Winston Churchill: The Unknown Story 5/6 - Fallen Hero

Winston Churchill, a giant of history, famous for his inspiring leadership. Advanced Britannia, long lived the cause of freedom. But behind the legend lies a complicated character. People tend to see Churchill the icon, Churchill the bulldog warrior, and, of course, that's not the whole story. He was an aristocrat and a man of the people. It says a lot for his charisma and his humility that he was accepted and liked. A trailblazer who also had questionable beliefs. He is an old-school imperialist. He calls Indian people the dusky nation. This is the story of the man behind the myth, using rarely seen footage, personal photographs, and told by those who knew him well. When my grandfather was at home, everything revolved around him. Seemed to be a natural way of life. This is the real Churchill. This time, it's 1945, and the last summer of the Second World War. Prime Minister Winston Churchill has led Britain to the brink of victory, but he's far from done. He's absolutely desperate to carry on and doesn't believe that anyone could do what he could do. Churchill calls a general election. He expects voters will give him another five years at No. 10. It never crossed their mind that the election was going to be lost. Churchill is in for a shock. It's VE Day, 1945. After five years of war, all over Britain, people are partying in the streets because Nazi Germany has just surrendered. With Japan still fighting, the Second World War is far from over. But victory in Europe is huge. VE Day is a day of national celebration. So you can see from all the newsreel footage what a tremendous outpouring of emotion and relief there is. In central London, the streets are taken over by hundreds of thousands of people. They all have one thing in mind. There is one man who's like a lightning conductor for all this emotion. One man that the people want to see even above and beyond the King on that day. It's Winston Churchill, who seems, for so many people, to have personified this tremendous effort to escape from the clutches of a very, very grave threat to national existence. Churchill leaves Buckingham Palace and joins the throng. Whenever he tries to go anywhere in his open-top car, he is absolutely mobbed and people are just so excited and happy to see him. The climax of this adoration of Churchill comes late that afternoon. He's at this government building overlooking Parliament Square. He emerges onto the balcony here to give a short speech to the crowd below. And when there is that wonderful moment where he opens with, this is your victory, and the crowd immediately roars back, no, it is yours, you can sense just how much of a sense of gratitude and appreciation there is towards Winston Churchill, who is quite clearly, on that day, being seen as the architect of victory. Churchill returns to Downing Street. He earlier made sure the capital won't run out of beer, and outside his front door, the street party continues deep into the night. But Churchill is hard at work, dealing with his usual evening correspondence. A pile of urgent telegrams six inches high. Tonight, many a congratulatory. One from a close associate seems to sum up the nation's feelings. All my thoughts are with you on this day, which is essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you, this day would not have been. He was the hero of the whole country. People were shouting and cheering at my grandfather. It was an extraordinary day. He was almost all-powerful. The man was now a legend. I think you can go even further than that. He's almost seen like a Christ-like figure, a man who kind of had taken the nation's sufferings on his own shoulder and had walked the nation through those dark days and inspired courage and confidence. Churchill is also a broken man. If you see any footage of Churchill during May 1945, when the war is over, here's another thing. He looks knackered. He looks absolutely worn out. He was in his 71st year and he was physically far from his old self. The fact was that he was exhausted. He was a man of astonishing resilience, but he was not young. I think it's interesting to juxtapose this image of Churchill in May 1945 with some of the images that we've seen of him entering Downing Street in May 1940. The figure is still ostensibly the same. You've got the same dress, you've got the same bow tie, you've got the omnipresent cigar, but you can see the ravages of the war and the result of the premiership on his face and in his bearing. He looks less steady, less confident than he did five years before. He was exhausted. The stress level must have been terrific, but he kept going. And so by the time they got to V-Day, if you imagine when you've run a double marathon and you stop, you want to collapse, and I'm sure at the end of the war he wanted to collapse. Throughout the five years he's been Britain's war leader, Churchill has pushed his body to the limits. He suffered a suspected heart attack and three bouts of pneumonia. He's having to be carried out of key meetings in the underground cabinet war rooms by groups