The main problem of writing a book about Churchill and Beaverbrook is knowing where on earth to start

Next month we shall be celebrating the 80th anniversary of VE Day and our thoughts might turn to the great What If question. What if Lord Beaverbrook had not been in place as Minister of Aircraft Production to build just enough Spitfires and Hurricanes to win the Battle of Britain; what if, despite that, we had lost the war? What if Trump, or at least a Trump-like figure had been in the White House, an isolationist who admired strong men like Hitler, and had refused to join in?  

And what if Winston Churchill had not become prime minister in 1940 and had stayed out in the wilderness where so many, King George most prominently (though temporarily), thought he belonged? All academic questions of course but fascinating, frighteningly so, and explored brilliantly in Robert Harris' brilliant Fatherland

I have been ruminating on such possibilities while researching for a new book on the all-important relationship between Churchill and Beaverbrook which I mentioned here in a recent column. The trouble about researching Churchill is knowing which of the 1,200 or more  biographies, written with varying degrees of competence, to read as well as 43 tomes written by the man himself. The Beaver is an easier subject; there are about 40 volumes, half of them biographies and the rest books in which he plays a major part. 

Biographies of course are a fraction of the real scale of the research; the Beaver has more the 60 boxes full of his private papers at the National Archive and 10 times that of his parliamentary papers, not to mention an invaluable archive at the Beaverbrook Foundation.  

Along the way there is some fine prose by biographers like Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, joint authors of the masterful Beaverbrook: A Life, not forgetting Grade A toadying by AJP Taylor who admitted he was in love with his subject. And of course by Churchill whose wartime speeches still have the capacity to stir no matter how many times you have read or heard them. But there can be no finer writing than Vincent Mulchrone's Daily Mail report of Churchill's lying in state and funeral. 

We all know the intro:"Two rivers run silently through London tonight and one is made of people. Dark and silent as the night-time Thames itself, it flows through Westminster Hall, eddying about the foot of a rock called Churchill". Mulchrone delivers a masterclass in fine, descriptive reporting and if you haven't read it in full it's online. And if you have, believe me it's worth a second look.

Then I came across a piece in the Express 10 years ago in which my much-missed old friend Paul Callan remembered standing outside Sir Winston's London house in Hyde Park Gate in January 1965. He was one of many waiting for news from Churchill's doctor, Lord Moran, who had arrived to see his 90-year-old patient. It was 5am, the hour at which, in his Fleet Street pomp, Callan would sometimes arrive home after a jolly night out. But this was different, he was 25 and reporting for the Yorkshire Evening Post and living in a £3-a-week bedsit in Putney.

“The fact that Lord Moran had arrived so early meant something finally was afoot. At last there was something to write about and when Christopher Soames, Churchill's son-in-law, came out I asked: "Did he say anything, what did he want, were there any audible words? Soames had been by his bed and had leaned close enough to hear the old man's last words: ‘I am so bored with it.’

“After all the weeks of waiting in the sharp-edged cold, of vainly trying to check out rumours that ranged from Sir Winston getting out of bed to light a cigar to a conspiracy theory that his body had been stolen by former SS officers, something was happening. It was the day he would slip from semi-consciousness into death.

“At two minutes past eight, the front door opening slowly again, we were told ‘Sir Winston is dead’.  I was close enough to see the tears that started coursing down the cheek of the policeman on the door.”

Then Callan gets into his inimitable stride and reports on his conversation with his (inevitably) dour news editor back in Leeds: “Much to the amusement of other journalists in the group I was instructed to get quotes from Yorkshire people in the crowd now gathering after hearing the news.

“I was told: ‘No bloody Southerners, we want salt o'earth saying what they thought of the old boy.’ And so, all too self-consciously, I walked slowly along the queue shouting ‘Anyone here from Yorkshire? Leeds maybe, Bradford? One woman raised her hand: 'Well love, I'm from Scarborough, have I won something’?”

Pure Callan, how we miss him.

*****

As I have chronicled over the years I have had my run-ins with the late Ian Paisley, in my view a deeply unChristian rabble-rouser with a ‘doctorate’ degree bought from the Bob Jones 'university' in South Carolina. Like many so-called evangelists, Paisley started his own church, the sectarian, fundamentalist Free Presbyterians. 

But as far as I know he never sold 'resurrection seeds' for $1,100 a pop. Nor did he market a nice line in 'seven supernatural blessings' at $1,000. Those are two of the lines of a preacher named Paula White who said Black Lives Matter was the Antichrist (the name that Paisley had for the Pope). She now heads up Donald Trump's 'White House Faith Office'. On every level that sentence is beyond satire but I promise you, I haven't been experimenting with the pharmaceuticals.

Trump, as bad and mad a man ever to make President, says that with White's help, he will 'bring America back together as one nation under God'. He has certainly made a good start: threatening the biggest law firms from acting against him; withdrawing billions of funding from the leading US research universities; illegally deporting immigrants to a country not of their birth; releasing from jail the thugs who attacked the Capitol building 15 months ago... and that's without the craziness of tariffs and scaring the bond market. It's getting very 1930s Germany.

  

Needless to say Paula White is as phoney as her disciple; she claims to speak in tongues (though not the sort the uncouth Trump specialises in), has been accused of stealing $600,000 from her former 'megachurch' (only in America), has been bankrupted, is now a multi-millionaire, has a private jet and, surprise, she believes in something called prosperity theology. She and Trump have much in common; both have been married three times and employ members of their family. 

And both are nasty see-through frauds out only for themselves.

*****

I subscribe to the old maxim that golf spoils a good walk. But I watched the climax  of the Masters because it was more dramatic than anything you could have devised and because Rory McIlroy finally made it, 25 years after finding a way of perfecting his chip shots on rainy Ulster days. As a 10-year-old he opened the door of his mother's washing machine and hit the ball. He never missed.

ALAN FRAME

15 April 2025