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MUSIC: "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who

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Swinging London - the past sent packing -

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and good riddance, too.

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New was what counted. Britain minted fresh.

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No more bowing to tradition. The sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.

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CHOIR SINGS

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It is now 9.20.

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Ludgate Hill crowded this morning

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with thousands of people who've been pouring in since dawn

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to see the body of Winston Churchill on its way to St Paul's Cathedral,

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from which I'm talking at the moment.

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But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died,

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and, all of a sudden, London stopped swinging.

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Out from some timeless wintry fog

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shambled the hairy old beast - history -

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big with memories.

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People in the streets stood in the freezing cold

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as the coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.

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Royalty paid its respects to the Great Commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.

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The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes

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as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.

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Satire held its tongue.

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Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering,

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and started paying attention,

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caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling,

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a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.

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Something immense HAD happened - the death of a patriarch -

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the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.

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What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.

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But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.

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Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,

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a millstone round the neck of the future.

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What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the Sceptered Isle for us mods?

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No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston -

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rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap -

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Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.

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This, in 1984, is London - chief city of Airstrip One -

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a province of the state of Oceania.

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Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but not of pomp - it was the history of people,

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written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English -

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sharp and hard as granite.

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His history was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.

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It was the kind that asked hard questions.

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For all their differences, Orwell and Churchill had this in common -

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they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.

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Look at Churchill and at Orwell, and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.

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You'll see how our past shaped our future.

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MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory

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# Jolly boating weather

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# And a hay harvest breeze

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# Blade on the feather... #

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In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born,

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this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime,

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turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful

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than she's ever been before or since.

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He must've thought it would go on forever.

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90 years later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrap yard.

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But then history has a cruel way with optimism.

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There never was any chance really that Winston Churchill could escape history.

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He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim,

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the great limestone pile of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.

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Winston's father, Randolph -

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boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37,

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seemed set to be the latest Churchill to rise meteorically.

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But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.

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Finally, the Tories let him go. He never got back to power.

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His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess -

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glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious,

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perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.

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But Winston hardly knew his parents.

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As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.

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And, as with all boys of his class, he was off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.

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There he listened, quaking with fear,

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to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms birched.

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Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England

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came from doing 11 years of penal servitude in the public and private schools of England.

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Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life.

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One of them happened one day while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.

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Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy

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had the stuff of politics or the law.

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But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so,

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he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier. And that did it, really.

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Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.

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He'd take his father's broken sword,

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and make the name of Churchill glorious again.

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So Winston charged headlong into the fray - India, Africa, you name it,

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even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history,

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trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.

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And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.

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It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion -

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the muse that fired everything he did -

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his politics, his speech making, his battle cry.

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Reading it, writing it, making it were all inseparable

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in the personality that was unfolding -

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ardent, impetuous, impassioned.

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And it was in the Empire that Winston began to write.

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Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers - and what stories!G

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It helped that he was socially shameless and physically fearless.

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There he was, a fleshy five foot seven, spinning a ripping yarn.

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He knew how to make the headlines, and he knew how to milk them.

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But Winston was never just gung ho for Winston.

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He believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire.

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But he knew next to nothing about what made that Empire really tick - money.

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MUSIC: "The Road To Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

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For while Churchill was humming the chorus of The Road To Mandalay,

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Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it -

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cashing in on tea, teak and, not least, narcotics.

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Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj.

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His job was to supervise the production of poppies and their export to Shanghai,

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ensuring, on behalf of the Empire,

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that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go understocked.

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In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son - Eric.

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Only later would he be known as George Orwell.

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A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England,

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while Richard stayed behind in Burma.

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Home was number 17 Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames - nostalgic, middle class, suburban.

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Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class and Eric Blair at the bottom,

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but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for boys destined to govern the Empire -

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exile to boarding school.

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GEORGE ORWELL: "Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's,

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"I began wetting my bed.

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"Nowadays, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.

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"It is a normal reaction in children who've been moved to a strange place.

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"In those days, however, it was seen as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose

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"and for which the proper cure was a beating.

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"Night after night, I prayed with a fervour never previously obtained in my prayers.

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" 'Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.

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" 'Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.' "

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St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Counties Gulag

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that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on,

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but it WAS his apprenticeship in contempt for the rituals of Empire.

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History lessons, he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.

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"Orgies of dates, with keener boys leaping up and down in their places

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"in their eagerness to shout out the right answers,

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"and not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the events they were naming."

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The torments, the canings,

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the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,

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the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath,

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gave Eric a lifelong horror of dirt and a hatred of a fake service ethos

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for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.

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If you were rich, these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling class.

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But Eric was not rich, not part of the upper class - he got the canings without the promise of the perks.

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His weapon was an air of bloody-minded indifference,

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and when he came here to Eton, he refined that insouciance into an art form.

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If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets,

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he'd show up with his badge askew.

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If Blair was going to recite poetry, it'd be Stevenson's Suicide Club.

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Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.

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Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.

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He was drunk on words, and he wanted everyone to share the intoxication.

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Back home from the Empire in 1900,

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he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.

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Once he found out he had the gift of the gab, he let the eloquence rip,

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drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great trouper of the Edwardian stage.

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Unlike many politicians, he didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating societies.

