Well then, of course, the whole thing

was, it was clear to me that he had given me a degree

because I was the only archaeologist he'd heard of

And he wanted a bit of help.

Well, that was all right I could...

fair enough.

Well, we talked about the Danes and then we passed on to other...

to prehistoric Britain and so on.

And the eye shades never came down.

But we met the following day and behind him is a shadow,

very extraordinary this shadow,

Lindemann who afterwards became Lord Cherwell.

I never heard, at that time,

I never heard Lindemann, or Cherwell, say anything.

Later, he... We met on various occasions and we talked

but he was the shadow which gave Churchill a peace of mind.

Churchill had somebody to lean on

in some curious, psychological way.

Anyway, we talked together, we talked on other occasions.

And I remember one of the questions which Churchill asked me

on one occasion was,

"Tell me, who was the first Englishman?"

Well, that's a bit of a question to have fired at you.

And of course, in the Churchillian sense, knowing what he wanted,

I said, "Oh, the Piltdown Man."

It's a curious, monkey-like skull which had been found,

not very long previously, in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex.

And this was regarded by many people at the time

as a very primitive type of sub-man.

And he made a mental note and then after all these conversations said,

"Would you write it down and send it to me?"

So I wrote these things down and sent them to him.

And of course, he took them and he put the Churchill into it.

He put the headlines into the whole thing. He brought it alive.

I simply just...I simply gave him a little fuel and he lit the fire.

Now, I'm now going to pass on.

There came the war, as you will very well remember.

Just before the...on the eve of war,

the proof of the first volume arrived and I saw it and corrected it

and sent it back.

Then the war.

And at various levels,

well, he and I were occupied for the following 10...15 years.

I remember very vividly the next occasion upon which this

question arose,

the question of the history of the English speaking people arose.

It was on a day in August in 1954

and I was sitting in my office

and a letter came to me from Churchill's editor.

Churchill by that time was still - he was Prime Minister.

He was a sick man really.

I rather think he'd had a stroke but I'm not sure.

Anyway, he was a burdened man

with no time to look at the niceties of a proof

and he'd handed the whole thing over

for final correction to his principal subeditor.

And he, not knowing that I had actually drafted the original,

sent it to me and asked whether I would be good enough

to read it through and comment on it.

I did and opened it at the page, almost, where the Piltdown Man

appeared as the first Englishman,

with Churchillian decoration.

Well, since 1938, or '39,

when I had written the draft,

things had happened to the Piltdown Man.

In 1949, and again in 1953,

new chemical methods had discovered,

determined, that Piltdown Man was a forgery, a complete forgery.

Well of course this had passed over, or passed by,

the mind of the busy Prime Minister,

the ailing Prime Minister who was the author of it in its final shape.

And I spent that August day, I remember, with a sort of fretsaw

carving out all references to Piltdown Man.

You won't find a single reference to Piltdown Man now in Volume One.

But by God if it had got through!

The whole of that bestselling history,

those four volumes,

would have rested upon a forgery.

It was a near miss!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd