Talk about it

The Roar of the Lion: the untold story of Churchill's World War II speeches

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2013

ISBN 978 0 19 964252 6

£25.00

20 August 1940.  Winston Churchill visits No.11 Group Fighter Command with his military secretary, General Hastings Ismay.  Throughout the afternoon, the RAF is battling the waves of German fighters crossing the Channel.  At one point, every squadron has taken to the air, with no reserves remaining.  According to Ismay:

I felt sick with fear.  As the evening closed in the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers.  Churchill’s first words to me were: ‘Don’t speak to me.  I have never been so moved.’  After about five minutes he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’

What was going on in Churchill’s brain during those five minutes?  Richard Toye’s absorbing and vividly narrated book, The Roar of the Lion, offers some tantalizing clues.

On the one hand, we see a man of high emotion.  There’s no reason to disbelieve that initial remark to Ismay.  Toye doesn’t mention Black Dog, but we do see other instances of his behaviour that suggested to others signs of mental turmoil.  On the other, Toye also reveals that the words he finally utters in the car were not entirely inspired.  Churchill had used a very similar construction at least three times before: in 1899, in 1906 and in 1907. 

As a young man, influenced in part by the barnstorming rhetoric of his father and the Democrat Bourke Cockran, Churchill had educated himself in the power of language.  (He had, famously, done poorly at Harrow.)  At the turn of the century, in his early twenties, he had drafted The Scaffolding of Rhetoric, an article designed to get him noticed by the heavyweight periodicals.  Unpublished during his lifetime, it’s very much a young man’s piece: overwrought, passionate, recklessly revealing. 

The direct, though not the admitted, object which the orator has in view is to allay the commonplace influences and critical faculties of his audience, by presenting to their imaginations a series of vivid impressions which are replaced before they can be too closely examined and vanish before they can be assailed.

Throughout his political career, as he defected from the Tories to the Liberals and back, as he railed equally against the dangers of Nazism and against reform in India, Churchill used his speeches, not only to influence, but also to survive – politically and, perhaps, psychologically.

By the 1930s, as Toye points out, the effect was wearing thin.  “To MPs who had, as it were, heard it all before, his speaking style seemed not majestically impressive but overblown and hackneyed.” 

But his constant interventions in the Commons over India seem to have jolted his rhetoric into a new register.  In a letter to his wife, he writes that he is now speaking “with garrulous unpremeditated flow.  They seem delighted.” 

Churchill carries this new rhetoric into the war with him.  He has reinvigorated his Victorian Ciceronianism by injecting the plain English championed during the 1930s by Greene, Hemingway, Orwell, and others.  His speeches, according to Harold Nicholson, now combine “great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational.  Of all his devices it is the one that never fails.”  The synthesis will allow him to speak, more or less successfully, both in the Commons and over the airwaves.  (One of Toye’s most intriguing discussions is about Churchill’s discomfort with radio.) 

But Churchill learnt another lesson in the wilderness years.  In that same letter to his wife, he suggests that the art of public speaking “all consists in my (mature) judgement of selecting three or four absolutely sound arguments and putting these in the most conversational manner possible.”  This was a revelation to him.  “There is apparently nothing in the literary effect I have sought for forty years!”

During that pregnant silence in the car with Ismay, then, we can imagine Churchill wrestling unruly passion against the need to articulate the plainest possible expression of the military reality.  Somewhere in that struggle, he drags up a couple of past rhetorical successes and presses them into service.  And the moment of inspiration follows.

But then, in uttering the sentence, Churchill is not merely reacting to the moment.  He’s also trying out his words on his audience. 

It’s a typical ploy.  Like any great performer, he can simultaneously feel the weight of the sad time and observe the effect on others as he expresses it.  That doublethink is essential to any rhetorical method.   And Churchill’s listeners sometimes came perilously close to seeing through it.

The book’s central thesis, in fact, concerns how Churchill’s speeches were judged by his many audiences.  Toye uses material both from the Ministry of Information and from Mass-Observation: a remarkable project that’s only now, thanks to the work of James Hinton, becoming clearly understood.  This material – including polls, reports and diaries – “is extraordinarily rich and variegated, and reveals the complexity of responses to Churchill, including surprising levels of criticism and dissent.”

It’s hard to imagine the pressures the man was working under.  He needed to satisfy what one diarist calls ‘the turbulent people’ of the United Kingdom: a people as hungry for information as for inspiration; sometimes cheered by Churchill’s truculence, often frustrated by his bluster.  But he was speaking also to global audiences: to the Empire and to the wavering Americans; to the enemy; to the movements of resistance in Europe.  He was battling a hostile press, especially on the left, and his own party, which continued to suspect his motives.  And he was running the war.  He was in his late sixties.  He contracted pneumonia at least twice, and seems at one point to have suffered a minor heart attack.

By 1942, after the disastrous fall of Singapore, Mass-Observation was reporting a sense among the public that Churchill might not be up to the job.  “The breaking of the oratorical spell is thus a shock as well as a disappointment.”  In the Commons, however, on 23 April, he seemed to find a way forward. The MP ‘Chips’ Cannon reported: “No humour or tact, little oratory, no mea culpa stuff, but straightforward, brilliant and colourful, a factual resumé of the situation.”   Something extraordinary was happening: “as the catalogue of catastrophe continued,” writes Toye, “MPs began to cheer up.”  The sheer mass of fact and argument seemed to ground the speech in an ethical appeal that steadied a fractious House and increased MPs’ confidence.

For Toye, Churchill’s ability to explain, narrate and argue his case before parliament and the people matters more than the few remembered phrases or the occasional miscalculation.  He never gave up speaking.  “Hitler and Mussolini, when things started to go wrong for them, retreated into silence,” he writes; “for them, this was a luxury; it was also a chronic weakness of the political systems they operated.”  Churchill had no such luxury.  He was operating in a political system that forced him to justify his actions.  He used rhetoric to inspire his electorate, cajole his allies and deceive his enemies; but he used it also to submit himself to the democratic power that kept him in office, and for which, ultimately, everyone was fighting. 

Toye’s conclusion is itself powerful and inspirational.  It closes a book that offers a remarkable insight, not only into these most famous of political speeches, but also the complex, conflicted society that responded to them.