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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
Chartwell must have been a heady place to be in exile. Standing on the manor's back lawn on a misty autumn day, buffeted by brisk, sweet winds, it is easy to imagine the appeal these panoramic views of the Weald of Kent must have had for Winston Churchill, luring him away from London's political battlegrounds. During much of the 1930s, Churchill, who had been denied cabinet position and governmental power by his own Conservative Party, was stubbornly locking horns with both sides of Parliament's aisle. Chartwell was his refuge. And he cultivated the landscape with the same meticulous obsession he gave to his speeches, his hands restlessly probing, meddling, tinkering. There is a photograph of Churchill, wrapped in a muffler and overcoat, some 70 years ago, tiling a cottage roof on his estate. Similar Churchillian handiwork still remains evident in the garden wall of brick he painstakingly laid, and in the artificial lakes he designed and excavated. One of his own paintings (he was a talented amateur) hangs in the dining room of the rambling, oddly cramped house--now a museum run by the National Trust; it shows a gathering for afternoon tea, the seated figures pausing in mid-sentence. Except that Churchill is turned away from the others--justly confident that the conversation will wait until he is prepared to turn back.
Chartwell was also, at times, a burden--its repairs and staff devoured Churchill's income as fast as his epic writing projects and fecund journalism could replenish it--but the estate grounded him in the English past, perhaps even reminding him of the legacies his parents had so cavalierly squandered. He even established a kind of informal government in exile at Chartwell. It became a place where his devoted friends and counselors shared information and assessed prospects, his country seat, particularly during those "wilderness years" (as they have been called), when there seemed little chance of his ever wielding power again and little reason to hope for it. After all, by the mid-1930s Churchill was entering his 60s. He had served in Parliament for nearly 30 years, had switched party allegiances twice, had been chancellor of the exchequer, and first lord of the admiralty, and had held ministerial posts ranging from home secretary to colonial secretary. But he was beginning to seem out of step even with the conservatives in his party, opposing, for example, any hints of independence for India, saying he was nauseated by the "fakir" Gandhi. One of his biographers, Robert Rhodes James, writes: "By the end of 1933 Churchill was widely regarded as a failed politician, in whom no real trust could be reasonably placed; by June 1935, these opinions had been fortified further." If he had ended his career here--puttering around Chartwell and making an occasional appearance in Parliament--few would have missed or mourned him.
But what also isolated Churchill during those years was his sharp, unrelenting focus on the growing Nazi German threat. And as it turned out, that preoccupation--considered to be "scaremongering," militaristic and dangerous during much of the decade--eventually brought him back to power and helped ensure his enduring reputation. In fact, Churchill's foresight, his independent stand, his unwavering attention--and later, his wartime leadership--granted him a stature in Britain that no American wartime leader, other than Lincoln, has ever achieved in the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have guided America through the Depression and led it to the brink of victory in World War II, but his personal triumph was not as mythic or startling as Churchill's; the risks of wartime defeat were not so great; and the effect of a single man's talents not so evident. Churchill was voted the greatest Briton who ever lived, in a recent BBC poll. He touched some fundamental nerve that still vibrates. The historian John Lukacs says that Churchill's reputation may now be at a peak. It is testimony to Churchill's continued importance that the backlash against him may be at a crest as well. One British historian, David Cannadine, recently asserted that Churchill, at his worst, was a "bombastic and histrionic vulgarian," while others have attacked "the cult of Churchill" that seeks to recruit him as an ally in the war on terrorism. In recent years, particularly since 9/11, his very reputation can seem up for grabs, as his statements and actions are heatedly invoked in debates about the nature of enmity, the causes of...
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