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He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial North,

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on soap boxes, from the tops of buses, and in music halls, where he really had to earn the cheers.

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Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.

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When he defected to the Liberals in 1904,

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he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England.

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We don't usually think of him as a radical, but all sorts of reforms poured from his fertile mind -

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Labour Exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.

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But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism.

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As Home Secretary, he was too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy -

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deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.

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It made sense, then, to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence where it could do some good.

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At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.

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Three years later, the world was at war.

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Gallipoli, 1915 -

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52,000 allied troops perish in Turkey.

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A bloody fiasco, and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.

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Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.

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Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence,

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the Tories paid back his treachery by booting him out of office.

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Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli,

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Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions

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MUSIC: "The Pretty Ploughboy" by Lesley Nelson-Burns

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Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders,

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using his old army connections

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so that a politician could demote himself to a tommy.

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On the 23rd November 1915, he wrote to his wife Clemmie.

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"My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.

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"I spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.

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"Filth and rubbish everywhere.

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"Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.

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"Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.

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"In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide

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"to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns."

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Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill. He'd served his time.

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Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.

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Eric Blair was too young for the trenches,

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but while at Eton he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.

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When the war ended, he may have felt guilty, like many of his generation, guilt for missing the slaughter.

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The next step after Eton should have been Oxford,

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but, like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.

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His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.

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But even if he'd had the chance, it's likely he'd have rejected the moneyed escalator through privilege.

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Instead, it was off to the colonies.

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There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.

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He might've even shared Churchill's idealism about the do-good Empire.

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Five years in the Burmese police,

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perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,

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smartly cured him of that. Doing his job as efficiently as he could,

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rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.

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Those he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't see themselves as criminals,

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but victims of foreign conquerors.

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All over the Empire, there were men who hated it as heartily as he did,

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but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.

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One incident, more than any other, brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.

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An elephant had broken its chains and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.

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Blair picked up his rifle.

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- Shall I call the hunters? 
- No, rouse no-one.

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I'll try and get him myself.

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When he found the beast, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth,

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it was obvious there was no reason to kill it, except the crowd expected him to.

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"I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly,

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"and it was at this moment, as I stood with the rifle in my hands,

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"that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.

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"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,

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"seemingly the lead actor of the peace.

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"But, in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.

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"When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,

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"but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.

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"In that instant, in too short a time even for the bullet to get there,

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"a mysterious, terrible change came over the elephant.

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"He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.

227
00:21:05,600 --> 00:21:10,120
"In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.

228
00:21:11,120 --> 00:21:15,160
"I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.

229
00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:22,200
"I often wondered, had any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool?"

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00:21:26,840 --> 00:21:31,680
MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory

231
00:21:32,720 --> 00:21:39,040
In 1927, Blair went home, where a sniff of the English air

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00:21:39,040 --> 00:21:43,960
convinced him he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.

233
00:21:43,960 --> 00:21:47,480
Home was here at Southwold -

234
00:21:47,480 --> 00:21:52,400
a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees

235
00:21:52,400 --> 00:21:55,920
that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.

236
00:21:55,920 --> 00:22:02,760
Eric's sister Avril kept a teashop, mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.

237
00:22:02,760 --> 00:22:10,000
When Eric announced to the family that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer,

238
00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:13,640
you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.

239
00:22:20,240 --> 00:22:24,440
And what was the England that Eric had come home to?

240
00:22:24,440 --> 00:22:28,280
A country he'd later describe as resembling a family,

241
00:22:28,280 --> 00:22:30,880
a rather stuffy Victorian family

242
00:22:30,880 --> 00:22:36,960
where rich relations are kowtowed to, and poor relations are horribly sat upon,

243
00:22:36,960 --> 00:22:41,200
where the young are thwarted, and power is in the hands

244
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:45,040
of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

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00:22:45,040 --> 00:22:50,080
A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.

246
00:22:50,080 --> 00:22:57,040
'May 1926, the General Strike. Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight...'

247
00:22:57,040 --> 00:23:00,560
One of those in control was Winston Churchill.

248
00:23:00,560 --> 00:23:03,080
After 20 years away from the Tories,

249
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he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike.

250
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:16,240
Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,

251
00:23:16,240 --> 00:23:22,080
which only made Eric all the more determined to expiate the sins of empire.

252
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In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place, he couldn't wait to lose his.

253
00:23:28,680 --> 00:23:34,800
Most people who were restless with their lot in life wanted to rise above their station.

254
00:23:34,800 --> 00:23:39,480
Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.

255
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:48,840
There was something almost Franciscan about his nose dive into squalor.

256
00:23:48,840 --> 00:23:53,520
It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability,

257
00:23:53,520 --> 00:23:58,760
it was the calculated embrace of all that repelled the fastidious Eric -

258
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muck, indescribably evil smells.

259
00:24:02,840 --> 00:24:07,200
When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit,

260
00:24:07,200 --> 00:24:10,320
he was making a point, at least to himself,

261
00:24:10,320 --> 00:24:15,680
that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.

262
00:24:15,680 --> 00:24:23,200
It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.

263
00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:29,320
For two years, Blair did a Cook's tour of destitution -

264
00:24:29,320 --> 00:24:33,760
comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.

