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I'm very glad that this episode, Dancer's History, it's brought to you by now, TV and now TV, Sky Cinema and Entertainment Pass, you can stream the latest blockbusters and award winning box sets with now TV. There are still people out there who say there's nothing on the telly tonight. Amazing. It's an extraordinary thing. So it's like when people used to say to each other, are you online to remember that it's people who say there's nothing on the telly tonight?

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But in the 19th century, you're going to love that. So don't get bored. This lockdown. Start your seven day free trial. You get the whole thing for free. Sweet search now, TV. Everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history today in 1874. November the 30th, 1874. Winston Churchill was born he was born at Blenheim Palace, his grandfather's house in the Oxfordshire countryside. He was born ten years to the day after General Hood sent his Confederate troops into heavily entrenched Union lines outside Franklin, Tennessee.

He destroyed the army of Tennessee. You destroyed his own army in a frontal assault against fixed positions as the industrial revolution to put awesome firepower into the hands of infantrymen and artilleryman. It was a battle that the military planners of Russia, Japan and Europe would have been wise to study devastating and one sided losses anyway. That was ten years before Winston Churchill was born to mark the anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth. We're talking to not one, but two historians of Churchill.

One of them is Professor Richard Toye, who we've had on the podcast before.

He's professor of history at the University of Exeter. We talked recently about his latest book, Winston Churchill A Life in the News.

The other is Doctor Warren Doctor. He's a lecturer in Aberystwyth University. He's also written about Churchill, particularly Churchill and the Islamic world. I got the two of them on, actually. I was talking to them earlier this summer for the ah, history hit live on YouTube. This is the selected highlights of our conversation. I asked them about Churchill, his reputation. It's striking that whenever I refer to Churchill now on social media, someone immediately pops up in the comments section and describes him as a racist.

Where are we, Winston Churchill? How should we think about him? Was he a racist? Is he a racist? Has it all work? These two excellent scholars are the right guys to ask if you want to watch Michael Rambo and Paris Churchill's birthplace, if you want to watch my trip around the Churchill war rooms. And frankly, we've got a lot of Winston Churchill content on the old history hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. You had over that.

It's actually still the Black Friday weekend offer. I mean, don't talk to me about it.

It still is. And if you go and use the code Black Friday, all lower case, Black Friday, you get a month for free and an 80 percent off the first four months is completely insane for less than a price of beer in a bar that you'll be going to witness this lockdown and you will be watching. Five months of history hit TV, including our big drama documentary Coming Soon, set over to history at Dot TV. And obviously you can buy face coverings that you can buy the church your face covering on our shop.

You can also buy the Oscar Wilde face covering. You died today in nineteen hundred were all about the anniversary. Got them covid. So go and check out shoptalk history at Dotcom as well. In the meantime, everyone enjoy Warren Doctor and Richard Toye.

Born in Richard, great to have you both on the podcast, thank you very much for coming on. Let's hit the ground running here. Let's start with the big question. Was Winston Churchill a racist, I guess, as we understand it today.

It's interesting that you say, as we would understand it today, because essentially it comes down to how we define racism. I think if racism is a binary, then he was a racist. He said racist things in his life, particularly against Indians and Hindu Indians in particular. Richard knows a lot more about the particularities that he said. But I do think that Winston Churchill was a racist in the sense that most people were during the time. But, you know, he holds on to a peculiarly Victorian notion of racism far past many people, contemporaries even, who would have denounced his views, for instance, on India as being backwards and out of touch, even into the 30s.

Richard, what do you reckon let's develop Warren's point, was he a racist even by the standards of his own time?

Well, I think that, you know, again, throughout his career and particularly as time went on. So I think that if one were to sort of look at the 90s, for example, if we sort of distinguish somewhat between these racial these imperial views, we can see that he was sort of pushing the envelope on the right of the spectrum on what he thought about the expansion of the British Empire and was concretely arguing for it to get bigger. At the same time, he was criticized for that.

I mean, the people who were saying he's clearly really pushing the envelope here, it's a bit extreme. But people weren't talking about his views of race, which he did express at that time as throughout his career. So at that time, he wasn't really criticized for them, whereas through the 1920s, the 1930s, through to the 1950s, he's at the end of his active career, people were starting to say, well, actually, these racial views that he's expressing are often ones which he expressed in private, it should be said, rather than things which he said publicly, that these sort of show that he's old fashioned, he's out of touch.

He is as extreme as some of the most extreme white Kenyan settlers who were really some of the most racist people really in the world in the 1920s, for example. Clearly, his Victorian background was important, but it wasn't that his ideas got frozen. The point when Queen Victoria died, there was he was remember that he switched parties twice. So he joined the liberals in nineteen eighty four and then switched back to the conservatives in the mid 1920s. And at the beginning of that liberal phase, he's being presented by some critics as a little England, which is a term which implies somebody who's not very interested in the empire or is hostile to it.

He's being portrayed even as a danger to the empire. So my argument is that actually it's in the interwar years that he consciously takes a right wing turn and knows what he's doing. He's aware of the significance of the kind of language that he uses. So he's simply stuck in the past. He's an active choice. This is why I said in my book, Churchill's Empire, which is published 10 years ago now, that it was in the interwar years that Churchill decided to become a Victorian.

