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00:23Swinging London, the past sent packing and good riddance too.
00:37New was what counted, rip-minted fresh, no more bowing and scraping to tradition, the
00:44sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.
00:59It is now 9.20.
01:04Lugget Hill crowded this morning with thousands of people who have been pouring in since dawn
01:10to see the passing of the body of Winston Churchill on its way here to St Paul's Cathedral from
01:16which I am talking at the moment.
01:19But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died and all of a sudden London stopped swinging.
01:29Out from some timeless wintry fog shambled the hairy old beast history, big with memories.
01:40People in the streets stood in the freezing cold as the enormous coffin staggered past
01:47on the shoulders of guardsmen.
01:51Royalty paid its respects to the great commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.
01:57The Dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.
02:07Satire held its tongue.
02:12Even us smart-aleck history students stopped sniggering and started paying attention,
02:19caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling, a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.
02:26Something immense had happened.
02:29The death of a patriarch, the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.
02:35What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.
02:44But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.
02:51Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden,
02:55a millstone round the neck of the future.
02:58What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the sceptered isle for us mods?
03:06No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston.
03:11Rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap.
03:15Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.
03:25This, in 1984, is London, chief city of Airstrip One, a province of the state of Oceania.
03:36Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, but it wasn't the history of pomp.
03:41It was the history of people, written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English, sharp and hard as granite.
03:51Orwell's history, then, was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.
03:56It was the kind that asked hard questions.
04:00But for all their differences, Orwell and Churchill did have this in common.
04:05They not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.
04:09Look at Churchill, look at Orwell, and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.
04:15You'll see how our past shaped our future.
04:46First We shall targetzy, and our past quotidien, if you want to die so effectively.
05:08Those who settled on this one, may have a really happy or endless reduz Clair
05:27In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born, this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham,
05:34was in its prime, turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful than
05:41she's ever been before or since. He must have thought it would go on forever. Ninety years
05:48later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrapyard. But then
05:54history has a cruel way with optimism. There never was any chance, really, that Winston
06:05Churchill could escape history. He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim, the great limestone
06:12pile of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Winston's father, Randolph, boy wonder of the
06:19Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37, seems set to be the latest Churchill to embark
06:26on a meteoric rise. But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening
06:33to resign. Finally, the Tories let him go. He never got back to power.
06:40His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess. Glamorous, rich, American, desirably
06:47luscious, perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers. But Winston hardly knew his parents.
06:57As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.
07:03And as usual with boys of his class, he was packed off to boarding school at the earliest
07:08possible opportunity. There, he listened, quaking with fear, to the screams of eight-year-olds
07:17having their bottoms soundly birched. Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy
07:27with the convicts of England came from doing 11 years of penal servitude in the public and
07:33private schools of England. Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations
07:40with his father in his entire life. One of them happened one day while Winston was playing
07:46with his 1,500 toy soldiers. Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy had the
07:55stuff of politics or the law. But now that he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry
08:01just so, he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier.
08:07And that did it, really. Winston's whole life would be battles with a gun, pen and voice.
08:13He'd pick up his father's broken sword and make the name of Churchill glorious again.
08:20So Winston charged headlong into the fray. India, Africa, you name it, he was there, even if
08:26he had to barge his way uninvited into history, trading on family contacts, paying his way
08:33to get to the action. And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.
08:41It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion,
08:48the muse that fired everything he did, his politics, his speech-making, his battle cry.
08:55Reading it, writing it, making it, were all inseparable in the personality that was unfolding.
09:02Ardent, impetuous, impassioned.
09:08And it was in the empire that Winston began to write. Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers.
09:14And what stories. It helped, of course, that he was socially shameless and physically
09:20fearless. There he was, a fleshy five-foot-seven, spinning a ripping yarn.
09:29He knew how to make the headlines and he knew how to milk them. But Winston was never just
09:34gung-ho for Winston. Almost all his life he believed in the greatness and goodness of the
09:40British Empire. But he knew, next to nothing, about what made that empire really tick. Money.
09:55For while Churchill was humming the chorus of the Road to Mandalay, Richard Blair, George
10:01Orwell's father, was actually on it, cashing in on tea, teak, and not least, narcotics.
10:09Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj. His job was to supervise the production
10:15of poppies and their export to Shanghai, ensuring, on behalf of the empire, that the Chinese habit
10:22would never knowingly go understocked.
