John Charmley on Churchill and the ‘Special Relationship’

John Charmley is a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia and a controversial figure noted for his revisionist work on Winston Churchill. There is a good wikipedia entry for Charmley here.

His book Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940-57 is brave in attempting to ‘clear away the lush undergrowth laid down by Churchill and his admirers’ (p. xiii). This undergrowth is both dense and misleading. One of its chief cultivators is Andrew Roberts, who is quoted on the dust jacket as saying about one of Charmley’s earlier works Churchill: The End of Glory: ‘For those who love Churchill partly because of his warts and feel that they have waited too long to hear the case for the prosecution put eloquently and with impeccable intellectual soundness, “it is a delight”‘. Roberts’ use of the word ‘warts’ is surely a deliberate echo of the supposed Cromwellian request to the artist Peter Lely to paint him ‘warts and all’ in his portrait. That aside, Charmley has a great deal to say about the A-A relationship, in his opening sentence he writes:

‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was Churchill’s, and he pronounced it good’.

He continues in a somewhat curmudgeonly way to say that ‘[t]he Anglo-American special relationship has been such a marked feature of the last fifty years that a generation which has the attention span of a television commercial is apt to regard it with awe as an ancient phenomenon. Yet in very large measure it was a artefact created by one of the greatest literary and political artists of the century, Winston Churchill.’ (p. 3).

It is indeed only in taking the long view that we can see the present state of friendship as something of a abberation. For a good hundred and fifty years after the War of Independence (1775-1783) the two powers seemed to be set for permanent conflict. Border disputes – relating primarily to Canada, maritime rights, and bitter memories of the war (both personal and national) were some of the factors that conspired to keep the countries apart. Churchill’s influence is most strong during World War Two and during his second premiership 1951-55, and there are many other reasons for the developing friendship of the late 19th century and early 20th. We can, however, look to him as one of the principal architects of both the actual and rhetorical relationship which has so often been given the tag ’special’ in the post war period.