第1个回答 2020-04-14
In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone on the brink of invasion. At that crucial time, one man, Winston Churchill, defined what it meant to be British. We like to think of ourselves as tolerant and long-suffering people. But Churchill, through his leadership and his example, reminded us that if all we hold dear – our democracy, our freedom – is threatened, we will show courage and determination like no other nation:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask what is our policy? I can say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all our strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be.”
3 This was the moment when Britain had to be at its greatest. And in Churchill we found the greatest of Britons.
Winston Churchill was born in 1874 into one of Britain’s grandest families. The Churchills had been fighting for king and country for generations. Young Winston always believed he’d do the same. But self-belief was something he maintained despite rather than because of his family. His father Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895), and his mother, Jennie (1854–1921), were both cold and distant people. Winston was packed off to Harrow. He wasn’t good-looking or clever; he was sickly, with a lisp and a stammer. He was bound to be bullied – and he was. Far from giving support, Winston’s father predicted his child would “degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence”.
He left school and, after three attempts, got into the military academy at Sandhurst. After Sandhurst he went looking for military action – wherever it was. He paid for himself by doubling up as a war correspondent. He used his dispatches to promote himself as a hero of the Boer War, and returned to England in 1900 renowned and all set to become an MP.
He was elected as Tory MP for Oldham in the same year. Then he swapped to the Liberals, then back. He was never really a Party animal. He cared about Britain. His vision was of a place with better living standards for ordinary people, but with a fierce regard for law and order. Though he wasn’t a vicious man, Churchill’s attitude to suffragettes, trade unionists or anyone who challenged the system was brutal. His weapon of first resort was the army. But then he’d always wanted to be a general. This ambition dated back to the days when he spent his school holidays playing with toy soldiers in the corridors of Blenheim Palace, below the tapestries of his heroic ancestors. He must have been delighted when, in 1911, he was made First Lord of the Admiralty – and even more so when the First World War offered him the opportunity to plan a major military offensive at Gallipoli, in 1915.
Gallipoli was a disaster, costing Winston his job and nearly his sanity. This was the onset of his first major bout of depression, a curse he called his “black dog”. Thankfully he now had a wife, Clementine, to help him through it. She was 11 years younger than him, beautiful, clever and unswervingly loyal. She kept him together, but he got himself out of it, in true Churchillian fashion. To make amends for his mistake, he took himself off to the trenches of France to fight. He must be one of the few soldiers to have written home from the First World War that he had “found happiness and content such as I have not known for months”. He was a man made for war.
By the time Churchill returned to England, he’d already achieved many great things. He’d been a successful journalist, he’d fought for his country and he’d held high office, as he was to do again in the 1920s as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But by 1930, Labour was in power and he was on the backbenches, a nobody and a has-been. He largely sat out the 1930s at his country retreat Chartwell.
In September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) famously brandished an agreement he’d signed with Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and declared he’d secured peace in our time. You could almost hear the sighs of relief. But not from Winston. He’d predicted – long before anyone else – what German nationalism was leading to. By the time he was proved right, and war had been declared, King George VI (1895–1952) knew that “there was only one person I could send for to form a Government who had the confidence of the country. And that was Winston”. When the call came, Churchill was 65 years old. It had been a long wait, but destiny had arrived.
People talk of 1066, of the Armada, of Trafalgar. But 1940 was the most important year in British history. It was the year of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz. It was the year when every single Briton, civilian as well as soldier, found themselves at war. The cause appeared hopeless, yet Winston, reviving the V sign for victory from the fields of Agincourt 500 years before, told us we could win.
Churchill was an instinctive, daring, often infuriating war leader. He was rude and unpleasant to his staff, who struggled to keep up with his limitless capacity for hard work and hard liquor. But he was also an inspiration. When victory was finally declared in Europe on 8 May 1945, it was quickly followed by a general election.
The billboards said “Cheer Churchill, Vote Labour”, and that’s what people did. That was the irony. The very democracy that Churchill was prepared to lay down his life to defend was the same democracy that knew the difference between the needs of peace and the needs of war.
When Churchill died in 1965, the new rock-and-roll Britain stood still. If Britain – its eccentricity, its strength of character, its big-heartedness – had to be summed up in one person, it was him. He had gone, but, thanks to him, Britain lived on. And what could be greater than that?