10:34In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son, Eric. Only later would he be known
10:40as George Orwell. A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England, while
10:47Richard stayed behind in Burma.
10:49Home was No. 17, Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames. Nostalgic, middle-class, suburban.
11:04Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class, and Eric Blair at the bottom,
11:10but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for all small boys destined to govern
11:16the empire. Exile to boarding school.
11:24Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's, I began wetting my bed. Nowadays, I believe bedwetting
11:32in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have
11:37been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked
11:42on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose, and for which the proper cure was
11:48a beating. Night after night, I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers.
11:56Please, God, do not let me wet my bed. Oh, please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
12:06St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic home county's gulag that George Orwell described
12:12nearly 40 years on, but there's no doubt that it was his apprenticeship in contempt for the
12:18rituals of empire. History lessons he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.
12:26Orges of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to
12:31shout out the right answers, and at the same time, not feeling the faintest interest in
12:36the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming.
12:42The torments, the canings, the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim,
12:48the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath, left Eric with the lifelong horror of dirt and
12:54a burning hatred of the fake service ethos for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these
13:01baptisms.
13:05If you were rich, all these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling
13:12class. But Eric was not rich. He was not part of the upper class. He got the canings without the
13:17promise of the perks.
13:18His weapon against them was an air of bloody-minded indifference, and when he came here to Eton,
13:25he refined their insouciance into an art form.
13:30If Blair was going to be made bugler for the cadets, he'd show up with his badger skew.
13:36If Blair was going to recite poetry, it was going to be Stevenson's suicide club.
13:42Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.
13:51Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence. He was drunk on words, and he wanted
13:58everyone else to share the intoxication. Back home from the empire in 1900, he defied his
14:04father's pessimism by following him into politics. And once he had discovered he'd got the gift
14:11of the gab, he let the eloquence rip, drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great
14:16trooper of the Edwardian stage.
14:21Unlike many politicians, Churchill didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating
14:27societies. He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial north, on soapboxes,
14:34from the tops of buses, and in musicals, where he really had to earn the cheers.
14:41Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory. When he defected to the
14:48Liberals in 1904, he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian
14:55England. We don't usually think of Churchill as a radical, but all sorts of social reforms
15:02poured from his fertile mind. Labour exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.
15:10But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism. As
15:17Home Secretary, he was a bit too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy
15:23deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.
15:31It made sense then to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence, where it could do some good.
15:38At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty. Three years later, the world was at war. Gallipoli,
15:481915. 52,000 Allied troops perish in Turkey. A bloody fiasco and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.
16:02Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.
16:09Accused not altogether fairly of recklessness and incompetence, the Tories paid him back for his treachery
16:16by booting him out of office. Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre
16:24at Gallipoli,
16:25Churchill crashed into one of his black dog depressions.
16:39Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders, using his old army connections
16:45so that the politician could demote himself to a Tommy.
16:51On 23 November 1915, he wrote to his wife, Clemmie.
16:59My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.
17:03I've spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.
17:08Filth and rubbish everywhere.
17:10Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.
17:14Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.
17:18In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide
17:22to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns.
17:33Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill.
17:37He'd served his time.
17:39Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.
17:46Eric Blair was too young for the trenches.
17:49But while at Eton, he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.
17:53When the war was over, he may have felt guilty, like a lot of his generation.
17:58Guilt for missing the slaughter.
18:02The next step after Eton should have been Oxford.
18:06But like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.
18:12His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.
18:16But even if Eric had had the chance,
18:17it's likely he would have rejected the smoothly moneyed escalator through privilege.
18:23Instead, it was off to the colonies.
18:31There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.
18:35He might even have shared some of Churchill's idealism about the Do Good Empire.
18:41Five years in a Burmese police,
18:44perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service,
18:48smartly cured him of that.
18:51Doing his job as efficiently as he could,
18:54rounding up petty criminals,
18:56looking the other way when they were beaten,
18:58he wore his power like a hair shirt.
19:01The Burmese he caught and jailed, he knew,
19:04didn't think of themselves as criminals,
19:06but as victims of foreign conquerors.
19:10All over the empire, there were men who hated their part in it,
19:14as heartily as he did,
19:16but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence
19:18or the cowardice of acquiescence.
19:23One incident, more than any other,
19:26brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.
19:30An elephant had broken its chains
19:32and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.
19:36Blair picked up his rifle.
