A Sunday spent at Chartwell

Until I spend a day in the archives at the Fleet Air Arm Museum next week I’m treading water; with the bulk of Fairey’s postwar papers to be found at the RAF Museum this will be my last trip to Yeovilton. Once I have looked at the remaining boxes in the FAAM’s Cobham Hall (a treasure trove of aircraft and helicopters not on display, with many awaiting refurbishment), then I can begin writing about the soon to be Sir Richard Fairey’s tenure in Washington as deputy and then director of the British Air Commission. In an ideal world I would have spent some time in Washington and Abilene, but my failure to secure funding killed that idea; and in any case personal circumstances mean an extended absence from home is not really feasible. Treading water means more than labouring in the garden, and on Sunday afternoon my wife and I visited Chartwell. We had been before, but in winter when the house is closed. In late December the numbers visiting the gardens are predictably small, but on a Sunday in June with the sun shining Chartwell’s gardens were the place to be. We had made the necessary prior booking for a tour of the house, and at the last the vicarious became an actual experience: rooms familiar from TV documentaries and biopics looked much smaller than when seen on screen. At last the blurred image became a real artefact, allowing the opportunity to study fine detail, from the names listed for a cartoon depiction of anthropomorphic cats attending a late gathering of the Other Club (Duff Cooper seemingly a post-1945 recruit) to the gloriously kitsch glass cockerel given to Clemmie by De Gaulle (“Mon general, merci beaucoup – c’est charmant et parfait pour la salle de dejeuner!”). For such a large house the number of rooms open to the public is quite small, with two or three converted to exhibition areas. While relieved that a tour of the building doesn’t become an endurance test (Broadlands is similarly modest, so no fear of visitor fatigue), one is left slightly dissatisfied. Perhaps this is because, as Mary pointed out, we learned almost nothing about life below stairs, or about family life at Chartwell (such information came from the impressively well-informed guides – lots of references to ‘Winston’ à la Thatcher, but thankfully not in the same fake referential tone). Apparently Randolph was forced to sleep in a very small bedroom, which explains a lot! More about the children would have been welcome as most [sanitised] references were re their adult lives. At least there was an acknowledgement that Clementine didn’t actually like the house, and that ‘friends’ purchased the freehold in 1946 to ease the Churchills’ financial burden. The National Trust would presumably argue that it has to address a huge international audience, and so the priority is to tell the – deliberately heroic – story of Sir Winston Churchill, focusing upon his first premiership and in particular his leadership in 1940, the nation’s ‘finest hour’. Most other key moments in his political career, including his lengthy periods of ministerial office up to May 1929, attract only passing reference, e.g. a recognition that Gallipoli was a disaster, on the basis that Churchill himself acknowledged the severe damage of the Dardanelles to his political career. This reminds us that the great man’s peacetime record rightly attracts considerable criticism [yet he was a great man, if only for his determination to face down Halifax and fight on in 1940 – even if the path to that decision was not as simple and straightforward as popular myth dictates].

The exhibition(s) and the house contents, especially the photographs, provide the informed visitor with a counter narrative, running parallel with a NT meta-narrative rooted in popular mythology and national psyche (‘our island story’ – in fact a very southern English story, rooted in Calder’s ‘Middle England’, and symbolised by Chartwell’s magnificent view across the Kent countryside: ‘This Is England – Fight For It!’). The invisibility of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax, MacDonald, et al – the ‘Guilty Men’ of appeasement – is unsurprising, and perhaps the same might be said of those generals and admirals whose framed photographs are noticeable by their absence. Churchill never understood the taciturn and cerebral Archie Wavell (but then neither did Attlee, who sacked him as Viceroy), so presumably the portrait was turned to the wall sometime around 1943. Wavell’s successor in New Delhi was Mountbatten, whose absence is striking – was Dickie and Edwina’s photograph placed in a drawer in August 1947 when both were seen as party to the ultimate betrayal, granting India independence? SEAC’s success 1943-5 was rooted in the unlikely partnership Mountbatten forged with Slim. These days ‘Uncle Bill’ is seen by many as Britain’s greatest fighting general in WW2, but his modest character and Churchill’s relative disinterest in the ‘Forgotten Army’ explain Slim’s absence from the walls of Chartwell. Needless to say, from room to room Montgomery is highly visible, this legacy of ego and relentless self-promotion obscuring the visitor to the fact that as CIGS Alan Brooke was at the PM’s side for much of the war; the 1950s controversy over his published diary’s criticism of Churchill obscured a then deferential public to the fact that if anyone won the war for Britain it was ‘Brookie’. If the Chief of the Imperial General Staff is an ever present in Grand Alliance conference photos, so too is the Foreign Secretary; but I found no reference to Eden anywhere in the house.

However, the most striking absence is surely Lloyd George. The personal and working relationship of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is crucial to our understanding of British politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and Richard Toye is not alone in exploring their individual and shared impact on the shape of British society right up to the present day. For all his character flaws, Lloyd George was as successful in peacetime as in time of war. Overall, his record in office is markedly superior to Churchill, the latter very much the junior partner in Asquith’s cabinet despite his elevation to Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty. With handy ammunition such as the postwar honours scandal, the Tories, quietly encouraged by Labour and the Asquithian Liberals, trashed LG’s reputation after 1922. A self-inflicted wound was shaking hands with Hitler in 1935, fuelling wartime suspicion that Britain as a satellite state of Nazi Germany would have seen Lloyd George play the role of Petain. What’s striking about centennial events re the Great War is the absence of references to the Chancellor of the Exchequer>Minister of Munitions>PM. This winter how publicly and prominently will we mark the formation in December 1916 of the second wartime coalition, with Lloyd George replacing Asquith in Number Ten? Undoubtedly Churchill’s premiership 1940-45 has all but obliterated Lloyd George’s primary place in the national consciousness, as Chartwell so clearly demonstrates. It’s time to redress the balance…