★★★★☆ A Celebration of Winston Churchill's Life

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

William Manchester, Paul Reid

William Manchester and Paul Reid's The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 is the third and final volume of what began as Manchester's multivolume biography of Winston S. Churchill, The Last Lion. Manchester began work on this, the final volume, in 1988. Between 1988 and 1998 he compiled over 2000 pages of detailed research notes and wrote the first 100 pages. His work was halted by two strokes in 1998. In 2003 Manchester asked Reid to complete it. He was just in time -- Manchester died in 2004. Over the subsequent eight years Reid completed the book for publication in 2012.

It is long. I recently read J.K. Rowling's novel The Running Grave. I thought that was a long book, but compared to Defender of the Realm it's a mere novella. Defender of the Realm clocks in at 1795 pages on kindle. The bulk is divided into eight chapters. Each chapter is really a book. The first six cover World War II, roughly one year per chapter. Thus, the bulk of Defender of the Realm is a history of WWII as seen from the point of view of Churchill and those close to him, that is, WWII as experienced by the English. These were, of course, the years in which Churchill was the hero we now know. Churchill's twenty post-war years are covered more concisely, in chapters seven and eight. These are sad -- it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he'd have been wiser to quit at the top of his game, as indeed his wife Clementine and many of his colleagues wished. "The Last Lion" is a good title -- it captures both Churchill's greatness and the sense that he may have survived past his time.

I titled this review "A Celebration of Winston Churchill's Life", and there's a reason for that. The Last Lion is not actually an even-handed biography of Churchill, although this, the final volume, comes closer to that than the first two. It first became obvious to me in Volume One, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932, when Manchester was writing about Winston Churchill's father, Randolph. Manchester reports as simple truth a story told by Lord Randolph's friend Harris about how Lord Randolph became infected with syphilis. When I read this story, I immediately thought, "This sounds like a transparent fabrication." Then at the end, Manchester added the following footnote

In his Lord Randolph Churchill (Oxford, 1981) R. F. Foster discounts Harris’s “almost completely unlikely assertion of the manner in which he [Randolph] contracted syphilis.” Foster does not say why. The account does not seem unlikely to this writer, and Harris, as Foster concedes, enjoyed a relationship with both Lord Randolph and Winston which “was both genuine and appreciably close”.

I can only say that although Harris's "account did not seem unlikely to this writer", it seemed very unlikely to this reader. (And that Harris was close to Lord Randolph is irrelevant to the plausibility of the story -- it speaks only to the question of who might have been complicit in its fabrication, if indeed it was false.) From that point it was clear to me that Manchester would, to the extent he could avoid it, speak no evil of the Churchill name.

Defender of the Realm began in that way, but the tone quickly changed. I surmise that the change in tone occurred at the point where we switched from those first 100 pages written by Manchester to those written by Reid. While Reid still attempts to put the most positive plausible spin on events, he is careful to give all relevant facts. When Churchill's behavior was indefensible (as not infrequently it was), Reid doesn't seek to justify or excuse it, although he does attempt to explain it. For the most part this seemed reasonable to me.

I was a little less charmed by the consistent attempt to puff up Churchill by denigrating Americans. A lot of this however, can be put down to Alan Brooke, Churchill's military chief of staff. Brooke, whom Reid quotes frequently, is an excellent source: an intelligent man in near daily contact with Churchill during the war, who kept a detailed diary, which he eventually published. However, if Brooke ever expressed anything other than withering disdain for the abilities of a US soldier, I must have missed it. Churchill himself did not escape Brooke's censure. At one point Reid refers to him as "the supercilious Brooke". If this story had been written by Homer, I suspect "the supercilious Brooke" would have been his epithet.

Defender of the Realm is an excellent account of the courage of Winston Churchill and the English people during WWII. It is, in my opinion, slightly marred by a pro-Churchill bias, but this was, I thought, a minor fault.

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