19:39Shall I call the handers?
19:40No, there is no one.
19:42I'll try and get him myself.
19:47When he found the beast peacefully throwing grass
19:50and bamboo shoots into its mouth,
19:52it was obvious there was no reason to kill it,
19:55except the huge crowd expected him to.
20:01I could feel their 2,000 wills pressing me forward,
20:04irresistibly.
20:06And it was at this moment,
20:07as I stood there with the rifle in my hands,
20:10that I first grasped the hollowness,
20:12the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.
20:16Here was I, the white man with his gun,
20:19standing in front of an unarmed native crowd,
20:22seemingly the lead actor of the piece.
20:25But in reality, I was only an absurd puppet.
20:39When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick,
20:47but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
20:51In that instant, in too short a time one would have thought,
20:55even for the bullet to get there,
20:56a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.
21:00He neither stirred nor fell,
21:03but every line of his body had altered.
21:07In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.
21:11I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.
21:16I often wondered whether any of the others grasped
21:19that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
21:34In 1927, Blair went home,
21:37where a sniff of the English air convinced him
21:40he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.
21:45Home was here at Southwold,
21:48a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees
21:53that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.
21:56Eric's sister, Avril, kept a tea shop.
21:59Mother played bridge, father stared at the sea.
22:04When Eric announced to the family
22:06that he was leaving the Burma police
22:08to become, of all things, a writer,
22:10you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.
22:20And what was the England that Eric had come home to?
22:24A country he'd later describe as resembling a family,
22:28a rather stuffy Victorian family
22:31where rich relations are cow-towed to
22:34and poor relations are horribly sat upon,
22:37where the young are thwarted
22:39and most of the power is in the hands
22:41of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
22:46A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.
22:52May 1926, the general strike.
22:55Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight.
22:58One of those in control was Winston Churchill.
23:01After 20 years away from the Tories,
23:04he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
23:07busy crushing the general strike.
23:13Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism,
23:16which only made Eric all the more determined
23:19to expiate the sins of empire.
23:22In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place,
23:26he couldn't wait to lose his.
23:29Most people who were restless with their lot in life
23:32wanted a rise above their station.
23:35Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.
23:44There was something almost Franciscan
23:46about his nosedive into squalor.
23:49It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability.
23:53It was the calculated bodily embrace
23:56of everything that repelled the fastidious Eric,
24:00muck, indescribably evil smells.
24:04When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit,
24:08he was making a point, at least to himself,
24:11that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.
24:16It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus
24:20to show that nothing human was beneath her.
24:25For two years, Blair did the cook's tour of destitution,
24:30comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.
24:35In the bathroom of one especially horrible Doss House, or Spike,
24:40he finally got down to basic truths.
24:44It was a disgusting sight.
24:47All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed.
24:51The grime, the rents and patches,
24:54the bits of string doing duty for buttons,
24:57the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments,
25:00some of them mere collections of holes held together by dirt.
25:04The room became a press of steaming nudity,
25:07the sweaty odours of the tramps competing
25:10with the sickly sub-fecal stench native to the Spike.
25:17He didn't have to do it, of course.
25:20He wasn't that hard up.
25:21But there was never anything second-hand about Blair,
25:25any more than there was about Churchill.
25:27Both were doers, not lookers.
25:29Whether in the trenches or the Doss Houses,
25:32they needed to live what they talked about.
25:37In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book,
25:41Down and Out, in Paris and London.
25:44But the name on the cover was not Blair,
25:47but George Orwell, a pseudonym.
25:49There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George.
25:53And Orwell, a river in Suffolk, connected him
25:57to the English landscape.
25:59But the landscape through which George Orwell would travel
26:01was not that of hedgerows and haystacks,
26:04but gutters and gasworks.
26:14In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill
26:18were on opposite sides of the barricades.
26:20Orwell had declared war on the empire.
26:23Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.
26:27Our myth was that the British Empire
26:30was founded on the playing fields of Eton.
26:32But Orwell had been on the playing fields of Eton,
26:35and he knew better.
26:36He knew that the British Empire
26:38was founded on fields of coal.
26:41The Germans and the Americans
26:42could fool around with chemicals and electricals,
26:45but our bedrock was coke and nutty slack.
26:50But then, in the 30s, that bedrock caved in.
26:54Export demand collapsed.
26:56Mines were shut.
26:57Whole towns coughed and died.