265
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:39,200
In the bathroom of one especially horrible doss house, or spike,

266
00:24:39,200 --> 00:24:41,800
he finally got down to basic truths.

267
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"It was a disgusting sight.

268
00:24:46,560 --> 00:24:51,080
"All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed,

269
00:24:51,080 --> 00:24:56,120
"the grime, the rents and patches, the string doing duty for buttons,

270
00:24:56,120 --> 00:24:59,600
"the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,

271
00:24:59,600 --> 00:25:03,080
"some of them holes held together by dirt.

272
00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:06,920
"The room became a press of steaming nudity,

273
00:25:06,920 --> 00:25:13,560
"the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly sub-faecal stench native to the spike."

274
00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:21,520
He didn't have to do it, of course. He wasn't that hard up.

275
00:25:21,520 --> 00:25:26,200
But there was nothing second-hand about Blair, or Churchill.

276
00:25:26,200 --> 00:25:28,720
Both were doers, not lookers.

277
00:25:28,720 --> 00:25:36,080
Whether in the trenches or the doss houses, they needed to live what they talked about.

278
00:25:36,080 --> 00:25:43,120
In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, Down And Out In Paris And London,

279
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but the name on the cover was not Blair, but pseudonym George Orwell.

280
00:25:48,160 --> 00:25:52,920
There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George,

281
00:25:52,920 --> 00:25:57,840
and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, linked him to the English landscape.

282
00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:04,120
But the landscape through which Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,

283
00:26:04,120 --> 00:26:06,640
but gutters and gasworks.

284
00:26:06,640 --> 00:26:10,680
MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake

285
00:26:13,200 --> 00:26:19,840
In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades -

286
00:26:19,840 --> 00:26:25,880
Orwell declared war on the Empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.

287
00:26:25,880 --> 00:26:31,520
Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.

288
00:26:31,520 --> 00:26:35,320
But Orwell had been there, and he knew better.

289
00:26:35,320 --> 00:26:40,160
He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.

290
00:26:40,160 --> 00:26:46,000
The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals,

291
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:49,520
but our bedrock was coke and nutty slack.

292
00:26:49,520 --> 00:26:53,280
But then, in the '30s, that bedrock caved in.

293
00:26:53,280 --> 00:26:59,560
Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.

294
00:27:00,560 --> 00:27:06,800
This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the Empire, had finally come to -

295
00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:12,840
from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.

296
00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:16,760
Never had the country been so bitterly divided.

297
00:27:19,720 --> 00:27:24,640
In the South, they built model villages with miniature collieries,

298
00:27:24,640 --> 00:27:29,320
miniature farms and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.

299
00:27:29,320 --> 00:27:32,760
In Wales, Scotland and the North of England,

300
00:27:32,760 --> 00:27:37,840
that hill would've been a slagheap, and there wouldn't be a ploughboy,

301
00:27:37,840 --> 00:27:42,800
but desperate scramblers looking for coal waste with their bare hands.

302
00:27:42,800 --> 00:27:48,640
Orwell, who cherished the countryside with an unsentimental, almost feral, passion,

303
00:27:48,640 --> 00:27:53,480
now headed for this underworld, the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.

304
00:27:53,480 --> 00:27:58,680
When his publisher asked him to write about the industrial North,

305
00:27:58,680 --> 00:28:03,720
Orwell grabbed the chance, and set out on the Road to Wigan Pier.

306
00:28:03,720 --> 00:28:07,160
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

307
00:28:08,360 --> 00:28:13,040
What he found was a town broken by depression,

308
00:28:13,040 --> 00:28:16,280
coated in grime which befouled everything -

309
00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:23,880
black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him, a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.

310
00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:29,760
And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory -

311
00:28:29,760 --> 00:28:36,720
get up at 3.45am, crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages, sometimes for miles.

312
00:28:36,720 --> 00:28:41,760
As far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.

313
00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:46,800
When he wasn't down the pits, Orwell was here, in Wigan public library.

314
00:28:46,800 --> 00:28:49,240
His name's in the visitors' book -

315
00:28:49,240 --> 00:28:53,600
EA Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.

316
00:28:53,600 --> 00:29:00,840
He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet - wages, rents and prices.

317
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:08,040
The Road To Wigan Pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day from right and left.

318
00:29:08,040 --> 00:29:11,560
Conservatives thought it was Bolshevik trash,

319
00:29:11,560 --> 00:29:16,680
but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic,

320
00:29:16,680 --> 00:29:24,440
a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.

321
00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:31,080
None of this prevented The Road To Wigan Pier from being a massive best seller. Why?

322
00:29:31,080 --> 00:29:36,360
Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it.

323
00:29:36,360 --> 00:29:40,040
Instead, he made a real work of literature.

324
00:29:40,040 --> 00:29:46,080
When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses,

325
00:29:46,080 --> 00:29:50,120
you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression -

326
00:29:50,120 --> 00:29:53,960
someone who could make you hear, see and feel

327
00:29:53,960 --> 00:29:58,400
the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.

328
00:29:58,400 --> 00:30:03,080
You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.

329
00:30:05,400 --> 00:30:10,040
One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley

330
00:30:10,040 --> 00:30:14,880
laud fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.

