Feature Article

Providence and St Paul?s

Tomorrow is the fortieth anniversary of Winston Churchill's funeral. He was not a conventional believer, but the Christian tradition inspired his devotion to the cause of good against evil

WINSTON CHURCHILL was, as a man of his time, class and education, saturated in the Christian tradition. His speeches were as full of references, quotations and allusions to the Bible, the Prayer Book and Christian hymns as they were to English literature. His verdict on the decolonisation of Africa and Asia, for example, was drawn from Isaiah (Thou hast multiplied the nations and not increased the joy), and his support for harsh punishments for offences committed against children from St Matthew (Whosoever shall offend against one of these little ones?).

Often such quotations were mere acts of conversational bravado - just like his fondness for quoting at length from songs by Gilbert and Sullivan, or English and American poetry - but on occasion they could have deeper significance. Many noticed, for example, the emotional pull exerted by his first wartime radio broadcast as prime minister, beginning with the reminder that it was Trinity Sunday, so evoking the shared community of speakers and listeners, and impli-citly identifying the British cause with Christianity against godless Nazi evil.

It is hard to imagine any politician making such an appeal today, or most of his audience understanding it. Arguably, Churchill actually relied more on Judaeo-Christian writings than on secular literature. Although his History of the English-Speaking Peoples made virtually no reference to Shakespeare or the major poets - despite the title of the books - he discussed at length the King James Bible and Cranmer's Prayer Book and made favourable references to The Pilgrim's Progress. He noted with satisfaction that all these Christian texts had been carried across the Atlantic by the Pilgrim Fathers and so translated into North America the same language and beliefs, an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking peoples of the world.

Churchill had a great respect for the Christian tradition as a factor of continuing contemporary relevance, and he invariably deprecated attempts to downgrade that tradition, for example in the contentious Twenties Commons debates about a modernised Anglican prayer book. He had been brought up in the 1880s firmly within the Anglican tradition, which had then barely changed for two centuries. In his post-1945 short story, The Dream, in which he seems to meet the ghost of his father while dozing over a painting, he instantly responds to Lord Randolph Churchill's question about his religion with the word Episcopalian.

His direct involvement with the Church was, however, at best semi-detached. He did not find it easy to make time for the selection of Anglican bishops when he was prime minister (although he bristled if this was noticed by his staff), and once said that he supported the Church like a flying buttress - helpfully, but from the outside. There was, in 1951, a press photograph of Churchill, the other party leaders and their wives attending a church service to launch the general election campaign - those were the days! He was caught on camera looking extremely bored, although that may be only because he was for once in his life having to listen to somebody else talking, without even the right of interruption.

Churchill was not a Christian believer in any conventional sense. Archbishop Fisher of Canterbury thought that Churchill had a very real religion, but it was a religion of the Englishman. He had a real belief in providence, but it was God as the God with a special care for the values of the British people. Fisher recalled that for Churchill the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London surrounded by the fires of 1941 nevertheless had an acute appeal that was both emotional and national. Churchill had given orders that St Paul's must be saved from the bombers at all costs, even if it meant sacrificing other nearby buildings, and when damage was actually done to the cathedral by incendiaries care was taken that the news was not reported by the press.

Just as his speeches in 1940 appealed to the common language and literature, so the round dome of St Paul's, not unlike the bowler hat and high forehead of Churchill himself, stood for the tradition in which he asked the British people to put their faith. What Churchill seems never to have had was a belief in a personal God. He joked as he aged that he was ready to meet his maker, and speculated as to whether the Almighty was looking forward to their interview with equal pleasure, but he did not in fact believe in an after-life, except perhaps as some perpetual sleep in surroundings of peaceful, black velvet. The extensive government planning for his funeral, in which he was intimately involved for several years, had the bleak code-name of Operation Hope-Not.

What Churchill did believe in was: himself, fate, and his personal vocation to leadership. He writes in his memoirs that when he became prime minister in 1940, he felt that he was walking with destiny, and that all of his life had been a preparation for that hour and that task. He was indeed burdened with an almost megalomaniacal self-belief, even as a young man, and this largely explains his early unpopularity among army contemporaries and ministerial colleagues who found him far too bumptious for his own good. It was a self-belief that kept him going through all the buffetings of his first 40 years in public life - when every ladder was followed by a lengthy snake, a switchback ride that would have led any lesser man to throw in his hand, choose another career, or retire.

He was, after all, almost 65 when war came in 1939, the age at which most men would have chosen a quiet life. But not Churchill, who was raring to go and convinced that he was the only man for the job. As indeed he was, for it remains extremely hard for the informed historian to imagine any scenario without Churchill as prime minister in which Britain would have fought on in 1940 and finished among the winners in the Second World War. Without Britain fighting on, it is equally hard to imagine the scenario in which totalitarianism would have been defeated at all - at least without a very lengthy period of the utmost horror all across Europe.

Believing in himself as he did, Churchill found the capacity to make the British people believe in themselves too - a crucial historical act that even today can be cited to the cynics as proof that individuals can and do make a difference. We are all worms, he had written, with admirable theological correctness some 40 years earlier, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.

John Ramsden is professor of modern history at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of all three twentieth-century volumes of the Longman History of the Conservative Party, and of a one-volume history of the Conservatives since 1832, An Appetite for Power. He published in 2002 Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and his reputation since 1945.

Central character in the drama of the twentieth century

FOR the last 60 years of his life, Winston Churchill's towering personality illuminated British public life, from his escape from a Boer prisoner of war camp that made him an instant celebrity in 1900 to his memorable funeral, a televised-round-the-world pageant of British ceremonial and of the Anglo-American special relationship, when he for the last time played the leading part.
It had indeed been joked about Churchill years earlier that he so longed to be the central character in every drama that when he went to a wedding he wished he was the bridegroom and when he went to a funeral he longed to be in the coffin. Now, after careful planning, and in a funeral with lots of soldiers and sailors, leaders from all over the world to pay homage, military bands, and the Stars and Stripes flying alongside the Union Flag throughout London, he had his final wish.
On that day, inevitably, there were many tears and there was great nostalgia for the Forties, Churchill's and (it was frequently said) the British people's finest hour, when he had twice given the roar for the lion of freedom in the fight against totalitarianism, against Hitler in 1940 and against Stalin in 1946. That Churchillian roar had been one of the things that made people believe in the triumph of freedom, even when the days were dark and victory seemed so far away.
When he died it was confidently expected that historians would soon cut him down to size, and so revise his reputation negatively, since so much of it was linked with the personality of the man himself, more indeed than was generally appreciated.
Historians have recently shown just how hard he worked at creating his own image, as a relentlessly autobiographical spin-doctor before the idea had been invented. David Reynolds' recent In Command of History (Penguin, 2004) shows how far his best-selling war memoirs were crafted for that purpose, and how far indeed the British political and military establishment connived at the process, scenting the chance to put an authorised version of Britain's Second World War before a worldwide reading public under Churchill's name.
To an extent he has remained ever since a useful asset in British international policy: President George W. Bush, a Churchill admirer, keeps a bust of Winston in the Oval Office for inspiration. The truth is that Churchill has remained in the English-speaking world the dominant figure of the twentieth century, and revisionist historians have done little to dent his image.