27:01This is what British history,
27:03the grandiose epic of the empire,
27:06had finally come to,
27:07from the jarro of the venerable Bede
27:10to the jarro of the hunger marchers.
27:14Never had the country been so bitterly divided.
27:21In the south, they built model villages
27:24with miniature collieries, miniature farms
27:26and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.
27:29In Wales, Scotland and the north of England,
27:33that hill would have been a slag heap,
27:35and it wouldn't have been a ploughboy,
27:36but desperate scramblers,
27:39searching for coal waste with their bare hands.
27:44Orwell, who cherished the countryside
27:46with an unsentimental, almost feral passion,
27:49now headed for this underworld,
27:51the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.
27:54When his publisher asked him to write a book
27:56on life in the industrial north,
27:59Orwell grabbed the chars
28:00and set out on the road to Wigan pier.
28:09What he found was a town broken by depression,
28:13coated in grime which befouled everything,
28:16black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him,
28:19a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.
28:23And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell,
28:26being employed was purgatory.
28:29Get up at 3.45 in the morning,
28:31crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages,
28:35sometimes for miles,
28:37as far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge
28:40to Oxford Circus.
28:43When he wasn't down the pits,
28:45Orwell was here in Wigan Public Library.
28:48Here's his name in the visitor's book,
28:50E.A. Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.
28:53He was doing research on the miners' battle
28:56to make ends meet.
28:58Wages, rents and prices.
29:03The road to Wigan pier came in for a lot of criticism in its day,
29:07from right and left.
29:09Conservatives, of course,
29:10thought it was a piece of Bolshevik trash.
29:12But socialist intellectuals attacked it
29:15for being too grimly pessimistic.
29:17A picture of the working class as broken by misery,
29:20rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.
29:25None of this prevented The Road to Wigan Pier
29:28from being a massive bestseller.
29:31Why?
29:31Well, Orwell took the usual political position paper
29:35and jumped it.
29:37Instead, he made a real work of literature.
29:41When you follow him into these soot-choke mines
29:44or the freezing dampness of the terrace houses,
29:47you know you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression.
29:50Someone who could make you hear, see and feel
29:54the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.
29:59You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.
30:06One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Moseley
30:10lured fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.
30:16To Orwell's horror, the working class audience
30:19who'd started out booing Moseley ended up cheering him.
30:24A fight was coming,
30:26and the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
30:28and his Chancellor Neville Chamberlain
30:31were too gutless to join in.
30:33What was their message?
30:35Peace in our time,
30:36or please go away and do your business somewhere else
30:39while we get on with hoeing the garden.
30:43This is a BBC home service.
30:46Hello children everywhere.
30:47That's one of the most familiar voices...
30:49Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.
30:53Europe was over there,
30:55full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.
31:00All very regrettable, no doubt,
31:02but surely their business, not ours.
31:07But the world out there was turning very ugly.
31:11Fascism was spreading across Europe.
31:13A huge cloud was falling over the village green.
31:17It was time to make a choice.
31:19Orwell made his.
31:21In December 1936, he set off for Spain.
31:28Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf
31:31and modified balaclava,
31:33the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman
31:35set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.
31:38All that police training in Burma had a use after all.
31:42But after four months at the front,
31:44Orwell, unmissably conspicuous at six foot two,
31:48took a bullet through the neck.
31:52He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.
31:56He'd seen at first hand how his comrades had been brutally crushed,
32:00not just by Franco, but also by the Communists.
32:03The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism,
32:07especially Stalin's brand.
32:11It was because Orwell hoped for a homegrown British social revolution
32:16and because he was sick of hearing excuses for Stalin,
32:20while his coffeehouse commissars prepared to forgive him for everything
32:24just because he wasn't Hitler,
32:26that he decided to write the real history of the Bolshevik Revolution.
32:30In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form,
32:36the Barnyard Fable.
32:43On my return from Spain,
32:45I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story
32:48that could be easily understood by almost anyone.
32:52However, the actual details of the story
32:55did not come to me for some time,
32:57until one day I saw a little boy
33:00driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path,
33:03whipping it whenever it tried to turn.
33:05It struck me that if only such animals
33:08became aware of their strength,
33:11we should have no power over them.
33:28Animal Farm would not be written for another six years,
33:32but already Orwell was beginning to reinvent the art of political writing.