331
00:30:14,880 --> 00:30:21,160
To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley

332
00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:24,760
ended up cheering him. A fight was coming,

333
00:30:24,760 --> 00:30:31,000
and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain,

334
00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:35,040
were too gutless to join in. What was THEIR message?

335
00:30:35,040 --> 00:30:39,080
Peace in our time, or do your business somewhere else

336
00:30:39,080 --> 00:30:42,280
while we get on with hoeing the garden(!)

337
00:30:42,280 --> 00:30:48,480
'This is the BBC Home Service. Hello, children. That's a familiar voice...'

338
00:30:48,480 --> 00:30:52,720
Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.

339
00:30:52,720 --> 00:30:59,600
Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.

340
00:30:59,600 --> 00:31:05,120
All very regrettable no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.

341
00:31:07,000 --> 00:31:10,680
But the world out there was turning very ugly.

342
00:31:10,680 --> 00:31:16,120
Fascism was spreading across Europe. A cloud fell over the village green.

343
00:31:16,120 --> 00:31:20,160
It was time to make a choice. Orwell made his.

344
00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:24,360
In December 1936, he set off for Spain.

345
00:31:27,000 --> 00:31:32,040
Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified Balaclava,

346
00:31:32,040 --> 00:31:38,080
the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.

347
00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:42,320
All that police training in Burma had a use after all.

348
00:31:42,320 --> 00:31:47,520
But after four months at the front, Orwell, conspicuous at six foot two,

349
00:31:47,520 --> 00:31:50,120
took a bullet through the neck.

350
00:31:51,400 --> 00:31:55,760
He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.

351
00:31:55,760 --> 00:31:59,160
He'd seen his comrades brutally crushed,

352
00:31:59,160 --> 00:32:02,720
not just by Franco, but also by the communists.

353
00:32:02,720 --> 00:32:09,360
The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism, especially Stalin's brand.

354
00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:16,000
It was because Orwell hoped for a home-grown British revolution,

355
00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:19,520
and because he was sick of excuses for Stalin -

356
00:32:19,520 --> 00:32:25,560
all those coffee house commissars prepared to forgive him just because he wasn't Hitler -

357
00:32:25,560 --> 00:32:30,000
that he wrote the real history of the Bolshevik revolution.

358
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:35,520
In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,

359
00:32:35,520 --> 00:32:38,040
the barnyard fable.

360
00:32:42,440 --> 00:32:47,360
"On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth

361
00:32:47,360 --> 00:32:51,960
"in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.

362
00:32:51,960 --> 00:32:57,120
"However, the details of the story did not come to me for some time,

363
00:32:57,120 --> 00:33:03,000
"until one day I saw a boy driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path,

364
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:05,520
"whipping it if it tried to turn.

365
00:33:05,520 --> 00:33:10,560
"It struck me that if only animals became aware of their strength,

366
00:33:10,560 --> 00:33:13,280
"we should have no power over them."

367
00:33:26,600 --> 00:33:31,960
Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,

368
00:33:31,960 --> 00:33:36,720
but already Orwell was reinventing the art of political writing.

369
00:33:36,720 --> 00:33:41,920
Tending to his goats and chickens at his cold cottage in Hertfordshire,

370
00:33:41,920 --> 00:33:47,280
fighting off the early signs of TB, he set about purging the language

371
00:33:47,280 --> 00:33:50,520
of the pompous preaching of the official left

372
00:33:50,520 --> 00:33:54,560
and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.

373
00:33:56,800 --> 00:34:00,320
As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,

374
00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:05,120
Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his mansion in Kent,

375
00:34:05,120 --> 00:34:09,680
brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.

376
00:34:09,680 --> 00:34:16,200
For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been,

377
00:34:16,200 --> 00:34:22,960
embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.

378
00:34:22,960 --> 00:34:27,480
So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing,

379
00:34:27,480 --> 00:34:32,240
and as he wrote thousands of pages on the Duke of Marlborough,

380
00:34:32,240 --> 00:34:37,000
thousands more on the History Of The English-speaking Peoples -

381
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:42,040
keeping company with generations who'd faced invasion before -

382
00:34:42,040 --> 00:34:47,080
so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.

383
00:34:47,080 --> 00:34:53,880
First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of Sunday hunts and gymkhanas,

384
00:34:53,880 --> 00:34:59,920
had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain WOULD share Europe's fate.

385
00:34:59,920 --> 00:35:06,280
WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe.

386
00:35:06,280 --> 00:35:09,800
' "Let us leave it, with its hatred and its armaments,

387
00:35:09,800 --> 00:35:15,280
' "to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels."

388
00:35:15,280 --> 00:35:18,960
'There would be much to be said for this plan

389
00:35:18,960 --> 00:35:23,520
'if we could unfasten Britain from its rock foundation,

390
00:35:23,520 --> 00:35:28,560
'and could tow it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

391
00:35:28,560 --> 00:35:33,600
'Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.'

392
00:35:33,600 --> 00:35:38,920
Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers -

393
00:35:38,920 --> 00:35:44,040
men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that the Nazis

394
00:35:44,040 --> 00:35:51,280
were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war,

395
00:35:51,280 --> 00:35:54,800
and who would stop at reasonable demands.

396
00:35:54,800 --> 00:36:02,240
The appeasers were like men who thought you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two,

397
00:36:02,240 --> 00:36:07,280
in the hope that, by the time it got to you, it would be full.