That is to say, he knew the significance of this Victorian imagery and he decided to exploit it.

I mean, such a good point there for anything else. Churchill's career stretched for decades, extraordinarily long political career. Of course, there would have been a huge amount of evolution and development and expediency and contradiction within that career.

Warren, can I ask you, a lot of people say this racism was normal for the time we shouldn't judge. Well, let's come back to that point. But let me ask if the premise is true. Were late Victorians endemically racist?

I think it's a really excellent point. It goes back to sort of what Richard said earlier about Churchill consciously deciding to become Victorian in the 1930s, because actually I argue in my book, erm from the Islamic world that as as a sort of Victorian soldier, he's kind of fairly progressive as a Victorian, but because he's writing that even NATO should be awarded the Victoria Cross and things after his experiences on the North-West Frontier in Sudan. He's thinking about these things in a more equitable way than we would traditionally imagine.

But I do think that for him, it's an imperial mindset. And that's essentially what's fueling his views, not so much concepts of race, because he really isn't talking so much about race. He's more talking about cultures and a sort of imagined kind of cultural hierarchy in which he places at least into the Edwardian era. This comes out of his book, My African Journey, where he stands as the sort of hierarchy which, of course, white, Protestant, British people at the top.

And then it sort of cascades down and know one of the interesting things I discovered is that he has greater sympathies with Muslims and one would suspect, owing in part because of the shared Abrahamic traditions with Judaism and Christianity and Islam. So I think he's thinking imperially and culturally, less racially.

Richard, are there any other insights we've gained over the last few years that give us a fuller understanding of his views on race?

It's an interesting question. Exactly where did his ideas come from? I think that he was very much influenced by his schooling, for example, at Harrow School, where there was a self consciously sort of imperial tradition, where the headmaster, James Weldon, explicitly wanted to sort of inculcate an imperial mentality. And so that's clearly part of the explanation. So I think that if he's trying to consider the range of opinions that were around Churchill and I think good, you know, people say, well, everybody thought this way.

Well, of course not. Everybody did think exactly like Churchill. There was a spectrum of opinion. There was sort of angry differences about the empire within British politics during the late 19th century. That doesn't mean that there was one set of people who were sort of perfectly politically. The correct, if you like, by modern standards, Richard, I just sit with you and ask about the Bengal famine, because that's something that now comes up all the time at the charge that he was at best uninterested in the plight of millions of Bengalis as they faced appalling famine.

Can you tell me a bit more about that famine?

First of all, remember, this was a devastating famine which started in 1943. The Japanese invaded Burma. Destruction of rice, supplies and all sorts of things going on in the war helped explain why this occurred in Britain at the time. It wasn't a big issue. It wasn't something which Churchill was ever criticized for in his own lifetime. In part, I suspect, because the very large number of people in Britain were indifferent to the fate of people in Bengal and also because it wasn't being reported to a great extent in the UK either.

So from the 1970s, when the famine started to be studied as a very serious example of why famines are caused and what brings them about. This was also the time at which revelations came out about what Churchill said. Because of new documentary publications and releases, there are real serious criticisms to be made of Churchill insofar as he certainly didn't react quickly enough. And he said some really, really horrible things in cabinet meetings, which I interview recorded about sort of Indians breeding like rabbits and so on.

So it's partly about documents becoming available. But in order for documents to be regarded as publicly significant, some historian has to take them up and start making arguments on the basis of war.

And in a year of statue toppling, some voices here in the UK have said that we need to think about Churchill's vast statue in Parliament Square outside just opposite Big Ben. What's your response to that?

Couple of things. I personally don't think that the Churchill statue should come down to, because in the end, I do think Winston Churchill played such a large role in forming the 20th century. And statue acts as an object, as we've seen, which allows us to discuss both the vices and the virtues. So in that way, you educate people on Churchill so long as we're talking about it. But at the same time, the present has to exist in discourse with history.

And, you know, it depends on how we use the statue. Do people want to engage in these conversations around the statue or do they want to just say he's a hero and that's it? And that's the problem actually, is when we think of him as a God or as a myth and not as a man who was obviously fallible. And I just you know, Richard and I probably are slightly different on the Bengal famine. I think there's there's evidence that Churchill did try to get through, particularly in August and September.

Nineteen forty three, both from Australia, Canada. There was even a I think, an idea that maybe grain from Iraq would go there. But because the allies, including the US, of course, Churchill still trying to project strength, he's loathed, asked the US for help. But he has to and he does. But ultimately, because the war is still ongoing and the Japanese still largely on the Pacific, it makes it very, very difficult.

And so I do fundamentally agree with Richard that Churchill's role in this is quite callous. And that's you know, that's the problem. He did have prejudice, particularly against him.

Richard, where are you on the Churchill statue? Well, I mean, I'm not aware. I mean, there may be some comment which I've missed on some corner of social media. And I'm not aware that anybody actually has proposed to take down the statue. Rather, at least one newspaper has started a petition saying the statue is under threat. We must have a petition to stop it being taken down. There is an element of people trying to sort of work out feeling about the statue to make it seem as it's under threat.