of marines because he's no longer capable of getting up the steep stairs. His wife Clementine is so worried about his health, she thinks it's time for drastic action. She wants him to retire. He has done his duty for his country. He's done it brilliantly. Now is the time to step back and do other things, enjoy himself, not put himself under such pressure. And she's worried that otherwise his health will give way completely and that this might be the only way that he can extend his life. Of course, she suspects he might not have much time left. Despite his exhaustion, Churchill does not agree with his wife about giving up his premiership. He's absolutely desperate to carry on. Churchill really thinks that he is kind of the key to the post-war era. He has a huge appreciation of himself and his own role and doesn't believe that anyone could do what he could do. Churchill's first plan for staying in power is to keep everything as it is. Throughout the war, parliamentary rivalries and general elections have been set aside. Churchill is a Conservative. His government is not. He's invited leading figures from all the parties to serve in his war cabinet. And it's a real testament to the political skill of Churchill that they've managed to keep this show on the road for such a long time. When we think of Winston Churchill now, we tend to think of him as this sort of bulldog, warrior, very obstinate, set on getting his own way, stubborn. The truth was that he could often be far more consultative and collaborative. Even though Germany is now defeated, Churchill wants to keep his all-party government going. This is a way that he would kind of guarantee that he would maintain his position in Downing Street. He's been very successful at playing the three main parties off against one another and make sure that he's kind of indispensable in the middle. Two weeks after VE Day, Churchill gets a phone call with bad news. It's from Blackpool, where the Labour Party is having their annual conference. They've decided to pull out of the war cabinet and so end Churchill's all-party government. Churchill is rather crestfallen by this and wanted to keep things going, but Churchill's desire is simply not going to be fulfilled. There is now only one way Churchill can stay in power. Even though the war is still going on, he'll have to call a general election. Churchill asks his colleagues if he'll win. According to the experts around Churchill, Churchill's own towering personal popularity allied to the VE Day feel-good factor, well, there's a sense in which those two things might well deliver to the Conservatives a pretty decent victory. Churchill is told he'll get a majority of at least 60. He'd expected victory because this was what all the most expert observers had told him was to be expected. Even the Labour Party experts predict Churchill will win. But experts can be wrong. It's a few days since Churchill's all-party government collapsed. In the gardens at No. 10, the men who served in it are having a last get-together. These are the politicians from all parties who've helped Churchill defeat Nazi Germany. And there is a good bit of alcohol taken. There's a lot of back-slapping. They're quaffing a glass or two together and reminiscing. Churchill can be seen here walking beside Labour leader Clement Attlee. These two men should be political enemies, but they've worked together for five difficult years and they've become close. Attlee certainly has a huge degree of reverence for Churchill. And he's really in awe of Churchill's rhetorical ability. And, of course, he's seen Churchill up close and personal for the last five years. He's seen the weight of decisions that have been on his shoulders. There's a definite kind of chalk-and-cheese aspect to their personalities, but I would say it's a relationship of mutual respect. Having welcomed Attlee and his colleagues, Churchill makes an emotional speech. He declares that it was only through this united political front that the country overcame the peril that had faced it. That Churchill believes that history will look back on this five-year period and will laud all of those who took part in it. All the accounts of that event tell us that Churchill is in a deeply emotional state. He was not shy of showing that emotion in public and in private. That's a very well-known facet of Churchill's personality. As soon as his guests go home, Churchill drives to Buckingham Palace to meet the King. He's firing the starting gun of the general election. And in elections, Churchill thinks there's only one goal, and that is to win. It's like a switch flips in Churchill's head. He is on the stump. He is the old campaigning war horse. And Churchill is not beyond, nor has he been beyond, in some 15 or 16 parliamentary elections in his career, in stepping into the gutter from time to time and in maybe delivering the odd blow below the belt. Churchill is a fighter, and he likes nothing better than to be in the fray. He cannot envisage a political campaign where he holds back and where he doesn't say what he thinks. It's the first weekend of campaigning