33:38Tending to his goats and chickens at his freezing cottage in Hertfordshire,
33:43fighting off the early signs of tuberculosis,
33:46he set about purging the language of the pompous preaching of the official left
33:50and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.
33:57As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm,
34:00Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds
34:03of his ruinously expensive mansion in Kent,
34:06brooding, like Orwell, on the ugliness of dictatorship.
34:10For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party
34:14as a posturing has-been,
34:16embarrassingly devoted to lost causes
34:19like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.
34:24So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing.
34:28And as he wrote, thousands of pages on his ancestor,
34:32the Duke of Marlborough,
34:33thousands more on the history of the English-speaking peoples,
34:37keeping company with the vanished generations
34:39who'd faced invasion before,
34:42so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.
34:49First, the little Englanders,
34:51stuck in their dream world of Sundy Hunts and Jim Karnas,
34:55had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not,
34:57Britain would share Europe's fate.
35:02There are those who say,
35:04let us ignore the continent of Europe.
35:07Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments
35:10to stew in its own juice,
35:13to fight out its own quarrel.
35:16Now, there would be much to be said for this plan.
35:18If only we could unfasten the British Islands
35:22from their rock foundation
35:24and could tow them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
35:30Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.
35:36Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers.
35:40Men like Neville Chamberlain,
35:42who seriously imagined that Hitler and the Nazis were reasonable men,
35:46with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated
35:50after the last war,
35:52and who would stop at reasonable demands.
35:55The appeasers, Churchill thought,
35:57were like men who imagined you could satisfy a ravenous wolf
36:01by throwing it a sheep or two in the hope
36:04that by the time it got to you, it would be full.
36:10In 1938, Hitler, who had already annexed Austria,
36:14threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.
36:18Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister,
36:21ran to Munich and served it up.
36:25I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler.
36:31And here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
36:44For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice,
36:48but the deepest stain on our long history,
36:51the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption
36:54that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
37:00All is over.
37:02Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken.
37:06Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
37:09We have passed an awful milestone in our history.
37:12When the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged,
37:16and that the terrible words have, for the time being,
37:20been pronounced against the Western democracies,
37:24thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.
37:33When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich,
37:37Hitler went ahead and occupied Prague,
37:40Chamberlain took it personally,
37:42realising that he and the country had been royally had.
37:49On the 1st of September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
37:55Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.
37:59This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
38:03handed the German government a final note,
38:07stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,
38:12that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
38:18a state of war would exist between us.
38:22I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,
38:28and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
38:38Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice announced the war
38:41as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.
38:45The evacuation of children began.
38:54None of this meant for a minute
38:56that Chamberlain was going to hand the reins over to Churchill.
38:59For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true,
39:03Churchill was still mistrusted by the vast majority of his party.
39:08But the swing in public opinion towards him had been so great,
39:12it seemed prudent to include him in the government.
39:14And on the day war was declared,
39:17Churchill was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.
39:23But as if in a rerun of Gallipoli,
39:25Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster,
39:28when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies
39:32through Norway backfired horribly.
39:39Somehow, Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.
39:44Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution
39:46made it seem as though he, at least, was doing his best.
39:50Next to Neville Chamberlain, gaunt, weary,
39:54presiding over a front bench of old geezers,
39:57Churchill, though an old geezer himself,
39:59seemed like a red-hot volcano,
40:01a lava flow of plans and strategies.
40:07Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low.
40:10And on the 10th of May in 1940, he was finally forced to resign.
40:17The weeks that followed were the most important
40:20in Britain's long history.
40:23Two vital questions were at stake.
40:25Who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister,
40:28and how would he deal with the Nazi war machine?
40:32Not only the survival of our national independence,
40:35but that of Western democracy would turn on the outcome.
40:42Two kinds of men, two kinds of England,
40:45were now in play for the leadership of the country.
40:48In the man everyone expected to take over,
40:51Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties,
40:54solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.
40:58And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.
41:02But in the best judgment of his life, Halifax turned the job down.
41:06In the pit of his stomach, he knew he didn't have what it took to be a war leader.
41:11Winston had seen the face of battle.
41:14Halifax had only hunted foxes.
41:19On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.
41:25On the same day came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.
41:32Now, of course, we all know that the finest hour was waiting in the wings.
41:37But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940,
41:42when Britain came closer than at any other time in its history to being overwhelmed.
41:48Belgium and Holland were going under, and France was soon about to join their fate.