398
00:36:09,200 --> 00:36:13,440
In 1938, Hitler, who'd already annexed Austria,

399
00:36:13,440 --> 00:36:18,280
threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.

400
00:36:18,280 --> 00:36:24,480
Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister, ran to Munich and served it up.

401
00:36:24,480 --> 00:36:29,840
I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,

402
00:36:29,840 --> 00:36:32,600
and here is the paper

403
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:37,400
which bears his name upon it as well as mine.

404
00:36:37,400 --> 00:36:40,440
CHEERING

405
00:36:42,080 --> 00:36:46,920
For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,

406
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:50,360
but the deepest stain on our history -

407
00:36:50,360 --> 00:36:54,600
the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption

408
00:36:54,600 --> 00:36:58,880
that democracies were, by definition, spineless.

409
00:36:58,880 --> 00:37:04,720
CHURCHILL: 'All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.

410
00:37:04,720 --> 00:37:08,320
'Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.

411
00:37:08,320 --> 00:37:12,120
'We have passed an awful milestone in our history,

412
00:37:12,120 --> 00:37:16,160
'when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged,

413
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:19,840
'and the terrible words have, for the time being,

414
00:37:19,840 --> 00:37:23,360
'been pronounced against the Western democracies,

415
00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:27,720
' "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." '

416
00:37:31,920 --> 00:37:35,960
When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,

417
00:37:35,960 --> 00:37:41,160
Hitler went and occupied Prague, Chamberlain took it personally,

418
00:37:41,160 --> 00:37:45,800
realising that he, and the country, had been royally had.

419
00:37:48,480 --> 00:37:54,000
On the 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

420
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:58,040
Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.

421
00:37:58,040 --> 00:38:02,880
- NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN:
- 'This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin

422
00:38:02,880 --> 00:38:06,600
'handed the German government a final note

423
00:38:06,600 --> 00:38:12,120
'stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock

424
00:38:12,120 --> 00:38:17,840
'that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

425
00:38:17,840 --> 00:38:21,880
'a state of war would exist between us.

426
00:38:21,880 --> 00:38:27,040
'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,

427
00:38:27,040 --> 00:38:33,240
'and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'

428
00:38:36,160 --> 00:38:39,600
Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice

429
00:38:39,600 --> 00:38:45,040
announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.

430
00:38:45,040 --> 00:38:48,080
The evacuation of children began.

431
00:38:53,320 --> 00:38:58,640
None of this meant Chamberlain would hand the reins over to Churchill.

432
00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:03,160
For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,

433
00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:07,560
Churchill was still mistrusted by most of his party.

434
00:39:07,560 --> 00:39:13,960
But the swing in public opinion towards him was so great it seemed prudent to have him in government,

435
00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:21,400
and, on the day war was declared, he was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.

436
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:27,640
But, as if in a rerun of Gallipoli, Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster

437
00:39:27,640 --> 00:39:33,680
when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway backfired horribly.

438
00:39:38,480 --> 00:39:43,240
Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.

439
00:39:43,240 --> 00:39:49,600
Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution made it seem like he at least was doing his best.

440
00:39:49,600 --> 00:39:56,000
Next to Neville Chamberlain - gaunt, weary, presiding over a front bench of old geezers -

441
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,200
Churchill, though an old geezer himself,

442
00:39:59,200 --> 00:40:04,040
seemed like a red hot volcano - a lava flow of plans and strategies.

443
00:40:05,080 --> 00:40:10,120
Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low,

444
00:40:10,120 --> 00:40:15,040
and, on the 10th May 1940, he was finally forced to resign.

445
00:40:16,680 --> 00:40:21,840
The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's history.

446
00:40:21,840 --> 00:40:24,680
Two vital questions were at stake -

447
00:40:24,680 --> 00:40:31,520
who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister and how would HE deal with the Nazi war machine?

448
00:40:31,520 --> 00:40:35,720
Not only the survival of our national independence,

449
00:40:35,720 --> 00:40:40,320
but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.

450
00:40:40,320 --> 00:40:46,960
Two kinds of men, and of England, were now in play for the leadership of the country.

451
00:40:46,960 --> 00:40:53,400
In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties -

452
00:40:53,400 --> 00:40:57,000
solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.

453
00:40:57,000 --> 00:41:01,520
And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.

454
00:41:01,520 --> 00:41:06,360
But, in the best judgment of his life, Halifax turned the job down.

455
00:41:06,360 --> 00:41:11,200
In the pit of his stomach he knew he couldn't be a war leader.

456
00:41:11,200 --> 00:41:16,200
Winston had seen the face of battle, Halifax had only hunted foxes.

457
00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:24,920
On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the Palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.

458
00:41:24,920 --> 00:41:30,640
On the same day, came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.

459
00:41:30,640 --> 00:41:36,480
Now, of course, we all know that the "finest hour" was waiting in the wings.

460
00:41:36,480 --> 00:41:41,320
But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,

461
00:41:41,320 --> 00:41:47,560
when Britain came closer than at any other time in history to being overwhelmed.

462
00:41:47,560 --> 00:41:52,800
Belgium and Holland were going under and France would join them.

