Faber & Faber

'I hope [the trilogy] will continue to provide food for thought and material for argument ...' When first published, John Charmley's books - Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, Churchill: The End of Glory and Churchill's Grand Alliance - incensed some but inspired others to reassess their viewpoints on a national icon ...

With the benefit of over a decade's distance, John Charmley reintroduces the trilogy.

The three volumes republished here by Faber originated as an attempt to bring to a wider public the results of my own research, and those of others. By the mid-1980s it seemed that the need for a comprehensive re-reading of Churchill was necessary. Although the magisterial official biography was still proceeding on its way, its pace, like its tone, was majestic, and its contents as laudatory as Churchill himself could have desired; it seemed, like the fable upas tree, to leave no room in its shade for other plants.

Yet scholars, who had been working in the archives which began to open in the 1970s, had long been casting doubt on Churchill’s record before 1939, whilst I had myself, whilst working on the Shuckburgh diaries which covered the 1950s, found that such doubts persisted into that decade. It seemed rum, to put it mildly, that the flawed politician of those decades should have been the impeccable genius of the wartime legend; yet this we were asked to believe was the case.

In the course of writing two biographies of men close to Churchill, Duff Cooper and Lord Lloyd, doubts had entered into my mind about the orthodox version of the policy of appeasement. Granted access (rare then) to Chamberlain’s papers, and working through the records in what was not then called the National Archives, a less simplistic version of appeasement and its rationale presented itself; so did a less condemnatory version of Chamberlain’s premiership: these coalesced into Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, a book which caused some small scandal at the time, but which, as a look at more recent scholarship shows, has stood the test of time well. Few historians would now dissent from the line that there was much to be said for the policy of appeasement; even fewer would care to defend the old picture of Chamberlain as a feeble Prime Minister hoodwinked by Hitler.

The publication of what had started as the second part of a study of Churchill, now called Churchill: The End of Glory in 1993 caused a furore. I found myself condemned for advancing an argument one historian called ‘morally reprehensible’, and accused of defacing a national icon. Re-reading the finely produced Faber edition, I find that it contains much that has now become orthodox in its turn. The book is far from as one-sided as some claimed in their anger, and in its account of the genesis and effect of Churchill’s speeches of May and June 1940, still makes a bolder claim then ever Churchill made for himself. More recent studies have confirmed Churchill’s chequered record as wartime grand strategist, and his propensity for favouring strange military options.

But the most critical part of that account was explored at greater length in the final volume of the trilogy, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, which provided a highly controversial account of the Anglo-American Alliance. It suggested how, and why, England had become subordinate to the USA, and it analysed the downsides of this for the British and their Empire. In the aftermath of the most recent trouble into which subservience to the US has brought British foreign policy, the book may make some small claim to prescience.

It is good to have them reprinted here as a trilogy, and I hope they will continue to provide food for thought and material for argument.