41:54A quarter of a million British troops were trapped in northern France,
41:58with hardly any hope of a safe exit.
42:02Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue.
42:07And hardly anyone who counted thought we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.
42:16Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech,
42:23shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.
42:28I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the government,
42:33I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
42:40We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
42:44We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
42:50You ask, what is our policy?
42:53I will say, it is to wage war by sea, land and air,
42:57with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.
43:01To wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
43:11That is our policy.
43:13You ask, what is our aim?
43:16I can answer in one word.
43:19Victory.
43:19Victory at all costs.
43:22Victory in spite of all terror.
43:25Victory, however long and hard the road may be.
43:29For without victory there is no survival.
43:37We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation.
43:41Enter the great prince, girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.
43:46But the truth was very different.
43:49The military men assumed Churchill would have to eat his words before long.
43:54The civil servants, who'd always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes at yet another theatrical performance.
44:01And the politicians, men like Halifax, believed that sooner or later,
44:06Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.
44:11It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.
44:19Churchill was having none of it.
44:21In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view,
44:24he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his entire life
44:28to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.
44:35The battle for Britain then started, not in the skies against the Luftwaffe,
44:41but here, behind the closed doors of the Kavanagh war room.
44:45In combat were Halifax and Churchill,
44:48two men with very different ideas of how to save the country.
44:58In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire
45:04that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.
45:09The very thought, he said, of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside,
45:13this true fragment of undying England, was an insult and an outrage.
45:20Churchill would not have disagreed.
45:23But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York
45:26or for some unreal dream of village England.
45:30He wasn't fighting for Britain at all, understood just as a piece of geography.
45:35He was fighting for what he thought was the meaning of being British
45:38and that meaning was an idea, a precious idea,
45:42we'd given to the world, freedom and the rule of law.
45:45Without it having to endure an existence by permission of the Führer,
45:51all we had was a mock Britain, not worthy of the name really,
45:55let alone of our long history.
45:57Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.
46:06When Churchill said all of this to the full cabinet on the 28th of May,
46:11he was greeted, not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.
46:16There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment he knew the people of Britain agreed.
46:25In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been.
46:33And yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe
46:37that made the difference between surrender and survival.
46:41All the qualities which generally made him so impossible,
46:44his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point,
46:48his romantic belief in British history were now, in the black days of May,
46:54exactly what the country needed.
46:59In the days ahead, Churchill learned that against all predictions,
47:03a quarter of a million British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk
47:07in a thousand little ships,
47:09the core of the army that would return almost exactly four years later.
47:15It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later in June 1940,
47:21which was, as one MP said, worth a thousand guns and the speeches of a thousand years.
47:31We shall go on to the end.
47:33We shall fight in France.
47:36We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
47:39We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
47:45We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
47:49We shall fight on the beaches.
47:51We shall fight on the landing grounds.
47:54We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
47:58We shall fight in the hills.
48:00We shall never surrender.
48:05This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell, for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism,
48:13was so relieved that at last Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote,
48:18that wars were won by fighting.
48:22Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different,
48:25though one loved the empire and the other detested it,
48:29both understood that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them,
48:34both from the Nazis and the defeatists.
48:40Orwell's TB at this stage was still undiagnosed,
48:43but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.
48:48Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.
48:57During the months of the Blitz, there were the two of them in the thick of the action,
49:02drawn like small boys to danger.
49:05Orwell, someone said, felt at home amidst the bombs, the bravery and the danger.
49:11Churchill was supposed to sleep somewhere safe, like the Cabinet war rooms,
49:15but to the horror of his staff, he kept going back to number 10.
49:20Sometimes he'd climb on the roof to see the fireworks.
49:30Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting,
49:35but they were different visions.
49:38Churchill's was more like a Shakespearean history play,
49:41with the war leader stalking through the night camp,
49:45drinking the affection of ordinary people.
49:48George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes,
49:52air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service,
49:55and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the levellers and the Chartists.
50:01The working people of Britain were not taking on the Luftwaffe
50:04in order to make the nation safe for the likes of Lord Halifax
50:08and the owners of country houses,
50:10but to create a nation that would finally help the miners of Wigan
50:14and millions like them have their share of the common decencies of life.
50:21The trouble was the way that war had to be won,
50:25not by the People's Army of Old England,
50:27but by the People's Army of the United States and the Soviet Union.
50:33Somewhere in the pit of his stomach,
50:35Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell.