463
00:41:52,800 --> 00:41:57,440
250,000 British troops were trapped in Northern France

464
00:41:57,440 --> 00:42:00,360
with hardly any hope of a safe exit.

465
00:42:00,360 --> 00:42:06,400
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue,

466
00:42:06,400 --> 00:42:14,040
and hardly anyone who counted thought that we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.

467
00:42:15,760 --> 00:42:21,800
Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech,

468
00:42:21,800 --> 00:42:26,040
shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.

469
00:42:27,160 --> 00:42:32,040
'I would say to the House, as I said to those who joined the government,

470
00:42:32,040 --> 00:42:38,640
'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

471
00:42:38,640 --> 00:42:44,320
'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

472
00:42:44,320 --> 00:42:48,600
'We have before us many months of struggle and suffering.

473
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:52,040
'You ask, "What is our policy?"

474
00:42:52,040 --> 00:42:58,000
'I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might,

475
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:04,360
'with all the strength that God can give us. To wage war against a monstrous tyranny

476
00:43:04,360 --> 00:43:10,400
'never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.

477
00:43:10,400 --> 00:43:15,320
'That is our policy. You ask, "What is our aim?"

478
00:43:15,320 --> 00:43:18,920
'I can answer in one word, victory.

479
00:43:18,920 --> 00:43:21,680
'Victory at all costs.

480
00:43:21,680 --> 00:43:28,080
'Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be.

481
00:43:28,080 --> 00:43:31,720
'For without victory there is no survival.'

482
00:43:35,520 --> 00:43:39,960
We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation

483
00:43:39,960 --> 00:43:46,000
into the great prince girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.

484
00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:48,600
But the truth was very different.

485
00:43:48,600 --> 00:43:53,240
The military men assumed he would have to eat his words.

486
00:43:53,240 --> 00:43:59,120
The civil servants, who always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes

487
00:43:59,120 --> 00:44:03,960
at another theatrical performance. And politicians, like Halifax,

488
00:44:03,960 --> 00:44:10,160
believed that, sooner or later, Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.

489
00:44:11,080 --> 00:44:16,320
It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.

490
00:44:16,320 --> 00:44:23,040
Churchill was having none of it. In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,

491
00:44:23,040 --> 00:44:27,880
he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his life

492
00:44:27,880 --> 00:44:32,920
to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.

493
00:44:35,160 --> 00:44:41,280
The battle FOR Britain then, started not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,

494
00:44:41,280 --> 00:44:45,800
but here behind the closed doors of the Cabinet War Room.

495
00:44:45,800 --> 00:44:52,760
In combat were Halifax and Churchill, men with very different ideas of how to save the country.

496
00:44:56,480 --> 00:45:03,520
In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire

497
00:45:03,520 --> 00:45:08,360
that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.

498
00:45:08,360 --> 00:45:14,400
"The very thought," he said, "of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside -

499
00:45:14,400 --> 00:45:19,240
"this fragment of undying England - was an insult and an outrage."

500
00:45:19,240 --> 00:45:21,880
Churchill would not have disagreed.

501
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:29,560
But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York or for some unreal dream of village England.

502
00:45:29,560 --> 00:45:34,400
He wasn't fighting for Britain at all just as a piece of geography.

503
00:45:34,400 --> 00:45:39,440
He was fighting for the meaning of being British, and that was an idea,

504
00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:44,720
a precious idea we'd given to the world - freedom and the rule of law.

505
00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:52,160
Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Fuhrer, would be a mock Britain.

506
00:45:52,160 --> 00:45:56,840
Not worthy of the name really, let alone of our long history.

507
00:45:56,840 --> 00:46:03,800
Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.

508
00:46:05,600 --> 00:46:10,520
When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on the 28th May,

509
00:46:10,520 --> 00:46:15,560
he was greeted not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.

510
00:46:15,560 --> 00:46:21,600
There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.

511
00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:31,920
In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been,

512
00:46:31,920 --> 00:46:36,600
and yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe

513
00:46:36,600 --> 00:46:40,640
that made the difference between surrender and survival.

514
00:46:40,640 --> 00:46:44,080
The qualities which made him so impossible -

515
00:46:44,080 --> 00:46:50,880
his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history -

516
00:46:50,880 --> 00:46:55,920
were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.

517
00:46:57,920 --> 00:47:02,600
In the days ahead, Churchill learned that, against all predictions,

518
00:47:02,600 --> 00:47:08,800
250,000 British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk in 1,000 little ships -

519
00:47:08,800 --> 00:47:14,040
the core of the army that'd return almost exactly four years later.

520
00:47:14,040 --> 00:47:20,800
It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later, in June 1940,

521
00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:27,720
which was, as one MP said, "Worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years."

522
00:47:30,680 --> 00:47:34,960
'We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France.

523
00:47:34,960 --> 00:47:38,480
'We shall fight on the seas and oceans.

524
00:47:38,480 --> 00:47:44,520
'We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.

525
00:47:44,520 --> 00:47:48,680
'We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.

526
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:53,440
'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.

527
00:47:53,440 --> 00:47:57,480
'We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

528
00:47:57,480 --> 00:48:02,240
'We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!'