for the general election. Churchill is at the PM's official country residence, Chequers. He's hard at work writing the script of a speech with which he'll kick-start his campaign. There is no accidental literary flourishes in a Churchill speech. He creates these, he hones these, he perfects his speeches. And that's, you know, what everybody expects of him. Churchill has a plan. He intends to make people vote for him by scaring them away from his rival for number ten, Labour leader Clement Attlee. What he wants to do is present Attlee as the kind of dangerous threat. Mr Attlee hands in his deposit money at Stepney Town Hall. Churchill is about to make a huge mistake. He intends to describe Attlee as a left-wing extremist whose government would be, in Churchill's words, harsh, clumsy and tyrannical, reliant on secret police. Churchill wants to use the term Gestapo. If you play word association, you say to somebody in Britain, Gestapo, and they are instantly going to come back with some kind of Nazi image, some kind of brute totalitarian force. So, to put that phrase in is really kind of incendiary. Pleased with his dirty attack on Attlee, Churchill shows a draft of his speech to his wife, Clement. For him to say this to equate Labour, the Gestapo, Clementine probably looked at it with horror. And it was also an absurd thing to say, as far as she was concerned. She was a great friend of Clement Attlee's and she pleaded with him to take the mention out. But Churchill refuses. When you look at the original speech, you can see that it is heavily edited over the course of time. It is heavily edited over the course of its creation by Winston Churchill. There are numerous alterations and additions throughout. But, interestingly, that mention of the Gestapo is one of the few lines that is unedited. The next day, ignoring Clementine's advice, Churchill goes on the radio to deliver his speech. In Great Britain, we do not like to be regimented and ordered about and have every action of our lives prescribed for us. Our present opponents have to fall back on some form of Gestapo. It's quite a shocking transition. He is really insulting even the patriotism of those very men with whom, on VE Day, he shared a balcony. I might add that he thought that that speech would be looked back on as one of the greatest of his career. Well, that actually hasn't happened. One of the first to react to the Gestapo speech is Attlee. Churchill's former wartime colleague has now become his enemy. Attlee leaked on Churchill's Gestapo remark and took the opportunity to remind voters that Churchill, the wartime leader, had been replaced by Churchill, the leader of the Conservative Party, remarking, I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly. Public opinion seems to side with Attlee. To many people, Churchill has really gone way, way over the top. To some people, it's more than just a kind of political gaffe. It's actively offensive. The mask of the national leader has finally slipped. Here is the Churchill of old. So the headline on the Daily Herald the next day is Churchill's Crazy Broadcast. Churchill, who's on a pedestal, very much admired as the war leader, and then is portrayed as somebody who's actually abandoned his best qualities. What the Gestapo comment does is give people the opportunity to label him as having gone out of control. It just seemed to confirm that Churchill was perhaps ill-suited to lead the peace. And I think what is sad about that is, during the war, he had such an instinct for the words needed to connect with the British public. But in 1945, and especially with that Gestapo speech, that instinct, sadly, seemed to have vanished. Even Churchill realises this, and he's devastated. Clementine writes to their daughter that Churchill is very low, poor darling. He thinks he has lost his touch and grieves about it. But Churchill is not giving up the fight. Despite his exhaustion, he decides that to win over the British public, he needs to do something he's done many times before, hit the campaign trail. As a campaigner over the course of his life, Winston Churchill has been known for having huge amounts of energy, for being able to really win a crowd and charm a room. But understandably, by the 1945 election campaign, he has lost some of that energy. This is the man who becomes such a legendary orator during the Second World War, but you see him on the stump. He's tired, he's drawn. Churchill is also weighed down by a heavy burden. He's not just campaigning for himself, but his entire party. Hundreds of MPs expect to be re-elected, thanks to the Churchill factor. The Conservative Party campaign is built round Churchill, and it's all about Churchill. The hope was that Winston Churchill, and his popularity as a wartime leader, would translate into a win at the polls. Churchill is not the force he was at the start of the war. His performances are tired. But he hopes that all he has to do is show up to remind people why they should vote for him. He gets huge crowds wherever he goes. He's mobbed at various train stations where it stops. And wherever