50:39But if being a junior partner to America was the price to be paid for defeating fascism,
50:44so be it.
50:48Churchill was, in any case, less of a little Englander than Orwell.
50:53He loved the punch-in-the-ribs guster of America
50:56as much as Orwell flinched at it.
50:59For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive, transatlantic thing.
51:04For Orwell, democracy, American style,
51:08was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.
51:13For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear.
51:17If war had meant dying together, peace was going to mean living together.
51:22Not in the slums of Britain,
51:23but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.
51:28Newspapers carried the astonishing news to an amazed public.
51:32Let's face it, whoever imagined such a result.
51:35Labour landslide.
51:38In the general election, Churchill received the thanks of the nation
51:41by being handed a tremendous drubbing.
51:45Labour took office with a huge mandate for reform.
51:49The socialist press greeted the triumph as the coming of the New Jerusalem.
51:57But instead of joining the Hallelujah Chorus, Orwell, like Churchill,
52:03was profoundly worried about a new world order
52:06where we would be slaves in another way.
52:10From Stettine, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic,
52:16an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
52:21Behind that line...
52:35To clear his head of the static hum of post-war London,
52:41Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain,
52:45to the very edge of the kingdom, the Hebridean island of Jura.
52:49No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.
52:54And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find,
52:58typing in bed with a machine on his knees,
53:00knowing he hadn't much longer to live,
53:03that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him and to Britain,
53:08the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.
53:13As Churchill issued his grim warnings,
53:15Orwell created a communal garden playman's Winston,
53:19Winston Smith.
53:21The year was 1948.
53:30In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother,
53:33no laughter but the love of triumph over a defeated enemy,
53:36no art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment,
53:39but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
53:44If you want a picture of the future,
53:46imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
53:55When we think of 1984,
53:57most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience,
54:01ruled by Big Brother,
54:03an upside-down world of doublespeak,
54:05where war is peace and lies are truth.
54:09But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical
54:14when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship,
54:18a guerrilla action fought not with guns and barricades,
54:21but by literally taking liberties,
54:24reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity,
54:27a walk in the country, an act of love,
54:30the singing of an old nursery rhyme.
54:34Winston Smith did all these forbidden things,
54:37prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were all absolutely normal.
54:43The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.
54:47The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.
54:57Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past,
55:01the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom
55:04in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.
55:08It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist,
55:12on the face of it such an impossible couple,
55:15the most unlikely of allies.
55:19George Orwell died in 1950.
55:22He was 46.
55:24The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Winston Churchill,
55:28a review of his war memoir Their Finest Hour.
55:32Though you'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's warrior heroics,
55:36he bestows on the book the greatest compliment he could think of,
55:40that it read like the work of a human being,
55:43not a public figure.
55:46And it was a verdict shared by the thousands who lined the streets of London
55:51when Churchill finally died in 1965.
55:58But then, when it counted,
56:00neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing,
56:04towed the party line.
56:05More important was their common belief
56:08that if Britain was to have a distinctive future
56:10in the age of super-states,
56:12it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history,
56:17the history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
56:24But the history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
56:28It's written not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living.
56:32It's our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are.
56:37And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it,
56:41to lament what ought to be lamented,
56:43to celebrate what should be celebrated.
56:46And if, in the end, that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot,
56:51well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell
56:54would have minded that very much.
56:56And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
57:01There were three ravens sat on a tree,
57:06Down a down, hey, down a down.
57:11They were as black as they might be,
57:16With a down, down, down.
57:19Then one of them said to his mate,
57:25Where shall we know our breakfast table
57:29In a down, derry, derry, down, down.
57:38She lifted up his bloody head,
57:44Down a down, hey, down a down.
57:49And kissed his wounds that were so red,
57:53With a down, down, down.
57:58She got him up upon her back,
58:03And carried him to earth and leave,
58:08With a down, derry, derry, down, down.
58:13I was not gonna be too close to him.
58:21I sang.
58:27But then she did not touch the light,
58:28With a down, derry, derry, down.
58:28I said, I was not gonna be too close to him.
58:29I said, I'm not gonna be too close to him.
58:31I said, I don't tell him.
58:33I said, I'm not gonna be too close to him.
58:41But then he was seven years old.
58:43He buried him before the pride
58:49But daring, she was dead herself and even soon died
59:00God send every gentleman such hopes, such howls
59:09And such a long way