MUSIC: "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who
Swinging London - the past sent packing -
and good riddance, too.
New was what counted. Britain minted fresh.
No more bowing to tradition. The sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.
CHOIR SINGS
It is now 9.20.
Ludgate Hill crowded this morning
with thousands of people who've been pouring in since dawn
to see the body of Winston Churchill on its way to St Paul's Cathedral,
from which I'm talking at the moment.
But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died,
and, all of a sudden, London stopped swinging.
Out from some timeless wintry fog
shambled the hairy old beast - history -
big with memories.
People in the streets stood in the freezing cold
as the coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.
Royalty paid its respects to the Great Commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.
The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes
as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.
Satire held its tongue.
Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering,
and started paying attention,
caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling,
a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.
Something immense HAD happened - the death of a patriarch -
the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.
What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.
But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.
Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,
a millstone round the neck of the future.
What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the Sceptered Isle for us mods?
No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston -
rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap -
Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.
This, in 1984, is London - chief city of Airstrip One -
a province of the state of Oceania.
Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but not of pomp - it was the history of people,
written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English -
sharp and hard as granite.
His history was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.
It was the kind that asked hard questions.
For all their differences, Orwell and Churchill had this in common -
they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.
Look at Churchill and at Orwell, and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.
You'll see how our past shaped our future.
MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory
# Jolly boating weather
# And a hay harvest breeze
# Blade on the feather... #
In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born,
this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime,
turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful
than she's ever been before or since.
He must've thought it would go on forever.
90 years later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrap yard.
But then history has a cruel way with optimism.
There never was any chance really that Winston Churchill could escape history.
He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim,
the great limestone pile of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.
Winston's father, Randolph -
boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37,
seemed set to be the latest Churchill to rise meteorically.
But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.
Finally, the Tories let him go. He never got back to power.
His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess -
glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious,
perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.
But Winston hardly knew his parents.
As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.
And, as with all boys of his class, he was off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.
There he listened, quaking with fear,
to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms birched.
Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England
came from doing 11 years of penal servitude in the public and private schools of England.
Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life.
One of them happened one day while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.
Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy
had the stuff of politics or the law.
But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so,
he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier. And that did it, really.
Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.
He'd take his father's broken sword,
and make the name of Churchill glorious again.
So Winston charged headlong into the fray - India, Africa, you name it,
even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history,
trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.
And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.
It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion -
the muse that fired everything he did -
his politics, his speech making, his battle cry.
Reading it, writing it, making it were all inseparable
in the personality that was unfolding -
ardent, impetuous, impassioned.
And it was in the Empire that Winston began to write.
Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers - and what stories!G
It helped that he was socially shameless and physically fearless.
There he was, a fleshy five foot seven, spinning a ripping yarn.
He knew how to make the headlines, and he knew how to milk them.
But Winston was never just gung ho for Winston.
He believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire.
But he knew next to nothing about what made that Empire really tick - money.
MUSIC: "The Road To Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling
For while Churchill was humming the chorus of The Road To Mandalay,
Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it -
cashing in on tea, teak and, not least, narcotics.
Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj.
His job was to supervise the production of poppies and their export to Shanghai,
ensuring, on behalf of the Empire,
that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go understocked.
In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son - Eric.
Only later would he be known as George Orwell.
A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England,
while Richard stayed behind in Burma.
Home was number 17 Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames - nostalgic, middle class, suburban.
Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class and Eric Blair at the bottom,
but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for boys destined to govern the Empire -
exile to boarding school.
GEORGE ORWELL: "Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's,
"I began wetting my bed.
"Nowadays, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.
"It is a normal reaction in children who've been moved to a strange place.
"In those days, however, it was seen as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose
"and for which the proper cure was a beating.
"Night after night, I prayed with a fervour never previously obtained in my prayers.
" 'Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
" 'Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.' "
St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Counties Gulag
that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on,
but it WAS his apprenticeship in contempt for the rituals of Empire.
History lessons, he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.
"Orgies of dates, with keener boys leaping up and down in their places
"in their eagerness to shout out the right answers,
"and not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the events they were naming."
