In the early 1990s, I visited Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s former home in the countryside of Kent in southeast England. Entering the house and traversing the grounds, I had a sensation of walking the footsteps of history, of imagining the great man dictating to secretaries the speeches that warned about the Nazi threat and the “gathering storm,” of seeing where Churchill worked long hours building brick walls and painting pictures, of standing in awe in Churchill’s study where he crafted his marvelous historical works, and of thinking about the meetings held there and the decisions made there that altered the course of world history.
And now, there is a book about the happenings at Chartwell in the 1930s, written by Chartwell’s curator, Katherine Carter.
It is Carter’s first book, and it is a delight to read. The book’s title, Churchill’s Citadel, is derived from a description by one of Churchill’s secretaries of the most important use of the house other than as living quarters for the Churchills. Carter writes that Chartwell in the 1930s became “the headquarters from which Churchill mounted his campaign against Nazi Germany.” She persuasively argues that the “gatherings at Chartwell strengthened Churchill’s resolve and added to the evidence, accounts and testimonies he was painstakingly accumulating at his country home.” Those gatherings, Carter continues, armed him with information that eventually propelled him to the office of prime minister on May 10, 1940.
Each chapter of the book highlights the visitors to Chartwell that came bearing stories of aggressive Nazi plans; the German military build-up; the deficiencies of British defenses against air attacks; political insights as to the intentions of Europe’s other powers, the United States, and Japan; divisions within the British government; and eventually the growing sentiment for Churchill’s return to office as war became more likely.
Albert Einstein visited Chartwell in July 1933 and warned Churchill about Germany’s growing rearmament, despite the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. After Einstein’s visit (the book includes photographs of Churchill and Einstein in Chartwell’s rose garden), Churchill, Carter notes, “began to weave the threat of Nazi Germany into his speeches at every opportunity.” A month after Einstein’s visit, Churchill read a speech in the House of Commons titled “Europe’s Hour of Danger” in which he called for British rearmament.
In February 1934, Churchill’s friend T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) came to Chartwell and reinforced Churchill’s view that Britain lacked adequate defenses against aerial bombardment. A little more than a year later, Lawrence was dead after being severely injured in a motorbike accident. That same year (1935), Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife Rose arrived at Chartwell, and Churchill used the occasion to urge Kennedy to persuade President Roosevelt to coordinate naval activities and expand the “special relationship” between the two English-speaking peoples. Kennedy would later become America’s ambassador to England during which he joined the appeasement of Hitler crowd and repeatedly made disparaging remarks about Churchill.
The next year in November, France’s former Prime Minister and then-Foreign Minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin met with Churchill at Chartwell and provided Churchill with insight into the thinking of French leaders regarding the Nazi threat. Flandin, like Churchill, believed that a closer alliance between France and Britain could deter German ambition, but it was not to be until too late. Churchill hoped that the French army — the largest in Europe — could be mobilized for peace, but France’s “Maginot Line mentality” and appeasement of Hitler combined with outdated military strategy doomed France and scuttled hopes of an effective Anglo-French alliance.
In August 1937, as war clouds gathered in Europe, Heinrich Brüning, who served as Germany’s Chancellor near the end of the Weimar Republic, came to Chartwell to encourage Churchill to urge Britain’s leaders to reach out to some of Germany’s generals who wanted to remove Hitler from power.
Austrian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi met with Churchill in February 1938 at the suggestion of Leo Amery. This was a month before the Anschluss incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. Coudenhove-Kalergi was the founder of the Paneuropean Union in 1931, and he discussed with Churchill plans to form a coalition of states to stop Hitler. After the Anschluss, Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Jewish wife escaped to Switzerland.
A few months after Coudenhove-Kalergi’s visit, German lawyer and anti-Nazi Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, at great risk to himself, visited Churchill to warn him of Hitler’s intention to seize Czechoslovakia and, like Bruning, suggested that Britain had allies among Germany’s generals.
Carter does not neglect the more regular Chartwell visitors such as Desmond Morton, Ralph Wigram, and Robert Vansittart, British bureaucrats who risked their careers to provide Churchill with secret information damaging to the British appeasers; foreign correspondent Shiela Grant Duff who armed Churchill with developments in Czechoslovakia; Conservative Member of Parliament Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister who became an ally of Churchill’s in the late 1930s; Professor Frederick Lindemann who advised Churchill on war-related scientific subjects; China’s foreign minister, Quo Tai-chi, who served as an intermediary between Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, and many others.
Carter also notes that Chartwell was where Churchill wrote his multivolume biography of the Duke of Marlborough and his multivolume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and where he and his family lived their interesting personal lives. But Chartwell’s historical significance is as the citadel or fortress where Churchill began the work that eventually led him to save Western civilization in the early years of World War II. It is a monument to democracy’s greatest hero.
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