Well, certainly, of course, it was it was defaced. That, as I say, I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that I would take it down with Churchill. There's clearly a possible set of rational arguments that you can make as to why he deserves a statue and you can sort of have a reasonable discussion about that. If you take the statue of Edward Colston, for example, the one that was pulled down sort of via direct action a couple of weeks ago in Bristol, well, that guy was a slave trader who traded at least sort of 80000 people.

And I don't think that anybody's really been able to come up with any credible defense of anything at all. So to me, I mean, whether or not you approve of sort of intervening to pull them down by the action of the crowd, they seem to be no justification for having a statue of this guy. And it's sort of shocking and mind boggling is sort Bristol Council had not even managed to get around to agreeing to have a sort of an explanatory plaque saying, well, actually, this guy was pretty dubious when he was appointed secretary of state for colonies.

Where did his views sit within the kind of range of views within British policymakers at the time in terms of the public opinion?

He was responsible during the period just beforehand when he became secretary of state for war and continuing his colonial secretary to some extent for the state of affairs in Ireland, where there had been brutal repression with the group of auxiliaries called the Black and Tans, who took reprisals on suspected IRA terrorists by essentially burning down people's houses and so on. So from the point of view of some people at the time, Irish Republicans would certainly have seen Churchill as being a die hard extremist.

Let's come on to the Second World War now. Churchill's apotheosis, I guess you'd say eight years ago this year, Churchill, Hitler, his rhetorical heights during and after the Battle of Britain war. And I talked to the excellent Professor Lucy Essex University on here the other day. And she points out she reminds us that you can be two things at once. You could you know, Churchill could both be a man who made an astonishing and important intervention in 1940 whilst also have, you know, profoundly suspect views on imperialism, racial hierarchy, things like that.

Let's focus on his role in the summer of 1940. What was his contribution?

I think that a few things have a. Number one, I do think that he was sort of the lone voice to stand up and push against the Nazis because there was this feeling from Halifax and others. And even Churchill later wrote his own memoirs, courses, history, the same story that everyone was in agreement. We since found out that that wasn't true. So I think Churchill is a key player in that. But Churchill also, and this is something Richard's written quite a lot about, is extraordinarily important in giving the voice to the roar of the lion.

What he did was he projected it to the American audience and in many ways, bringing America in, which is also very peculiarly Churchillian because he's half American himself, is a key way in which he has to be the man for the moment. Right. Because he sees America as an important player that he can bring them into the war, convinced Roosevelt that there should be an alliance and he is very successful in that.

How should we think about Churchill within the context of what was going on on the other side of the channel? Because we probably should acknowledge that while we were criticizing him in Germany, there was the genesis of what would become one of the worst genocides in history.

It's a part of the whole spectrum of what we were discussing that Churchill was able to recognise even as early as 1932, just how sinister Nazism was, particularly towards Jewish people. He didn't say that that's what would happen in 1933. I don't mean to say that. But he saw that there was a sinister intention that early on I think is remarkable.

To what extent Churchill, the Victorian views on the world contribute to his defeat in 1945? Richard, I don't think so.

I would say that he was regarded by many people as reactionary, somebody who was an arch conservative. They looked at his record going back to at least the time of Gallipoli. They looked at his record during the general strike. But in general, although there was some relatively sort of low key criticism of his imperial views during World War Two, I don't think that was actually a major factor in him losing office.

What do you reckon? What do you reckon Churchill's greatest accomplishment was? Well, I will say recognising the danger of the Nazis in the 1930s, his leadership in the 1940s, I would say one of his great skills, perhaps not sufficiently recognised, is that when he was making those speeches, he wasn't necessarily all about sort of the wonderful phrases. It was about his consistent willingness to tell the truth to the British people and not offer a sort of false promises of easy victory.

So making clear from the beginning that the war was going to last a very, very long time, victory would come in the end. But it wasn't clear how that a lot of patience and a lot of perseverance was required.

And I do think it is his greatest challenge. It comes down to that summer in 1940 and being able to become a symbol of will and resistance against the Nazis.

What is the biggest myth we tell each other about Churchill?

I would say that the myth does actually concern the speeches, which I would argue very, very good speeches, but successful for different reasons than we really think. Virtually all of the British population received these speeches with great enthusiasm, were energized and galvanized by them. There was much more critical comment and controversy aroused by these speeches than one might think, even if a majority of people did like them. And so I would say that this actually cost Churchill in a better light, because rather than it being easy for him to sort of persuade everybody of his viewpoint, he actually had to struggle against criticism, which he was certainly aware that existed and that it was his ability to tell a coherent story, to explain to the British people and to analyze what was going on was actually considerably more important than phrases which he did come up with, which is certainly wonderful from a.

Equality, but it wasn't necessarily the literary phrases or the speeches that contain them were the most important or even the most persuasive.

Thank you so much, Richard and Warren. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

I think about the history of our country. Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Martinus. I know, but them's the rules.

Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

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