In Tribute to Winston Churchill. The Greatest Briton of all time.

Today we commerate the 50th anniversary of the State funeral of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, the man voted by BBC2 viewers as the greatest Briton ever.  As hu-mans go, Churchill was certainly an extraordinarily large figure and as far as this Canine correspondent goes, he deserves all the accolades being heaped upon him once again decades after his death.

For me, born only 4 hu-man years ago, Churchill is somewhat of an enigma, as he is I'm sure to many 21st Century children.  That he is of a bygone age is not in doubt.  Jeremy Paxman has said in today's Independent that he wouldn't get elected today if he were to stand and as polemical as that statement may be, I think I have to agree.  I have read extensively about Churchill, his times and his doings, and have an avid fascination for Churchillian times.  He was perhaps the last great British Statesman and I doubt we shall ever see his like again, but he was a man of his age.  For a Democratically elected PM he was much more of a dictator than any PM could ever be today.  It really was Churchill's way or the highway!  He held views that were already old-fashioned even at the peak of his power.  He was against suffrage for women; he held racist views of many of the peoples, especially Indians, of the Commonwealth and was a raging alcoholic. He was quite simply a Victorian dinosaur, the last of a dying age and when he died the British Empire died with him.  He was, in the end, much more of an iconic British stalwart than perhaps any politician before or since, perhaps associated more with the Empire and it's fading values than even the monarchy itself.

Churchill's life reads like a boy's own adventure and there are many great biographies out there that illustrate that point clearly.  That anyone could be born into such privilege today and still live the life that he led and have the drive to achieve what he achieved seems preposterous; aristocrat, war correspondent, cavalry officer, MP for over 60 years, PM not once, but twice, First Lord of the Admiralty (also twice), Nobel Prize winning author, award winning artist, raconteur, wit and speech-maker extraordinaire, he was a man apart and I for one am proud to say that he was British.  I have no doubt that without Winston we would not be here today and the world would be a very different place.

When Chamberlain appointed Lord Halifax Foreign Secretary with the remit of 'appeasing' Nazi Germany with peace overtures, it was Churchill who stood alone shouting his defiance when all about him were for suing for peace.  Even after May 1940 and Churchill's rise to power, the pro-Nazi appeasers, including Sir Samuel Hoare (latterly Churchill's Spanish Ambassador), 'Rab' Butler, Lord Brocket and the Duke of Bedford among many others, continued to send out peace feelers despite Churchill's direct instructions to Anthony Eden, in his second term as Foreign Secretary (following on from Halifax), that any German approaches be met with 'absolute silence.'

In fact 'feelers' continued to be put out throughout the War from both sides, though how much Churchill knew about any British proposals is unknown, as is whether the many such British 'feelers' were serious offers or merely deceptions designed to forestall Hitler in his ambitions.

Plainly the appeasers didn't get their way.  In Churchill they had found an opponent with a steely resolve, as Britain had found a leader who could inspire and motivate them as no-one else in British history ever had.  In some ways Churchill was as much a dictator as Hitler.  He was firm in his opinions, direct and honest to a fault, and not a man to suffer fools.  But unlike Hitler he was manic in his defence of freedom and civil liberties (as he saw them).  He was also a visionary, speaking as early as 1946 on Europe as a single trading entity, in fact taking his ideas one step further when he envisioned a single parliament for the whole world, something we have yet to see pass, but never say never.  He was a man who said as he found and one always knew exactly where he stood on any issue, unlike many of today's politicians who find it all but impossible to answer a question with candour, directness and honesty.  It was this honesty that many believe led him to defect to the Liberals, returning much later on to his beloved Conservatives, when their collective policies became once again, more closely akin to his own.  That he was a dinosaur is not in dispute.  He never owned a television, in fact never even watched one, regarding the novel invention with a wary eye.  In some ways it was good that he passed when he did, because I cannot imagine him dealing with today's intrusive press corps (though I'm sure he would have been just as devout in his defence of freedom of the press, so much in the news the past few weeks), or with twitter, or the internet.  Without Hitler, there would not have been a Churchill as we remember him today.   And without Churchill there would not be a Britain.  

And to all his many detractors today I say that this is the man who is largely responsible for their ability to be able to criticise.  Without the freedoms he fought for on our behalf we wouldn't be able to say our piece, to come and go as we please, to take our holidays whenever and (mostly) wherever we wish.  Of course, he didn't do it single handedly.  Without the millions who laid down their lives, perhaps inspired to put themselves in harm's way by Churchill himself, we would not be living the lives we do today.  There would have been no swinging 60's or hippy 70's, no punk rock, no modern cinema, no contemporary literature, no X factor on a Saturday evening.  So when we espouse the freedoms we cherish so dearly today in the West, and quite rightly so, we should do well to remember that without Winston Churchill none of them would have come to pass.  

Rest in Peace.

Winston Churchill 1874-1965

Bibliography

Hess, Hitler & Churchill; Peter Padfield, 2013
Churchill; Roy Jenkins, 1988
The Churchill Factor; Boris Johnson, 2014

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