Churchill goes, cameras will follow. Churchill carries on the campaign, but he tells a friend he's as tired as he's ever been. And when he reaches the Midlands, there are signs that the wheels are coming off Churchill's election bandwagon. Of course, the coverage of this is very upbeat and very positive. We saw very large, enthusiastic crowds. And perhaps masks an underlying truth, and it's a truth that was spelt out by the News Chronicle, which, when they reported this tour, said, Mr Churchill visits the East Midlands. Cheers for him, but not for the Tories. And, of course, in the piece that we're watching, you're seeing very much the cheers for him, but according to some of the journalists there, there was an underlying current of opposition to the Conservative Party. Relying on big rallies rather than meeting people one-on-one, Churchill has no idea what voters really think. Churchill didn't sense that people were in fact saying to him, thank you for what you've done, you've led us superbly. He didn't realise that it was an expression of thanks rather than an expression of determination to vote for the Conservative Party and its allies in the coming election. Churchill just doesn't get Britain of 1945. He cannot see how people have been changed by the last five years. Many men have died in the Second World War. Women have contributed hugely to the effort. There's a youthfulness, an optimism. People wanted an end to wartime austerity and a guarantee that there would be no return to pre-war economic depression. People wanted opportunity, better health care, a social security system, housing and pensions and education for their young. Churchill worries doing this could cost the taxpayer too much money. Churchill was much more shy about promising to find large sums of money, which he said we don't have for the moment and we can't be sure of having until we know how soon the war ends in the Far East and what its cost is. Churchill won't even promise voters free health care for all. If he's elected, the NHS might never get off the ground. He's deeply concerned that the financial position that Britain is in after the war is going to be so perilous that the country might not even have enough money really to pay for food, let alone to pay for new hospitals. This doesn't go down well with the British public. Churchill, the war hero, struggled with an offer that met the needs of the moment. This reinforced the public's perception that he was a man of war and not a suitable peacetime leader. Churchill still thinks his wartime leadership will win him the election. He cannot imagine that Britain's don't want him. But he's about to have an unpleasant surprise. There are just weeks until the election. Winston Churchill needs to find a way to convince Britons to re-elect him as Prime Minister. He's also still fighting the war. The gloves are off in this brutal struggle at the front door to Tokyo. Though Germany is beaten, Japan fights on. Churchill is looking for ending the Japanese war through an invasion and also retaking those lost territories of the British Empire in that part of the world. At the time of which we're speaking, it was still expected that the war against Japan would continue for another 18 months and consume an immense amount of money. Churchill can't imagine he'll be voted out when the war still rages. So, in a filmed election address, he tries to rally voters by reminding them that defeating Japan will involve one final struggle. Five years ago, I promised you blood, toil, tears and sweat. Once again, now, today, I must tell you that in spite of all our victories, a rough road lies ahead. I'm exhausted watching it. We've been through five, six years of war and Churchill offers us more work, more effort, more striving. It's a vision of a tough world, a realistic one, but maybe not the one that you were hoping for after such a great effort already. The speech doesn't go down well. If you look at contemporary accounts, diaries, eyewitness accounts, even read the newspapers from June 1945, you can see that many people, understandably perhaps, think it's all over bar the shouting, that the real big event was the war in Europe and that was the one that placed the country in immediate peril, you know, threatened the survival of the nation. Well, that threat has now lifted. And the problem is that the British public at this point just want to return to some sort of normality. They want to know about how the new government will deal with things like the high cost of living and housing and the cost of coal. That's the sort of thing that they want answers to. Churchill is talking about the wrong things. He still was so focused on winning the war, so he was distracted. Clementine is very worried that he is losing sight of what life is like without war. What she kept trying to persuade him to do was to think and talk about post-war peace talks and post-war peacetime Britain. It was time for Churchill to sort of start looking at what was happening at home, but he simply couldn't. Churchill seems out of tune with the ordinary people of 1945 Britain. He's also