529
00:48:04,040 --> 00:48:08,880
This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell,

530
00:48:08,880 --> 00:48:12,400
for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,

531
00:48:12,400 --> 00:48:17,440
was so relieved that Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote,

532
00:48:17,440 --> 00:48:19,960
"that wars were won by fighting."

533
00:48:19,960 --> 00:48:24,800
Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,

534
00:48:24,800 --> 00:48:30,080
though one loved the Empire and the other detested it, both understood

535
00:48:30,080 --> 00:48:37,200
that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them from the Nazis and the defeatists.

536
00:48:38,240 --> 00:48:42,080
Orwell's TB, at this stage, was still undiagnosed,

537
00:48:42,080 --> 00:48:48,120
but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.

538
00:48:48,120 --> 00:48:55,040
Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.

539
00:48:56,040 --> 00:48:58,400
During the months of the Blitz,

540
00:48:58,400 --> 00:49:04,440
there were the two of them, in the thick of the action, drawn like small boys to danger.

541
00:49:04,440 --> 00:49:10,480
"Orwell," someone said, "felt at home amidst the bombs, bravery and the danger."

542
00:49:10,480 --> 00:49:15,240
Churchill should've slept somewhere safe like the Cabinet War Rooms,

543
00:49:15,240 --> 00:49:19,680
but, to the horror of staff, he want back to Number Ten.

544
00:49:19,680 --> 00:49:24,000
Sometimes, he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.

545
00:49:28,560 --> 00:49:34,800
Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting,

546
00:49:34,800 --> 00:49:37,320
but they were different visions.

547
00:49:37,320 --> 00:49:43,560
Churchill's was Shakespearean, with the war leader stalking through the night camp,

548
00:49:43,560 --> 00:49:47,000
drinking the affection of ordinary people.

549
00:49:47,000 --> 00:49:51,560
George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes -

550
00:49:51,560 --> 00:49:55,320
air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service -

551
00:49:55,320 --> 00:50:00,640
and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the Levellers and the Chartists.

552
00:50:00,640 --> 00:50:04,560
The workers of Britain didn't take on the Luftwaffe

553
00:50:04,560 --> 00:50:09,600
to make the nation safe for Halifax and the owners of country houses,

554
00:50:09,600 --> 00:50:14,400
but to create a nation that'd help the miners of Wigan,

555
00:50:14,400 --> 00:50:19,240
and millions like them, have some of the common decencies of life.

556
00:50:20,280 --> 00:50:26,800
The trouble was the way that war had to be won - not by the people's army of old England,

557
00:50:26,800 --> 00:50:31,840
but by the people's army of the United States and the Soviet Union.

558
00:50:31,840 --> 00:50:39,120
Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell,

559
00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:46,560
but if being a junior partner to America was the price to be paid for defeating fascism, so be it.

560
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:53,040
Churchill was, in any case, less of the Little Englander than Orwell.

561
00:50:53,040 --> 00:50:58,440
He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America as much as Orwell didn't.

562
00:50:58,440 --> 00:51:03,760
For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive transatlantic thing.

563
00:51:03,760 --> 00:51:11,000
For Orwell, democracy American-style was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.

564
00:51:12,240 --> 00:51:17,080
For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear -

565
00:51:17,080 --> 00:51:21,760
if war meant dying together, peace meant living together,

566
00:51:21,760 --> 00:51:27,840
not in the slums of Britain, but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.

567
00:51:27,840 --> 00:51:34,280
RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Newspapers carry the astonishing news to an amazed public!

568
00:51:34,280 --> 00:51:36,840
'Labour landslide!'

569
00:51:36,840 --> 00:51:39,120
In the general election,

570
00:51:39,120 --> 00:51:43,760
Churchill was thanked by the nation by being handed a terrible drubbing.

571
00:51:43,760 --> 00:51:47,760
Labour took office with a mandate for reform.

572
00:51:47,760 --> 00:51:51,520
The socialist press greeted the triumph

573
00:51:51,520 --> 00:51:54,040
as the coming of the New Jerusalem.

574
00:51:56,200 --> 00:52:00,440
But instead of joining the hallelujah chorus,

575
00:52:00,440 --> 00:52:06,400
Orwell, like Churchill, was worried about a new world order

576
00:52:06,400 --> 00:52:09,760
where we would be slaves in another way.

577
00:52:09,760 --> 00:52:15,800
CHURCHILL: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,

578
00:52:15,800 --> 00:52:20,040
'an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.

579
00:52:20,040 --> 00:52:24,560
'Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient...'

580
00:52:24,560 --> 00:52:30,600
- VOICE ON RADIO: 
- 'Baileys, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.

581
00:52:30,600 --> 00:52:35,720
'Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly, gradually becoming...'

582
00:52:35,720 --> 00:52:39,760
To clear his head of the static hum of postwar London,

583
00:52:39,760 --> 00:52:44,440
Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,

584
00:52:44,440 --> 00:52:49,080
to the very edge of the kingdom - the Hebridean island of Jura.

585
00:52:49,080 --> 00:52:53,720
No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.

586
00:52:53,720 --> 00:52:59,960
And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find, typing in bed with the machine on his knees,

587
00:52:59,960 --> 00:53:07,200
knowing he hadn't long to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain -

588
00:53:07,200 --> 00:53:11,280
the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.