The torments, the canings,
the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,
the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath,
gave Eric a lifelong horror of dirt and a hatred of a fake service ethos
for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.
If you were rich, these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling class.
But Eric was not rich, not part of the upper class - he got the canings without the promise of the perks.
His weapon was an air of bloody-minded indifference,
and when he came here to Eton, he refined that insouciance into an art form.
If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets,
he'd show up with his badge askew.
If Blair was going to recite poetry, it'd be Stevenson's Suicide Club.
Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.
Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.
He was drunk on words, and he wanted everyone to share the intoxication.
Back home from the Empire in 1900,
he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.
Once he found out he had the gift of the gab, he let the eloquence rip,
drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great trouper of the Edwardian stage.
Unlike many politicians, he didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating societies.
He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial North,
on soap boxes, from the tops of buses, and in music halls, where he really had to earn the cheers.
Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.
When he defected to the Liberals in 1904,
he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England.
We don't usually think of him as a radical, but all sorts of reforms poured from his fertile mind -
Labour Exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.
But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism.
As Home Secretary, he was too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy -
deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.
It made sense, then, to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence where it could do some good.
At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.
Three years later, the world was at war.
Gallipoli, 1915 -
52,000 allied troops perish in Turkey.
A bloody fiasco, and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.
Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.
Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence,
the Tories paid back his treachery by booting him out of office.
Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli,
Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions
MUSIC: "The Pretty Ploughboy" by Lesley Nelson-Burns
Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders,
using his old army connections
so that a politician could demote himself to a tommy.
On the 23rd November 1915, he wrote to his wife Clemmie.
"My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.
"I spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.
"Filth and rubbish everywhere.
"Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.
"Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.
"In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide
"to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns."
Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill. He'd served his time.
Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.
Eric Blair was too young for the trenches,
but while at Eton he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.
When the war ended, he may have felt guilty, like many of his generation, guilt for missing the slaughter.
The next step after Eton should have been Oxford,
but, like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.
His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.
But even if he'd had the chance, it's likely he'd have rejected the moneyed escalator through privilege.
Instead, it was off to the colonies.
There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.
He might've even shared Churchill's idealism about the do-good Empire.
Five years in the Burmese police,
perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,
smartly cured him of that. Doing his job as efficiently as he could,
rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.
Those he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't see themselves as criminals,
but victims of foreign conquerors.
All over the Empire, there were men who hated it as heartily as he did,
but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.
One incident, more than any other, brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.
An elephant had broken its chains and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.
Blair picked up his rifle.
- Shall I call the hunters? - No, rouse no-one.
I'll try and get him myself.
When he found the beast, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth,
it was obvious there was no reason to kill it, except the crowd expected him to.
"I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward irresistibly,
"and it was at this moment, as I stood with the rifle in my hands,
"that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.
"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,
"seemingly the lead actor of the peace.
"But, in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.
"When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,
"but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
"In that instant, in too short a time even for the bullet to get there,
"a mysterious, terrible change came over the elephant.
"He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.
"In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.
"I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.
"I often wondered, had any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool?"
MUSIC: "Eton Boating Song" by William Johnson Cory
In 1927, Blair went home, where a sniff of the English air
convinced him he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.
Home was here at Southwold -
a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees
that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.
Eric's sister Avril kept a teashop, mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.
When Eric announced to the family that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer,
you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.
And what was the England that Eric had come home to?
A country he'd later describe as resembling a family,
a rather stuffy Victorian family
where rich relations are kowtowed to, and poor relations are horribly sat upon,
where the young are thwarted, and power is in the hands
of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.
'May 1926, the General Strike. Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight...'
One of those in control was Winston Churchill.
After 20 years away from the Tories,
he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike.
Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,
which only made Eric all the more determined to expiate the sins of empire.
In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place, he couldn't wait to lose his.
Most people who were restless with their lot in life wanted to rise above their station.
Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.
There was something almost Franciscan about his nose dive into squalor.
It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability,
it was the calculated embrace of all that repelled the fastidious Eric -
muck, indescribably evil smells.
When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit,
he was making a point, at least to himself,
that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.
It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.
For two years, Blair did a Cook's tour of destitution -
comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.
In the bathroom of one especially horrible doss house, or spike,
he finally got down to basic truths.
"It was a disgusting sight.
"All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed,
"the grime, the rents and patches, the string doing duty for buttons,
"the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,
"some of them holes held together by dirt.
"The room became a press of steaming nudity,
"the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly sub-faecal stench native to the spike."
He didn't have to do it, of course. He wasn't that hard up.
But there was nothing second-hand about Blair, or Churchill.
Both were doers, not lookers.
Whether in the trenches or the doss houses, they needed to live what they talked about.
In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, Down And Out In Paris And London,
but the name on the cover was not Blair, but pseudonym George Orwell.
There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George,
and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, linked him to the English landscape.
But the landscape through which Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,
but gutters and gasworks.
MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake
In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades -
Orwell declared war on the Empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.
Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.
But Orwell had been there, and he knew better.
He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.
The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals,
but our bedrock was coke and nutty slack.
But then, in the '30s, that bedrock caved in.
Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.
This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the Empire, had finally come to -
from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.
Never had the country been so bitterly divided.
In the South, they built model villages with miniature collieries,
miniature farms and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.
In Wales, Scotland and the North of England,
that hill would've been a slagheap, and there wouldn't be a ploughboy,
but desperate scramblers looking for coal waste with their bare hands.
Orwell, who cherished the countryside with an unsentimental, almost feral, passion,
now headed for this underworld, the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.
When his publisher asked him to write about the industrial North,
Orwell grabbed the chance, and set out on the Road to Wigan Pier.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
What he found was a town broken by depression,
coated in grime which befouled everything -
black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him, a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.
And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory -
get up at 3.45am, crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages, sometimes for miles.
As far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.
When he wasn't down the pits, Orwell was here, in Wigan public library.
His name's in the visitors' book -
EA Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.
He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet - wages, rents and prices.
The Road To Wigan Pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day from right and left.
Conservatives thought it was Bolshevik trash,
but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic,
a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.
None of this prevented The Road To Wigan Pier from being a massive best seller. Why?
Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it.
Instead, he made a real work of literature.
When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses,
you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression -
someone who could make you hear, see and feel
the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.
You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.
One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley
laud fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.
To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley
ended up cheering him. A fight was coming,
and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain,
were too gutless to join in. What was THEIR message?
Peace in our time, or do your business somewhere else
while we get on with hoeing the garden(!)
'This is the BBC Home Service. Hello, children. That's a familiar voice...'
Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.
Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.
All very regrettable no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.
But the world out there was turning very ugly.
Fascism was spreading across Europe. A cloud fell over the village green.
It was time to make a choice. Orwell made his.
In December 1936, he set off for Spain.
Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified Balaclava,
the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.
All that police training in Burma had a use after all.
But after four months at the front, Orwell, conspicuous at six foot two,
took a bullet through the neck.
He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.
He'd seen his comrades brutally crushed,
not just by Franco, but also by the communists.
The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism, especially Stalin's brand.
It was because Orwell hoped for a home-grown British revolution,
and because he was sick of excuses for Stalin -
all those coffee house commissars prepared to forgive him just because he wasn't Hitler -
that he wrote the real history of the Bolshevik revolution.
In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,
the barnyard fable.
"On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth
"in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.
"However, the details of the story did not come to me for some time,
"until one day I saw a boy driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path,
"whipping it if it tried to turn.
"It struck me that if only animals became aware of their strength,
"we should have no power over them."
Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,
but already Orwell was reinventing the art of political writing.
Tending to his goats and chickens at his cold cottage in Hertfordshire,
fighting off the early signs of TB, he set about purging the language
of the pompous preaching of the official left
and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.
As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,
Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his mansion in Kent,
brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.
For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been,
embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.
So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing,
and as he wrote thousands of pages on the Duke of Marlborough,
thousands more on the History Of The English-speaking Peoples -
keeping company with generations who'd faced invasion before -
so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.
First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of Sunday hunts and gymkhanas,
had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain WOULD share Europe's fate.
WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe.
' "Let us leave it, with its hatred and its armaments,
' "to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels."
'There would be much to be said for this plan
'if we could unfasten Britain from its rock foundation,
'and could tow it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
'Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.'
Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers -
men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that the Nazis
were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war,
and who would stop at reasonable demands.
The appeasers were like men who thought you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two,
in the hope that, by the time it got to you, it would be full.
In 1938, Hitler, who'd already annexed Austria,
threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.
Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister, ran to Munich and served it up.
I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler,
and here is the paper
which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
CHEERING
For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,
but the deepest stain on our history -
the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption
that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
CHURCHILL: 'All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.
'Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
'We have passed an awful milestone in our history,
'when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged,
'and the terrible words have, for the time being,
'been pronounced against the Western democracies,
' "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." '
When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,
Hitler went and occupied Prague, Chamberlain took it personally,
realising that he, and the country, had been royally had.
On the 1st September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.
- NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: - 'This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
'handed the German government a final note
'stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock
'that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
'a state of war would exist between us.
'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,
'and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'
Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice
announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.
The evacuation of children began.
None of this meant Chamberlain would hand the reins over to Churchill.
For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,
Churchill was still mistrusted by most of his party.
But the swing in public opinion towards him was so great it seemed prudent to have him in government,
and, on the day war was declared, he was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.
But, as if in a rerun of Gallipoli, Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster
when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway backfired horribly.
Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.
Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution made it seem like he at least was doing his best.
Next to Neville Chamberlain - gaunt, weary, presiding over a front bench of old geezers -
Churchill, though an old geezer himself,
seemed like a red hot volcano - a lava flow of plans and strategies.
Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low,
and, on the 10th May 1940, he was finally forced to resign.
The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's history.
Two vital questions were at stake -
who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister and how would HE deal with the Nazi war machine?
Not only the survival of our national independence,
but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.
Two kinds of men, and of England, were now in play for the leadership of the country.
In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties -
solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.
And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.
But, in the best judgment of his life, Halifax turned the job down.
In the pit of his stomach he knew he couldn't be a war leader.
Winston had seen the face of battle, Halifax had only hunted foxes.
On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the Palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.
On the same day, came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.
Now, of course, we all know that the "finest hour" was waiting in the wings.
But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,
when Britain came closer than at any other time in history to being overwhelmed.
Belgium and Holland were going under and France would join them.
250,000 British troops were trapped in Northern France
with hardly any hope of a safe exit.
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue,
and hardly anyone who counted thought that we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.
Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech,
shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.
'I would say to the House, as I said to those who joined the government,
'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
'We have before us many months of struggle and suffering.
'You ask, "What is our policy?"
'I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might,
'with all the strength that God can give us. To wage war against a monstrous tyranny
'never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
'That is our policy. You ask, "What is our aim?"
'I can answer in one word, victory.
'Victory at all costs.
'Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be.
'For without victory there is no survival.'
We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation
into the great prince girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.
But the truth was very different.
The military men assumed he would have to eat his words.
The civil servants, who always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes
at another theatrical performance. And politicians, like Halifax,
believed that, sooner or later, Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.
It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.
Churchill was having none of it. In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,
he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his life
to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.
The battle FOR Britain then, started not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,
but here behind the closed doors of the Cabinet War Room.
In combat were Halifax and Churchill, men with very different ideas of how to save the country.
In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire
that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.
"The very thought," he said, "of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside -
"this fragment of undying England - was an insult and an outrage."
Churchill would not have disagreed.
But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York or for some unreal dream of village England.
He wasn't fighting for Britain at all just as a piece of geography.
He was fighting for the meaning of being British, and that was an idea,
a precious idea we'd given to the world - freedom and the rule of law.
Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Fuhrer, would be a mock Britain.
Not worthy of the name really, let alone of our long history.
Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.
When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on the 28th May,
he was greeted not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.
There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.
In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been,
and yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe
that made the difference between surrender and survival.
The qualities which made him so impossible -
his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history -
were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.
In the days ahead, Churchill learned that, against all predictions,
250,000 British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk in 1,000 little ships -
the core of the army that'd return almost exactly four years later.
It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later, in June 1940,
which was, as one MP said, "Worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years."
'We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France.
'We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
'We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
'We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.
'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.
'We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
'We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!'
This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell,
for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,
was so relieved that Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote,
"that wars were won by fighting."
Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,
though one loved the Empire and the other detested it, both understood
that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them from the Nazis and the defeatists.
Orwell's TB, at this stage, was still undiagnosed,
but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.
Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.
During the months of the Blitz,
there were the two of them, in the thick of the action, drawn like small boys to danger.
"Orwell," someone said, "felt at home amidst the bombs, bravery and the danger."
Churchill should've slept somewhere safe like the Cabinet War Rooms,
but, to the horror of staff, he want back to Number Ten.
Sometimes, he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.
Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting,
but they were different visions.
Churchill's was Shakespearean, with the war leader stalking through the night camp,
drinking the affection of ordinary people.
George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes -
air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service -
and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the Levellers and the Chartists.
The workers of Britain didn't take on the Luftwaffe
to make the nation safe for Halifax and the owners of country houses,
but to create a nation that'd help the miners of Wigan,
and millions like them, have some of the common decencies of life.
The trouble was the way that war had to be won - not by the people's army of old England,
but by the people's army of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell,
but if being a junior partner to America was the price to be paid for defeating fascism, so be it.
Churchill was, in any case, less of the Little Englander than Orwell.
He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America as much as Orwell didn't.
For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive transatlantic thing.
For Orwell, democracy American-style was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.
For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear -
if war meant dying together, peace meant living together,
not in the slums of Britain, but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Newspapers carry the astonishing news to an amazed public!
'Labour landslide!'
In the general election,
Churchill was thanked by the nation by being handed a terrible drubbing.
Labour took office with a mandate for reform.
The socialist press greeted the triumph
as the coming of the New Jerusalem.
But instead of joining the hallelujah chorus,
Orwell, like Churchill, was worried about a new world order
where we would be slaves in another way.
CHURCHILL: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
'an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
'Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient...'
- VOICE ON RADIO: - 'Baileys, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.
'Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly, gradually becoming...'
To clear his head of the static hum of postwar London,
Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,
to the very edge of the kingdom - the Hebridean island of Jura.
No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.
And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find, typing in bed with the machine on his knees,
knowing he hadn't long to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain -
the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.
As Churchill issued his grim warnings,
Orwell created a common or garden plain man's Winston - Winston Smith.
The year was 1948.
In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,
no laughter but that of triumph.
No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,
but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
When we think of 1984,
most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother,
a world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth.
But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical
when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,
a guerrilla action fought, not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties,
reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity -
a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.
Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,
prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were absolutely normal.
The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.
The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.
Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,
the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.
It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist, on the face of it, such an impossible couple -
the most unlikely of allies.
George Orwell died in 1950. He was 46.
The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Churchill -
a review of his war memoir, Their Finest Hour.
You'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's heroics,
but he bestows the greatest compliment he could -
that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.
And it was a verdict shared by those who lined the streets of London
when Churchill finally died in 1965.
But then, when it counted,
neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing - toed the party line.
More important was their belief that if Britain was to be distinctive in the age of super-states,
it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,
that which tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
It's written, not to revere the dead, but inspire the living.
It's our cultural bloodstream - the secret of who we are.
And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented,
to celebrate what should be celebrated.
And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,
well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much.
And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
# There were three ravens sat on a tree
# Down a-down, hey down, a-down
# They were as black as they might be
# With a down, down, down
# Then one of them said to his mate
# "Where shall we now our breakfast take?"
# With a down, derry, derry down, down
# She lifted up his bloody head
# Down a-down, hey down, a-down
# And kissed his wounds that were so red
# With a down, down, down
# She got him up upon her back
# And carried him to earthen lake
# With a down, derry, derry down, down
# She buried him before the prime
# Ah, derry
# She was dead herself ere evensong time
# God, send every gentleman
# Such hawks, such hounds
# And such a land. #
Subtitles by Raymond Morrison BBC Broadcast 2002
E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk