A History of Britain (2000) s03e04 Episode Script

1 (1960s' POP MUSIC) Swinging London.
The past sent packing, and good riddance too.
New was what counted, Britain minted fresh.
No more bowing and scraping to tradition, the sacred cows of the establishment given a right old butchering.
(RICHARD DIMBLEBY) It is now 9.
20.
Ludgate Hill crowded this morning with thousands of people, who have been pouring in since dawn to see the passing of the body of Winston Churchill on its way here to St Paul's Cathedral, from which I'm talking at the moment.
But then, in a dark, cold January, Winston Churchill died, and all of a sudden London stopped swinging.
Out from some timeless wintry fog shambled the hairy old beast history, big with memories.
People in the streets stood in the freezing cold as the enormous coffin staggered past on the shoulders of guardsmen.
Royalty paid its respects to the great commoner by waiting at the altar of St Paul's.
The dockers paid their respects by dipping the jibs of their cranes as the coffin-laden barge sailed past.
Satire held its tongue.
Even us smart-alec history students stopped sniggering and started paying attention, caught out by an unexpected rush of feeling, a suspiciously patriotic lump in the throat.
Something immense had happened, the death of a patriarch, the passing of a certainty about what it meant to be British.
What it meant, Churchill knew, was to be the inheritor of an astonishing history.
But once the sniffling stopped and the eyes dried, disrespectful thoughts crept back in.
Perhaps the weight of the British past was a crushing burden, a millstone round the neck of the future.
What use were Churchill's endless fairy tales of the sceptr'd isle for us mods? No, in 1965, my loyalty was to a different Winston.
Rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap - Winston Smith, the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare parable of the future.
This, in 1984, is London, chief city of Airstrip One, a province of the state of Oceania.
Orwell, we knew, cared deeply for history, not the history of pomp, but the history of people, written not in purple rhapsodies, but Orwell's English, sharp and hard as granite.
Orwell's history, then, was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation.
It was the kind that asked hard questions.
But for all their differences, Orwell and Churchill did have this in common - they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it.
Look at Churchill, look at Orwell and you'll understand what happened to Britain in the 20th century.
You'll see how our past shaped our future.
(MUSIC: ETON BOATING SONG) In 1874, when Winston Churchill was born, this place, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham, was in its prime, turning out the ships and guns that made Britain more powerful than she's ever been before or since.
He must have thought it would go on forever.
Ninety years later, when he died, it was on its way to becoming a museum and a scrap yard.
But then history has a cruel way with optimism.
There never was any chance really that Winston Churchill could escape history.
He was, after all, born in a palace, Blenheim, the great limestone pile of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.
Winston's father, Randolph, boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37, seemed set to be the latest Churchill to embark on a meteoric rise.
But he was also a prima donna, forever stamping his feet and threatening to resign.
Finally, the Tories let him go.
He never got back to power.
His mother, Jenny, was the ultimate society hostess - glamorous, rich, American, desirably luscious, perpetually surrounded by breathless admirers.
But Winston hardly knew his parents.
As usual with little aristocrats, it was his nanny, Nanny Everest, who did most of the mothering.
As usual with boys of his class, he was packed off to boarding school at the earliest possible opportunity.
There he listened, quaking with fear, to the screams of eight-year-olds having their bottoms soundly birched.
Later, as Home Secretary, he'd say that his sympathy with the convicts of England came from doing eleven years of penal servitude in the public and private schools of England.
Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life.
One of them happened one day while Winston was playing with his 1,500 toy soldiers.
Now, Randolph never thought his podgy, unprepossessing boy had the stuff of politics or the law.
But when he saw Winston lining up his infantry and cavalry just so, he wondered whether he might not like to be a soldier.
And that did it, really.
Winston's whole life would be battles, with a gun, pen and voice.
He'd pick up his father's broken sword and make the name of Churchill glorious again.
So Winston charged headlong into the fray.
India, Africa, you name it, he was there, even if he had to barge his way uninvited into history, trading on family contacts, paying his way to get to the action.
And as well as charging, Winston began to gorge on history.
It was in the noonday shadows of Bangalore that history became Churchill's personal religion, the muse that fired everything he did, his politics, his speech making, his battle cry.
Reading it, writing it, making it, were all inseparable in the personality that was unfolding - ardent, impetuous, impassioned.
And it was in the empire that Winston began to write.
Books, letters, dispatches to newspapers.
And what stories.
It helped, of course, that he was socially shameless and physically fearless.
There he was, a fleshy five foot seven, spinning a ripping yarn.
He knew how to make the headlines and he knew how to milk them.
But Winston was never just gung-ho for Winston.
All his life he believed in the greatness and goodness of the British Empire.
But he knew next to nothing about what made that empire really tick - money.
(MUSIC: THE ROAD TO MANDALAY) For while Churchill was humming the chorus of "The Road to Mandalay", Richard Blair, George Orwell's father, was actually on it, cashing in on tea, teak, and not least, narcotics.
Blair worked for the Opium Department of the Raj.
His job was to supervise the production of poppies and their export to Shanghai, ensuring on behalf of the empire that the Chinese habit would never knowingly go under-stocked.
In 1903, Richard's wife, Ida, gave birth to a son, Eric.
Only later would he be known as George Orwell.
A year later, Ida moved Eric and his older sister back to England, while Richard stayed behind in Burma.
Home was 17 Vicarage Road, Henley-on-Thames.
Nostalgic, middle-class, suburban.
(CHORAL MUSIC) Winston Churchill may have been in the top drawer of the ruling class and Eric Blair at the bottom, but they were connected by the obligatory rite of passage for all small boys destined to govern the empire - exile to boarding school.
Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's, I began wetting my bed.
Nowadays, I believe bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted.
It is a normal reaction in children who've been removed from their homes to a strange place.
In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating.
Night after night, I prayed with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, "Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
Please, God, do not let me wet my bed.
" St Cyprian's may not have been quite the sadistic Home Counties gulag that George Orwell described nearly 40 years on, but there's no doubt that it was his apprenticeship in contempt for the rituals of empire.
History lessons he wrote off as meaningless conditioning.
Orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right answers.
And at the same time, not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming.
The torments, the canings, the pewter bowls with yesterday's porridge caked to the rim, the morning plunge into a slimy swimming bath, left Eric with a lifelong horror of dirt and a burning hatred of the fake service ethos for which small boys were supposed to suffer all these baptisms.
If you were rich, all these ordeals were a trial by fire, a kind of admission card to the ruling class.
But Eric was not rich, not part of the upper class.
He got the canings without the promise of the perks.
His weapon against them was an air of bloody-minded indifference, and when he came here to Eton, he refined that insouciance into an art form.
If Blair was made bugler for the cadets, he'd show up with his badge askew.
If Blair would recite poetry, it would be Stevenson's "Suicide Club".
Better still, he'd just stand there, sardonic and silent.
(MUSIC: THE BRITISH GRENADIER) Winston Churchill could never see the point of silence.
He was drunk on words, and he wanted everyone else to share the intoxication.
Back home from the empire in 1900, he defied his father's pessimism by following him into politics.
And once he had discovered he'd got the gift of the gab, he let the eloquence rip, drafting and rehearsing his speeches like some great trouper of the Edwardian stage.
Unlike many politicians, Churchill didn't learn the art of public speaking from posh debating societies.
He cut his teeth as an orator up here in the industrial north, on soap boxes, from the tops of buses, and in music halls, where he really had to earn the cheers.
Winston's irrepressible activism made it impossible for him to stay a Tory.
When he defected to the Liberals in 1904, he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England.
We don't usually think of Churchill as a radical, but all sorts of social reforms poured from his fertile mind.
Labour Exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops.
But Churchill's radicalism too often played second fiddle to his grandstanding egotism.
As Home Secretary, he was a bit too eager to treat politics like battles, a bit too trigger-happy, deploying troops against strikers, treating suffragettes like prisoners of war.
It made sense, then, to use this boiling, piston-driven belligerence where it could do some good.
At 36, Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty.
Three years later, the world was at war.
Gallipoli 1915, 52,000 Allied troops perish in Turkey.
A bloody fiasco, and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill.
Overnight, Churchill went from being the shooting star of the war government to its burnt-out meteor.
Accused, not altogether fairly, of recklessness and incompetence, the Tories paid him back for his treachery by booting him out of office.
Stung by the humiliation and tortured by guilt for his part in the massacre at Gallipoli, Churchill crashed into one of his "black dog" depressions.
In God they bid, young ploughboy, Ploughing on the plain Churchill did his penance in the trenches of Flanders, using his old army connections, so that a politician could demote himself to a Tommy.
On the 23rd November, 1915, he wrote to his wife Clemmie.
My darling, we've finished our first 48 hours in the trenches.
I spent the morning in a hot bath, engineered with some difficulty.
Filth and rubbish everywhere.
Graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously.
Feet and clothing breaking through the soil.
In the dazzling moonlight, troops of enormous rats creep and glide to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle and machine guns.
Life on the front line was expiation for Churchill.
He'd served his time.
Now he could look soldiers and the House of Commons in the eye again.
Eric Blair was too young for the trenches, but while at Eton he did his bit by writing bad recruitment poems.
When the war was over, he may have felt guilty, like a lot of his generation - guilt for missing the slaughter.
The next step after Eton should have been Oxford.
But like Churchill, his fate was decided by a premature verdict of stupidity.
His father believed that he was too dim to win a scholarship.
Even if Eric had had the chance, it's likely he would have rejected the smoothly-moneyed escalator through privilege.
Instead, it was off to the colonies.
(MUSIC: ETON BOATING SONG) There's no sign that Eric thought he'd been hard done by, though.
He might have shared some of Churchill's idealism about the do-good empire.
Five years in the Burmese police, perhaps the most thankless branch of the entire colonial service, smartly cured him of that.
Doing his job as efficiently as he could, rounding up petty criminals, looking the other way when they were beaten, he wore his power like a hair shirt.
The Burmese he caught and jailed, he knew, didn't think of themselves as criminals, but as victims of foreign conquerors.
All over the empire, there were men who hated their part in it as heartily as he did, but were trapped in a conspiracy of silence or the cowardice of acquiescence.
One incident more than any other brought his imperial imprisonment home to him.
An elephant had broken its chains and gone on the rampage at a local bazaar.
Blair picked up his rifle.
- Shall I call the hunters? - No, rouse no one.
I'll try and get him myself.
When he found the beast, peacefully throwing grass and bamboo shoots into its mouth, it was obvious there was no reason to kill it, except the huge crowd expected him to.
I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward irresistibly.
It was at this moment, with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness and futility of the white man's dominion in the east.
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of an unarmed native crowd, seemingly the lead actor of the piece.
But in reality I was only an absurd puppet.
(MUSIC: ETON BOAT SONG) When I pulled the trigger, I did not hear the bang or feel the kick, but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.
In that instant, in too short a time for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.
He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered.
In the end, I could stand it no longer and went away.
I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.
I often wondered, had any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool? In 1927, Blair went home, where a sniff of the English air convinced him that he couldn't be part of an oppressive system a day longer.
Home was here at Southwold, a Suffolk seaside town so full of Anglo-Indian retirees that it was known as a little Raj by the sea.
Eric's sister Avril kept a teashop, Mother played bridge, Father stared at the sea.
When Eric announced to the family that he was leaving the Burma police to become, of all things, a writer, you can well imagine their horrified disbelief.
(CHORAL MUSIC) And what was the England that Eric had come home to? A country he'd later describe as resembling a family - a rather stuffy Victorian family where rich relations are kowtowed to and poor relations are horribly sat upon; where the young are thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
A family, he said, with the wrong members in control.
May 1926, the General Strike.
Newspapers cease printing on the stroke of midnight.
One of those in control was Winston Churchill.
After 20 years away from the Tories, he was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike.
Southwold was not exactly a hotbed of socialism, which only made Eric all the more determined to expiate the sins of empire.
In a world where pretty much everyone knew and kept their place, he couldn't wait to lose his.
Most people who are restless with their lot in life wanted to rise above their station.
Eric was impatient to sink all the way to the bottom.
There was something almost Franciscan about his nosedive into squalor.
It wasn't just a renunciation of middle-class respectability, it was the calculated bodily embrace of everything that repelled the fastidious Eric - muck, indescribably evil smells.
When he sold his clothes and bought a tramp's kit, he was making a point, at least to himself, that his life as a writer would start by plumbing the depths.
It was like St Catherine of Siena drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.
For two years, Blair did the Cook's tour of destitution, comprehensive, unrelenting, gruesomely anti-scenic.
In the bathroom of one especially horrible doss house, or "spike", he finally got down to basic truths.
It was a disgusting sight.
All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed.
The grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes held together by dirt.
The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly sub-faecal stench native to the spike.
He didn't have to do it, he wasn't that hard up.
But there was never anything second hand about Blair, any more than there was about Churchill.
Both were doers, not lookers.
In the trenches or the doss houses, they needed to live what they talked about.
In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, "Down and Out In Paris and London", but the name on the cover was not Blair, but George Orwell, a pseudonym.
No name was more royal than the name of the king, George, and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, connected him to the English landscape.
But the landscape through which George Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks, but gutters and gasworks.
(MUSIC: JERUSALEM) In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades.
Orwell had declared war on the empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.
Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.
But Orwell had been there and he knew better.
He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.
The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals, but our bedrock was coke and nutty slag.
But then, in the Thirties, that bedrock caved in.
Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.
This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the empire, had finally come to, from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.
Never had the country been so bitterly divided.
In the south, they built model villages with miniature collieries, miniature farms and miniature plough teams coming over the hill.
In Wales, Scotland and the north of England, that hill would have been a slagheap, and it wouldn't have been a ploughboy, but desperate scramblers searching for coal waste with their bare hands.
Orwell, who cherished the countryside with an unsentimental, almost feral, passion, now headed for this underworld, the dark shadow on the lungs of Britain.
When his publisher asked him to write a book on life in the industrial north, Orwell grabbed the chance and set out on the road to Wigan pier.
What he found was a town broken by Depression, coated in grime which befouled everything.
Black thumbprints on the bread his landlord cut him, a second skin of soot when he went down the pit.
And if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory.
Get up at 3.
45 in the morning, crawl half-naked through four-foot-high passages, sometimes for miles - as far, Orwell said, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.
When he wasn't down the pits, Orwell was here in Wigan Public Library.
Here's his name in the visitors' book - E.
A.
Blair, 72 Warrington Lane, Wigan.
He was doing research on the miners' battle to make ends meet.
Wages, rents and prices.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" came in for criticism in its day from right and left.
Conservatives, of course, thought it was a piece of Bolshevik trash, but socialist intellectuals attacked it for being too grimly pessimistic, a picture of the working class as broken by misery rather than indestructible proletarian heroes.
None of this prevented "The Road to Wigan Pier" from being a massive best seller.
Why? Well, Orwell took the usual political position paper and junked it.
Instead, he made a real work of literature.
When you follow him into these soot-choked mines or the freezing dampness of the terraced houses, you know you're in the company of the Dickens of the Depression, someone who could make you hear, see and feel the physical reality of a hard world in a hard time.
You don't really want to look, but then you can't turn away.
One night in Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Oswald Mosley laud Fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany to the skies.
To Orwell's horror, the working class audience who'd started out booing Mosley ended up cheering him.
A fight was coming, and the Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and his Chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, were too gutless to join in.
What was their message? Peace in our time, or please do your business somewhere else while we get on with hoeing the garden.
This is the BBC Home Service.
Hello, children everywhere.
That's one of the most familiar voices Their vision of Britain was a little world unto itself.
Europe was over there, full of unsavoury continentals doing beastly things to each other.
All very regrettable, no doubt, but surely their business, not ours.
But the world out there was turning very ugly.
Fascism was spreading across Europe.
A huge cloud was falling over the village green.
It was time to make a choice.
Orwell made his.
In December 1936, he set off for Spain.
Eccentrically kitted out in a long woolly scarf and modified Balaclava, the lanky, floppy-haired Englishman set about drilling the anti-fascist recruits.
All that police training in Burma had a use after all.
But after four months at the front, Orwell, unmissably conspicuous at six foot two, took a bullet through the neck.
He survived physically, even if his idealism did not.
He'd seen at first hand how his comrades had been brutally crushed, not just by Franco, but also by the communists.
The ordeal in Spain had taught him to hate communism, especially Stalin's brand.
It was because Orwell hoped for a home-grown British social revolution and because he was sick of hearing excuses for Stalin, all those coffee house commissars prepared to forgive him for everything just because he wasn't Hitler, that he decided to write the real history of the Bolshevik revolution.
In deadly earnest, he decided to revisit that old literary form, the barnyard fable.
On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone.
However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time, until I saw a little boy driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn.
It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them.
(THREATENING MUSIC) "Animal Farm" would not be written for another six years, but already Orwell was beginning to reinvent the art of political writing.
Tending to his goats and chickens at his freezing cottage in Hertfordshire, fighting off the early signs of tuberculosis, he set about purging the language of the pompous preaching of the official left and the nauseous sentimentality of the romantic right.
As Orwell pottered about his mini-farm, Churchill restlessly stalked the grounds of his ruinously expensive mansion in Kent, brooding like Orwell on the ugliness of dictatorship.
For years now, Churchill had been thought of by his own party as a posturing has-been, embarrassingly devoted to lost causes like keeping India out of the hands of the Indians.
So instead of politics, Churchill turned back to writing.
And as he wrote - thousands of pages on his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, thousands more on "The History of the English Speaking Peoples", keeping company with the vanished generations who faced invasion before - so Churchill's convictions about what had to be done now hardened.
First, the Little Englanders, stuck in their dream world of hunts and gymkhanas, had to wake up to the fact that, like it or not, Britain would share Europe's fate.
(CHURCHILL'S VOICE) There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe, leave it with its hatreds and armaments "to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels.
" There would be much to be said for this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations and could tow them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
Well, I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done.
Churchill reserved his greatest contempt for the appeasers, men like Neville Chamberlain, who seriously imagined that Hitler and the Nazis were reasonable men with reasonable grievances about the way Germany had been treated after the last war, and who would stop at reasonable demands.
The appeasers, Churchill thought, were like men who imagined you could satisfy a ravenous wolf by throwing it a sheep or two, in the hope that when it got to you, it would be full.
In 1938, Hitler, who had already annexed Austria, threatened war if he didn't get a slice of Czechoslovakia.
Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister, ran to Munich and served it up.
I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
(CROWD CHEERS) For Churchill, this was not just an act of cowardice, but the deepest stain on our long history, the most shameful vindication of Hitler's assumption that democracies were, by definition, spineless.
(CHURCHILL) All is over.
Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
We have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the western democracies, "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting".
When, in spite of the promises he'd made at Munich, Hitler went ahead and occupied Prague, Chamberlain took it personally, realising that he and the country had been royally had.
On the 1st September, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
Britain and France sent Germany an ultimatum.
(CHAMBERLAIN) This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
Neville Chamberlain's mournful voice announced the war as if lamenting the death of a maiden aunt.
The evacuation of children began.
None of this meant that Chamberlain was going to hand the reins over to Churchill.
For all that his dark prophecies seemed to be coming true, Churchill was still mistrusted by the vast majority of his party.
But the swing in public opinion towards him had been so great, it seemed prudent to include him in the government.
As war was declared, Churchill was given his old job back as First Lord of the Admiralty.
But, as if in a rerun of Gallipoli, Churchill's first big campaign ended in disaster when his attempt to cut off Germany's iron ore supplies through Norway backfired horribly.
Somehow Churchill escaped the blame for the fiasco in Norway.
Whatever the problems, his energy and resolution made it seem as though he at least was doing his best.
Next to Neville Chamberlain - gaunt, weary, presiding over a front bench of old geezers - Churchill, though an old geezer himself, seemed like a red hot volcano, a lava flow of plans and strategies.
Confidence in Chamberlain, meanwhile, was at an all-time low, and on 10th May, 1940, he was finally forced to resign.
The weeks that followed were the most important in Britain's long history.