589
00:53:11,280 --> 00:53:14,920
As Churchill issued his grim warnings,

590
00:53:14,920 --> 00:53:20,160
Orwell created a common or garden plain man's Winston - Winston Smith.

591
00:53:20,160 --> 00:53:23,000
The year was 1948.

592
00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:32,880
In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,

593
00:53:32,880 --> 00:53:35,640
no laughter but that of triumph.

594
00:53:35,640 --> 00:53:39,080
No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,

595
00:53:39,080 --> 00:53:43,720
but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.

596
00:53:43,720 --> 00:53:46,240
If you want a picture of the future,

597
00:53:46,240 --> 00:53:51,280
imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

598
00:53:53,120 --> 00:53:56,160
When we think of 1984,

599
00:53:56,160 --> 00:54:02,360
most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother,

600
00:54:02,360 --> 00:54:07,680
a world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth.

601
00:54:07,680 --> 00:54:12,920
But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical

602
00:54:12,920 --> 00:54:17,120
when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,

603
00:54:17,120 --> 00:54:23,880
a guerrilla action fought, not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties,

604
00:54:23,880 --> 00:54:27,400
reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity -

605
00:54:27,400 --> 00:54:33,480
a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.

606
00:54:33,480 --> 00:54:37,080
Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,

607
00:54:37,080 --> 00:54:41,920
prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were absolutely normal.

608
00:54:41,920 --> 00:54:46,960
The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.

609
00:54:46,960 --> 00:54:53,480
The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.

610
00:54:55,680 --> 00:55:00,520
Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,

611
00:55:00,520 --> 00:55:08,000
the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.

612
00:55:08,000 --> 00:55:14,440
It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist, on the face of it, such an impossible couple -

613
00:55:14,440 --> 00:55:16,960
the most unlikely of allies.

614
00:55:18,640 --> 00:55:22,880
George Orwell died in 1950. He was 46.

615
00:55:22,880 --> 00:55:27,720
The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Churchill -

616
00:55:27,720 --> 00:55:30,960
a review of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour.

617
00:55:30,960 --> 00:55:35,560
You'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's heroics,

618
00:55:35,560 --> 00:55:39,200
but he bestows the greatest compliment he could -

619
00:55:39,200 --> 00:55:45,160
that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.

620
00:55:45,160 --> 00:55:50,240
And it was a verdict shared by those who lined the streets of London

621
00:55:50,240 --> 00:55:54,200
when Churchill finally died in 1965.

622
00:55:56,880 --> 00:55:59,400
But then, when it counted,

623
00:55:59,400 --> 00:56:05,040
neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing - toed the party line.

624
00:56:05,040 --> 00:56:11,560
More important was their belief that if Britain was to be distinctive in the age of super-states,

625
00:56:11,560 --> 00:56:16,400
it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,

626
00:56:16,400 --> 00:56:21,440
that which tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.

627
00:56:22,880 --> 00:56:27,400
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.

628
00:56:27,400 --> 00:56:32,240
It's written, not to revere the dead, but inspire the living.

629
00:56:32,240 --> 00:56:36,680
It's our cultural bloodstream - the secret of who we are.

630
00:56:36,680 --> 00:56:42,800
And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented,

631
00:56:42,800 --> 00:56:46,160
to celebrate what should be celebrated.

632
00:56:46,160 --> 00:56:51,000
And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,

633
00:56:51,000 --> 00:56:57,080
well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much.

634
00:56:57,080 --> 00:57:00,680
And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.

635
00:57:00,680 --> 00:57:05,200
# There were three ravens sat on a tree

636
00:57:05,200 --> 00:57:09,800
# Down a-down, hey down, a-down

637
00:57:11,000 --> 00:57:15,120
# They were as black as they might be

638
00:57:15,120 --> 00:57:19,720
# With a down, down, down

639
00:57:19,720 --> 00:57:24,760
# Then one of them said to his mate

640
00:57:24,760 --> 00:57:28,880
# "Where shall we now our breakfast take?"

641
00:57:28,880 --> 00:57:35,520
# With a down, derry, derry down, down

642
00:57:37,680 --> 00:57:42,760
# She lifted up his bloody head

643
00:57:42,760 --> 00:57:48,000
# Down a-down, hey down, a-down

644
00:57:49,000 --> 00:57:53,160
# And kissed his wounds that were so red

645
00:57:53,160 --> 00:57:57,200
# With a down, down, down

646
00:57:57,200 --> 00:58:01,800
# She got him up upon her back

647
00:58:01,800 --> 00:58:07,520
# And carried him to earthen lake

648
00:58:07,520 --> 00:58:12,560
# With a down, derry, derry down, down

649
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:47,440
# She buried him before the prime

650
00:58:48,800 --> 00:58:51,480
# Ah, derry

651
00:58:51,480 --> 00:58:57,760
# She was dead herself ere evensong time

652
00:58:59,560 --> 00:59:04,080
# God, send every gentleman

653
00:59:04,080 --> 00:59:08,920
# Such hawks, such hounds

654
00:59:08,920 --> 00:59:13,880
# And such a land. #

655
00:59:16,880 --> 00:59:20,920
Subtitles by Raymond Morrison BBC Broadcast 2002

656
00:59:20,920 --> 00:59:23,960
E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk