From the archives: Glasgow Herald obituary of Winston Churchill, January 1965

FIFTY-FIVE years ago next month, in January 1965, the Glasgow Herald reported the death of Britain’s war-time prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill. Here, we run extracts from our obituary of an extraordinary politician we described as “a man for all seasons, for all time”.

Statesman, orator and historian Born: November 30, 1874; Died: January 24, 1965.

SIR Winston Churchill, whose death we regret to announce, was unsurpassed among all the politicians of our time in versatility of talent, in vicissitude of fortune, and in magnitude of achievement; no other so confounded both friends and enemies so often and in so many spheres, and none fell so steeply or rose so high.

The son of a luckless political genius, Lord Randolph Churchill, scion of the great Marlborough house, he was born on November 30, 1874. An indifferent pupil at Harrow, he was counselled by his father against a desire to read for the Bar and entered Sandhurst to be commissioned in 1895. He took an original view of a young officer’s duties and combined service with journalism, thus obtaining much experience of war and the censure of old-fashioned “brass hats” who never believed that the pen is to be compared to the sword.

This was the beginning of the literary career which was crowned by the noble biography of the first Duke of Marlborough and the epic memoirs of two world wars. He went to the Spanish-american War and contrived to combine the duties of war correspondent and officer in the Malakand and Tirak campaigns, the Nile Valley war, where he rode in the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, and the South African war, where he was taken prisoner by the Boers in 1899 and made a dramatic escape.

After his military exploits Churchill won the Oldham parliamentary seat in 1900 for the Conservatives. He later went over to the Liberals, winning a resounding victory in Manchester in 1906. He became Under-secretary for the Colonies; in 1908 he was made President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary in 1900, and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.

It was at the Admiralty that he found himself. A student of war and international politics, he had early recognised the German menace and sought to counter it less by propaganda than by preparation. In war he became a different personality and it was soon clear that his views on strategy differed as much from those of military leaders as, in his methods of prosecuting the war, he differed from the more orthodox members of the Government.

The failure of the Gallipoli campaign during the Great War broke Churchill temporarily and he returned to active service, but he was later recalled to Government duties. He was made Minister of Munitions and, as War Secretary he made himself the champion of the antiBolshevik crusade. But he went out of office with Lloyd George, widely distrusted.

He had suffered a severe rebuff by voters in the 1922 ballot in Dundee, the constituency that had accepted him after the loss of his Manchester seat at the by-election necessitated in 1908 by his elevation to Cabinet rank. It was only at the General Election of 1924 that he was returned for Epping, a seat he held until 1945. Afterwards he represented Woodford.

To general amazement, Stanley Baldwin made Churchill his Chancellor, in which capacity he made the controversial decision to return to the gold standard. Hitler came to power in 1933 and the following year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Churchill’s view of these dictators increased the estrangement between him and the Conservative leaders.

To Churchill, Hitler was not so much the foe of Bolshevism as the re-creation of the German menace in a form far more ferocious than any Kaiser bred in the old Western, civilised, tradition could have dreamt of. It was from 1934 that Churchill began his crusade against the policies of peace at any price – known as “appeasement” – and which quickly made him a lonely figure.

Now, in a series of speeches which were listened to coldly by almost everyone except the Germans, he attacked the foreign policy of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and sought to rouse the country to the danger of “danegeld” [historical payments to Viking raiders to spare a territory from attack] at the expense of other nations and of Britain’s position in the world, to a ruthless and ambitious adventurer who, in his unbalance, dreamed of world conquest. It is significant of the seriousness with which Churchill spoke that he referred more than once to the need for co-operation with Russia, then in its “popular front” mood.

After the Munich summit of 1938, the House listened unmoved to his description of this settlement as a “total and unmitigated defeat”. But as the days went on and his prophecies of doom were fulfilled to the letter he acquired in the country such prestige that, when war came, Chamberlain could do nothing else than bring him back into office as First Lord once again. The country rejoiced and, to a cheering Fleet, the Admiralty sent the signal, “Winston is back”.

Churchill stood loyally behind Chamberlain and took full responsibility for the 1940 fiasco in Norway. However, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became prime minister on May 10. On that day, Hitler invaded the Low Countries and sent his armoured divisions on the first stage of their expedition that would bring the army of France to its direst defeat. From then on the biography of Churchill is the history of the war, and of events still in living memory.

The new Prime Minister sounded at once a note that struck home: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears”. Within a fortnight the battle of France was lost and the “miracle of Dunkirk” – a miracle performed by ordinary people who never regarded it as a miracle – had saved the personnel of the British Army; within a month, France, beaten to her knees, was out of the war and at Hitler’s mercy. Nothing but the Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force greater in quality than quantity stood between us and Hitler’s forces.

When France was reeling from disaster, Churchill had striven to put heart into her leaders and proclaimed his leadership at home by the electrifying address to his own people at a time when the British Army consisted largely of divisions abroad. “We shall not flag,” he said. “We shall go on to the end... We shall fight on the seas and the 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”.

And when the tragedy of France was consummated and the Battle for Britain was, it seemed, about to be joined, he told the House the truth of the situation and ended with the immortal words: “Let us brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last a thousand years, men shall say, ‘This was their finest hour’.” Immortal words, yet though they brought men cheering to their feet they did not ring so magnificently as the simple retort to Hitler’s peace moves: “What sort of people do they think we are?”

The conduct of the war was in many hands, and many were the architects of victory, but in that period between the fall of France and the attacks on Russia and then on Pearl Harbour, the chief conductor was Churchill, as much strategically as diplomatically.

It was a period of gloom, relieved only by extremes of heroism, a period of mistakes and miscalculations; yet it was the spirit in which he waged that war, in spite of criticisms at home and doubts abroad, that made him inevitably the leading figure of the whole period, even in comparison to such formidable leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. His own account of the war shows how vividly, how closely, he followed events – and how masterfully he estimated situations.

After the war, Churchill, in summits at Tehran and Yalta, did not succeed in fixing the settlement he wanted, but he prevented both a breaking of the war-time alliance and the exclusion of Britain by an entente between Roosevelt and Stalin.

But he suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Labour in the 1945 election, and it was not until October 1951 that he returned as prime minister, remaining in office until 1955.

He can almost be regarded as the author both of the movement towards European federation and of the European defence system. Churchill had laid the foundations [of the establishment of Nato] in great speeches in the US, particularly at Fulton, in which he pleaded virtually for a permanent Anglo-american alliance.

It was one of the strange symptoms of the strangeness of the times that the man whom the British electorate had decisively rejected, and whose conduct in Opposition showed none of the old mastery, should have been regarded everywhere else as the virtual Prime Minister of Britain, listened to and admired by millions abroad, to the almost complete neglect of those Labour ministers who were actually in power.

On July 28, 1964, after Churchill’s final Commons appearance, MPS thunderously approved an all-party motion expressing its gratitude for his services. The occasion released in the House an hour-long mingling of tribute, reminiscence, and stories from all sides which was not least memorable for its deeply-felt emotion and freedom from rhetoric.