At the heart of a great man
A host of objects has become totemic: his polka-dot bow ties, his siren suits
Winston Churchill in 100 Objects Phil Reed and Anthony Richards (Greenhill, £25)
THEIR actions may speak loudest, but the hearts of men are often revealed in small things. When Winston Churchill met President Roosevelt in the Oval Office for the first time in December 1941, he was intrigued by the clutter on FDR’S desk: not the usual appurtenances of executive office, but ceramic pigs and roosters, stuffed animals and figurines of Democratic donkeys and Republican elephants, revealing his whimsical side. The two had first met, briefly, in London in 1918 and then at sea off Newfoundland in August 1941 before the Americans entered the war. The latter meeting was fruitful, but hardly conducive to getting to know each other. That began in the White House in December and continued for almost a month, during time which the ‘small things’ began to add up.
No figure in modern times is so readily identifiable by a vast array of images and objects as Churchill. Indeed, he deliberately and quite shamelessly played to the media throughout his life to make his name known. As a result, a host of images and objects connected with him has become totemic: his polka-dot bow ties, his siren suits, even his slippers. Each item in this collection, however, is not only a part of his image, but emblematic of the man. They all have back stories that give intriguing insights into his personality, his attitudes and, of course, his style.
Churchill held all the high offices of state except for foreign secretary (arguably, he became his own foreign secretary during the Second World War). He won a Nobel Prize for his writing and oratory and he was a painter of some talent—enough to manage inclusion in the Royal Academy summer exhibition, submitted anonymously, if unlikely to have remained so. Before all this he was a skilled horseman, a courageous soldier and an intrepid war reporter.
Selecting 100 objects to sum up the man and his achievements would be difficult only inasmuch as a great deal must be left out.
The authors, a former director of the Imperial War Museum’s
Churchill War Rooms and the museum’s documents and sound archivist, have assembled what
I can only describe as a cavalcade, almost literally cradle to grave, each with accompanying text. I say ‘almost literally’ because the first item, a lock of Churchill’s hair kept in an envelope from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the place of his birth, must surely have been snipped from toddler rather than baby. Its redness is arresting.
Some objects, such as Gandhi’s spectacles, are pegs on which to hang a mini-essay, in this case Churchill’s ambivalent relationship with India, a wide subject and deftly done. Churchill served in India early in his military career and he was, say the authors, ‘cognisant and appreciative of the bravery and sacrifice of the Indians fighting with the British’. I smiled on reading that ‘His dismissal of India in his twenties as “this tedious land” and his praise for Britain’s achievements in ruling “these primitive but agreeable races” are the words of a bored subaltern and an arch
Imperialist… [which] cannot be condoned in themselves… [and] need to be understood in the context of their times’. I ran Churchill’s words past an Indian army officer friend, whose father had been one of the first Indian cadets at Sandhurst in the early 1920s. He smiled broadly and said, with evident pride: ‘Churchill got us to a T.’
Some of the 100 objects are not small things, however. The contest for largest is between HMS
Belfast and St Margaret’s, Westminster, with HMS Enchantress and Chartwell a close third and fourth. Chartwell’s inclusion needs no explanation; St Margaret’s is there because it was where he and Clementine were wed. HMS Belfast perfectly illustrates Churchill’s zeal for being as close to the action as possible and HMS Enchantress because the little sea-going yacht exemplifies Churchill’s total immersion in his position as First Lord of the Admiralty before the First World War—and also perhaps the opportunity to show the matchless cartoon in Punch summing up the man and the moment. This book is the perfect way to get to know Churchill and, for those who know him already, to get to know him even better. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Allan Mallinson
The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity Timothy C. Winegard (Dutton, £14.99)
WHERE would Alexander be without Bucephalus or Roy Rogers minus Trigger? Millions more unnamed horses, argues Timothy Winegard in this epic 544-page tome, have been ‘the invisible hand driving human history’ for more than five millennia, compared with only one century of the combustion engine. They’re the planet’s ninth most abundant mammal (after humans and cows) with about 58 million; the UK has some 850,000, as a 2019 survey showed, with a financial ‘imprint’ of £7 billion, half of which is from racing. In the US, the author’s home country, more than 64,000 feral horses roam—considered too many—often rounded up for meat.
The fortunes of the horse, which evolved from a scampering, fox-like creature into one that could chew grass, ebbed and flowed in prehistoric times, but the story of the animal’s domestication begins, suggest anthropologists, about 5,500 years ago when a teenager on the Eurasian Steppes thought it would be a laugh to climb on the back of one. Thereafter, no doubt after much mishap, the horse became an instrument with which to annex land, as well as the driver of travel and exploration, transport and trade, hunting and farming. Equestrian sport dates back aeons, too; it was as much part of the Ancient Olympic Games as it is in the present Paris Games.
This highly researched book (the bibliography is 24 pages) spends much time in the distant past—the writer is a history professor—but is an engrossing, stimulating read, expanding the premise that horsepower is largely responsible for today’s world order. The developing Chinese nation, for instance, was on the brink of failure for want of horses, about which the rulers fantasised, visualising them as all-powerful, dragon-like creatures; in 141BC, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, realising there was nothing for it but to compete with other cultures hitherto considered barbarians, ordered his envoy, Zhang Qian, to procure horses. The victory of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, say historians, changed warrior tactics for ever when the Normans brought 3,000 cavalry horses across the channel in a six-week period.
Today, the equestrian world has to work harder on its PR, as some question whether we have ‘social licence’ to ride, but Prof Winegard concludes that ‘one unbreakable bond remains constant: horses are not truly horses without humans, and humans are not truly humans without horses’.