out of date. Whoever wins this election will lead the country into the second half of the 20th century. Churchill was born 71 years ago, during the reign of Queen Victoria. When you look at Winston Churchill, he does appear quite Victorian. You'll see him wearing top hats and three-piece suits and watches with chains going across, and one could say you're looking at someone who appears out of touch with modern-day Britain. Churchill really hadn't been on a bus in his life. He'd only been on a tube once on the Circle Line when he'd gone round and round and had to send down to rescue him. He didn't carry cash around like the royal family. Churchill is so out of touch, he can't see it. But Clementine was his direct line to people. People wrote to her in the thousands. She had this huge postbag. She did talk to people and did read these letters, and I suspect she could sense that support was ebbing away from her husband. Soon, others in Churchill's close family are also sounding alarm bells. Both his daughters, Mary and Sarah, warn him that many of the people they know in uniform are thinking of voting Labour. Even the opinion polls are predicting that Churchill will lose. The polls are shown to his close advisers, but they ignore them, believing them to be a mistake. People didn't set the same store on opinion polls in those days as we tend to now. So the fact that the opinion poll is showing something which appears to be absurd, nobody really believed this could possibly be true. So Churchill doesn't find out about the opinion polls until, I think, the year after the election. Time is running out for Churchill. He travels to Walthamstow in north-east London for his final pre-election rally. Can you hear me? Ladies and gentlemen... So what you see is Churchill attempting to deliver his speech in front of a large audience in London, very clearly being heckled by what is a substantial part of the crowd. Churchill appears quite thrown by it. This is someone who is very used to speaking over crowds and doesn't usually lose momentum in that way. What you're seeing here is, of course, that this is something that Churchill was not used to. He'd been used to largely positive, largely appreciative crowds, particularly in very recent weeks, and so, yes, he looks rattled by this. Therefore, a great effort is made on all these points. And when we are asked... It looks like you've got Lady Churchill towards the left, sort of straining to see and to work out what's going on, what's being shouted. It soon becomes clear that the crowd are chanting, WE WANT LABOUR! You've got someone on the right whose head is literally in his hands at that point. Then the booing starts. Walthamstow is an embarrassment and a sign that Churchill may be in deep trouble. Finally realising how out of touch he is with British voters, Churchill admits, I have nothing to offer them. But then comes news that changes everything. There are just ten days until decision time. Winston Churchill's fate lies in the hands of British voters. Then something happens Something happens that changes the fate of the entire world. America has exploded an atomic weapon at a secret test site. Nothing has survived within a mile of the blast. Will this power, now available to man, be made to rule out war and open a new progressive chapter of history, the Atomic Age? So, Churchill is tremendously excited and boosted by the news that the United States has tested this A-bomb. This is a weapon to be used against Japan. This is a weapon that could bring the war against Japan to an early finish without the need for a hideously costly Allied invasion. This is, in Churchill's mind, a war-winning weapon. There isn't time to drop the bomb before the election results come in. But Churchill is still optimistic he'll win the vote, despite being booed at Walthamstow. So he's excited about helping to shape the Atomic Age during his next five years in power. Two days before the votes are counted, Churchill tells a friend, I have great plans in store. I think, for Churchill, there is always an element of being part of history and wanting to be seen as part of history. Churchill likes nothing more than to be at the centre of great events. But the night before the count, Churchill has a dreadful premonition. So Churchill goes to bed that night, and I think he goes to bed with some degree of confidence. He thinks that Churchill is going to get a majority of 70 or 80, and, according to his own maybe slightly romanticised account, he said that he woke up in the early hours of the 26th of July with a sort of sudden, sharp pain. He said it was almost like a physical pain, but what it really was was a fear that the power to shape the future, just as he'd had the power to shape the war, in a way, was going to be taken away from him. This is Churchill's worst nightmare. Churchill retains this deep view that, without him, everything that he has fought for, both in the Second World War and all throughout his life, could be at stake. It's results day at 10 Downing Street. And it's around about ten o'clock in the morning that the first results begin to emerge. When the result for North Paddington was declared, it read, General Mason Macfarlane wins Labour game. Always a late riser, Churchill is still in his morning bath when he gets the first results. His aide, Captain Pym, enters the bathroom to tell him that, so far, there have been ten Labour games. Churchill said something entirely characteristic and, to my mind, entirely admirable. He said something like this, People have a perfect right to vote for another party. That is what we've been fighting for. Hand me my towel. As soon as he's dressed, Churchill goes to the map room across the road from Number 10. Churchill loved his map room. He loved information, particularly visual information. One of the ways in which he relaxes, in a way, throughout the war, is to make his way down to the map room and to study the evidence. Today, it's the election results that are being displayed on the walls of the map room, constituency by constituency, as they come in. And those results are also showing a tsunami of Labour gains, and the writing is well and truly on the wall. Churchill hangs around in that map room, his sort of makeshift election HQ, for the next couple of hours. I think he's solemn and stoical, quite quiet for Churchill, as you'd expect. By late morning, there's no denying it. It's clear that Churchill has lost the election. I was with the two people who were with him on the day that the election results came through, and they both told me they all sat in 10 Downing Street and they all three had a good cry together, because he'd been killing himself for the last six years, and then suddenly he's rejected. And I think he felt that he'd been terribly let down after it all. It certainly does have a powerful emotional effect, as I'm sure it does on any leader who is defeated, but it is probably harder, given that it was so unexpected. By lunchtime, it's clear Churchill hasn't just lost, he's been absolutely crushed. Newspapers carried the astonishing news to an amazed public. Well, let's face it, whoever imagined such a result? And slowly the model of it all struck home. Labour landslide. Churchill returns to Number 10 for what was supposed to be a celebratory lunch. Mary Churchill, his youngest daughter, recalled that we lunched in gloom. You can imagine this was not a happy meal. By then, absolutely, the writing was not just on the wall, it was on the cutlery they were using, it was on the plate, it was on the tablecloth, there was no escaping the reality of this. The atmosphere was incredibly gloomy, and then Clementine tries to cheer him up and say, well, you know, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. To which he replied, in that case, it seems very effectively disguised. But I think what she meant by that was, well, you know, you might survive a bit longer, you know, if you don't actually have to do this job any more. At seven that evening, Churchill makes the journey he hoped he'd never have to make, to Buckingham Palace, to hand in his resignation to the King. This is a photo of him setting off from Downing Street. I see the face of a man trying to put on a brave face. He's a man who's very used to the cameras. He's the great icon of his day, and he's been used to putting on a show. He is a showman. And I see here a man bravely attempting to do that one more time. Churchill meets the King as his Prime Minister for the final time. Then he returns to the building where only 11 weeks ago he'd celebrated VE Day. He spends the evening sitting in a publicly viewable window in Whitehall, waving and giving victory signs and so on. Of course, this would be unpleasant for anybody. It's a form of rejection, and the fact that the election campaign has been driven so much around his own personal image, it actually then makes it a very seemingly personal rejection as well. The following day, he moves out of Downing Street. I see here Churchill hunched over. You can see him walking in no great hurry. Downcast. He's grieving for the loss of office. Winston told his doctor, Lord Moran, it would have been better to have died in the war. I mean, that's how he felt about it. In time, Churchill will be remembered for the glory of VE Day rather than the electoral defeat that followed. And despite being turfed out of Number 10, he never loses his faith in the people's right to choose. Inevitably, he is down. He comes out of it. I would be inclined to take what he says at face value. They're perfectly entitled to vote for who they please. This is democracy. This is what we've been fighting for. You can't have it two ways. You either believe in democracy or you don't. And he does. Next time, it's Churchill's final years. He would still smoke cigars in bed and occasionally set light to the sheets. Churchill's reckless behaviour in old age is jeopardising his place in history. Churchill, the British bulldog, is looking much more like a playboy. Before one of the most elaborate funerals Britain has ever seen seals Churchill's legacy for generations to come. You would have been struck by a sense that you yourself were witnessing history.