Book review: opposites attract in Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

One was a steely wartime prime minister; the other the author of an acclaimed dystopian novel - what could they possibly have in common?

Winston Churchill, British prime minister, imperialist and fan of George Orwell’s 1984. Getty Images

Sometime in the late 1970s, George Orwell’s first biographer, Bernard Crick, went to visit one of his subject’s closest friends, the novelist Anthony Powell. Like many a life-writer marshalling his material, Crick had come with preconceptions. At some stage during their lunch he briskly informed his host – an Eton-educated lieutenant colonel’s son who had married the daughter of an earl – that he could not imagine what Powell and Orwell might have had in common. This, as Powell des­pairingly noted in his diary, was “routine”.

Crick had allowed his judgment to be swayed by factors that neither men would have thought particularly important. Not only were Orwell and Powell a mere two years apart in age, they had also attended the same school and had many of the same friends. Each, too, had been born into a family with a long tradition of military and imperial service. On half-a-dozen levels – social, intellectual and temperamental – there was far more to bring them together than drive them apart.

The same point, as Thomas E Ricks insists in Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom – an entertaining but somewhat erratic study – can be made of Orwell (1903-1950) and Winston Churchill (1874-1965). They may have been separated by a 29-year age gap; one may have been the left-­leaning author of possibly the greatest dystopian novel in the English language and the other a diehard romantic imperialist, goaded on by a well-nigh mythical view of British history. But beyond that lay consanguinity, mutual respect and an impressive armoury of shared ideals.

Both had been to one of England’s leading public schools (as a Harrovian, Churchill would have been reassured by Orwell’s near-obsessional interest in the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match). Both were, to a certain degree, maverick outsiders – Orwell throwing over his respectable job in the Burma police for the literary life; Churchill, for all his status as a duke’s grandson, roaming from one political party to another and never quite being trusted by establishment grandees.

Each, too, was driven by a psychological motor that can seem simply baffling. Orwell, as he more than once confessed, regarded most of his early career as a failure. In the same way, Churchill spent much of the 1930s, when most British politicians were falling over themselves not to offend a belli­gerent Nazi Germany, in the political wilderness, written off as a has-been by many of his parliamentary colleagues and, as Ricks reminds us, seriously annoying his constituency association.

Success came late. Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book that made Orwell's name, hung fire until June 1949, by which time its tubercular author was already on his deathbed. The first trickle of royalties, later to grow into an unstoppable torrent, was, he told a friend, "fairy gold". Churchill's greatest years as a wartime prime minister – 1940 to 1945 – had to wait until his late 60s. Both men, it transpires, were tortoises rather than hares, a cheering example of saving the best for last.

As an exercise in parallel biography, Churchill & Orwell has one small drawback. The two never met. But there was plenty of each-way esteem. Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, recalled calling at 10 Downing Street in 1953 to find his patient deep in Nineteen Eighty-Four whereupon he remarked what a wonderful book it was. And Ricks did not regard the two never meeting as a handicap in his mission to show that both were freedom fighters constantly at work in defence of individual liberty, as the mid-century autocracies battled over the common man's soul.

If one or two of the devices used to shackle his protagonists sometimes fail to convince (exhibit A is their prose styles, which are often yards apart) then his tracking of their immediately pre-war lives throws up plenty of points of contact, in particular the ooze of frustration in which both men found themselves enmired in a world of mass unemployment and warring dictators. Each was galvanised by the events of August 1939 – Orwell, a one-time pacifist, coming downstairs to read news of the Russo-German pact and experiencing a kind of Damascene revelation; Churchill, readmitted to the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, sniffing the air in delight like an old warhorse led out once again into fray.

Come summer 1940 and Churchill's accession to the premiership, Ricks sets out on a slightly different path: alternating accounts of strategy and military manoeuvres with the running commentary of Orwell's diaries and press articles. "For the first time in decades we have a government with imagination," he wrote around the time France fell. Thereafter, Orwell remains a kind of phantom presence at Churchill's elbow, notably at the Tehran conference of 1943 in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin not only divided the post-war world up between them but also offered a template for the permanently opposed land masses of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As a joint biographer – a difficult task at the best of times – Ricks is far more at home with Churchill than with Orwell. Mostly this is a matter of tiny fact errors or speculation (thinking the character of Mr Macgregor in Burmese Days is taken from Beatrix Potter, whereas most of the novel's names were robbed from a local newspaper). But one or two of them stem from a failure to comprehend the kind of late-Victorian world in which Orwell's personality was formed. Thus, rather like Crick with Powell, Ricks can't understand why the young Orwell, having "graduated" from Eton at the end of 1921 doesn't immediately set sail for university ("There was nothing about him that recommended him as any sort of enforcer of law").But successive generations of Orwell's family had spent time as colonial administrators, and Burma, where several of his relatives had been living for years, was a natural home for a 19-year-old brought up to regard the idea of imperial service (he joined the police there) as a perfectly respectable career choice.

Ricks also overstates the left-wing Orwell's partiality for Churchill. Certainly, he wrote that "it is significant that in the moment of disaster the man best able to unite the nation was Churchill, a Conservative of aristocratic origins". But there are other remarks, not quoted by Ricks, about "Winston Churchill posing as a democrat" and some lines of poetry – these can be found in the pastiche-­Byronic stanzas As One Non-Combatant to Another – that run: "I've no wish to praise him/I'd gladly shoot him when the war is won/Or now, if there was someone to replace him."

On the other hand, Orwell notes that at "a time when empires crashed like houses", many a left-winger "was glad enough to cling to Churchill's trousers". If some of this ambivalence is absent from Churchill & Orwell, then where Ricks succeeds is in his adroit use of details. Churchill's gargantuan alcohol intake, his bluster, his habit of bursting into tears, his ability to infuriate subordinates charged with executing his whim, his gaffes – all combine to create a figure of monstrous vitality, charging through the world of high-level politics like a rhinoceros through a jungle clearing.

This eye for detail is marked in the manoeuvrings of the 1930s, when the appeasers were at work to prevent a second war at almost any cost, and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, could congratulate himself on his efforts to keep unfavourable mentions of Germany out of the paper. At one point, for example, Ricks quotes a line or two uttered in 1938 by Lord Hali­fax, the British foreign secretary and a favourite to succeed Neville Chamberlain, shortly after the West had abandoned Czechoslovakia to Nazi rule. It was, Halifax complacently suggested, "a disagreeable business". Suddenly, with a tectonic plate-shift that no history book can quite convey, you understand why Chamberlain had to go, why Churchill had to become prime minister, and why a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four had to be written.

D J Taylor is a novelist and critic. His book Orwell: The Life was first published in 2003.