The second to last volume in the Churchill documents series being published by Hillsdale College Press covers the six years from Winston Churchill’s election defeat in July 1945 to his return to 10 Downing Street after winning a parliamentary majority in the October 1951 general election. The years spent out of government, while Clement Attlee and Labour were in office, are usually, beyond the Iron Curtain Speech in March 1946, little considered and quickly dispensed with in most Churchill biographies (the excellent Churchill: The Unruly Giant by Norman Rose for example devotes just 10 pages out of its 425 pages to those six years). These were nonetheless busy and eventful years and The Churchill Documents: Volume 22: Leader of the Opposition August 1945 to October 1951 checks in at more than 2,200 pages.
Arranging the documents in chronological order, the volume narrates Churchill’s political, literary, and personal affairs during the period. It includes correspondence, excerpts from memoirs and diaries written by colleagues, and Churchill’s speeches.
Almost immediately after leaving Downing Street in 1945, Churchill departed on a holiday to Lake Como (pg. 53), resumed painting, and arranged the reopening of his beloved Chartwell which had been closed during the war (pgs. 50-51). Over the ensuing six years, as covered in this volume, he, with a team, researched and wrote his war memoirs that set out his history of the Second World War and for which he ultimately received the Nobel Prize for Literature; arranged his financial affairs (trust, taxes, selling literary rights); holidayed in Cuba, the south of France, the United States, and Marrakesh; suffered health issues (pg. 1476); and dealt with family affairs. Among the many interesting pieces found in browsing through the volume are Churchill’s letter to his son Randolph on February 9, 1949 advising him on his divorce from Pamela in which he “strongly recommend a friendly settlement of the minor differences” (pg. 1322-23); a note from his wife Clementine warning him of overworking the thermostat after a near-fire in his bedroom (pg. 1286), and a letter he received welcoming him to “the company of Hallmark Painters for 1950 Christmas Cards” (pg. 1651). Churchill cabled a reply that he was “delighted” to have his paintings “exhibited in America through the medium of Christmas Cards.”
As Andrew Roberts has noted in Churchill: Walking with Destiny the 1945 election defeat can be seen as really “a blessing in disguise for Churchill” as the issues and problems the Attlee government faced, such as India, the scuttle from Palestine, and financial austerity, were ones Churchill would have entirely disliked. Instead as the most prestigious statesmen on the world stage, not holding government office, Churchill adopted issues that he was most concerned with, most famously delivering the Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri warning of the Soviet threat and calling for an Anglo-American special relationship (pgs. 227-235). Another theme of concern to Churchill in the post-war period was the pursuit of European Unity. He spoke on the subject often, including at Zurich University in September 1946 (pg. 458-461), delivering a speech in which he called for “a kind of United States of Europe,” as well as at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1947 (pg. 704-711) and at the opening of the Congress of Europe in May 1948 (pg. 1037-1042). With the Brexit saga, Churchill’s views from this period have been scrutinized, debated, and reconsidered over and over again.
Although he was leader of the Conservative Party and therefore leader of the opposition, Churchill spent relatively little time on party political affairs. Of Churchill, James Stuart, the Conservative Chief Whip, remarked, “our leader did not often grace us with his presence.” Churchill largely left the thankless task of opposing the Attlee government in the commons and remaking the party in the wake of the election defeat to his colleagues, most especially Anthony Eden and Lord Woolton. However, he spoke in the House of Commons on about 590 different days (many included in the volume) and in the 1950 and 1951 election campaigns was the Conservative party’s great asset.
As with the previous volumes in the series, The Churchill Documents: Volume 22: Leader of the Opposition August 1945 to October 1951 is exhaustive and comprehensive. It is an exceptional work and valuable contribution to the study of Churchill.