Two vital questions were at stake - who would follow Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and how would he deal with the Nazi war machine? Not only the survival of our national independence, but that of western democracy, would turn on the outcome.
Two kinds of men, two kinds of England, were in play for the leadership of the country.
In the man everyone expected to take over, Lord Halifax, was the England of the counties - solid, sensible, a good egg and a cool head.
And then there was Winston, who was none of these things.
But in the best judgement of his life, Halifax turned the job down.
In the pit of his stomach, he knew he couldn't be a war leader.
Winston had seen the face of battle, Halifax had only hunted foxes.
On Friday May 10th, Churchill went to the Palace and emerged as the new Prime Minister.
On the same day came the news that Belgium and Holland had been invaded.
Now, of course, we all know that a "finest hour" was waiting in the wings.
But nobody knew it then, not in the merciless days of May 1940, when Britain came closer than at any other time in its history to being overwhelmed.
Belgium and Holland were going under, and France was soon about to join their fate.
A quarter of a million British troops were trapped in northern France with hardly any hope of a safe exit.
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were about to ride to our rescue, and hardly anyone who counted thought we could possibly get out of the military nightmare alone.
Facing catastrophe, Churchill went to the House of Commons and made a short speech, shocking in its clarity, defiant in its optimism.
I would say to the House, as I said to those who've joined the government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask what is our policy.
I will say it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might, with all the strength that God can give us.
To wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy.
You ask what is our aim.
I can answer in one word - victory.
Victory at all costs.
Victory in spite of all terror.
Victory however long and hard the road may be.
For without victory there is no survival.
We'd like to think of this as a moment of transformation.
Enter the great prince girding on his rusty armour, pulling the shaky country together.
But the truth was very different.
The military men assumed Churchill would have to eat his words before long.
The civil servants, who'd always hated his operatics, rolled their eyes at yet another theatrical performance.
And the politicians, men like Halifax, believed that Churchill would have to trade in sentimental mush for hard reality.
It was time, thought Halifax, to do a deal with Germany.
Churchill was having none of it.
In the last two weeks of May, hidden from public view, he fought the most desperate and important campaign of his entire life to prevent Britain from going cap in hand to Hitler.
The battle for Britain, then, started not in the skies against the Luftwaffe, but here behind the closed doors of the Cabinet War Room.
In combat were Halifax and Churchill, two men with very different ideas of how to save the country.
In his memoirs, Halifax wrote that it was when he was taking an idyllic walk across his estate in Yorkshire that the true horror of a German invasion finally struck home.
The very thought, he said, of a jackboot forcing its way into this countryside, this true fragment of undying England, was an insult and an outrage.
Churchill would not have disagreed.
But Churchill wasn't fighting for the Vale of York or for some unreal dream of village England.
He wasn't fighting for Britain at all understood just as a piece of geography, but for what he thought was the meaning of being British, and that meaning was an idea, a precious idea we'd given to the world - freedom and the rule of law.
Without it, having to endure an existence by permission of the Führer, all we had was a mock Britain, not worthy of the name really, let alone of our long history.
Better by far to die fighting than to live with the shame of being a slave state.
When Churchill said all of this to the full Cabinet on the 28th May, he was greeted not with polite nods, but a thunder of fists on the table.
There would be no British Vichy, and at that moment, he knew the people of Britain agreed.
In his memoirs, Churchill never really owned up to just how close a shave this whole episode had been, and yet it was his refusal to accept the Nazi conquest of Europe that made the difference between surrender and survival.
All the qualities which generally made him so impossible - his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history - were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.
In the days ahead, Churchill learned that, against all predictions, a quarter of a million British troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk in a thousand little ships, the core of the army that would return almost exactly four years later.
It was his speech, broadcast to the country a few days later, in June 1940, which was, as one MP said, "Worth a thousand guns "and the speeches of a thousand years".
(CHURCHILL) We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills.
We shall never surrender.
This kind of indefatigable defiance was why George Orwell, for all his mistrust of Churchill's conservatism, was so relieved that at last Britain had a leader who realised, as he wrote, "That wars were won by fighting".
Although the socialist and the old aristocrat were so different, though one loved the empire and the other detested it, both understood that those differences were nothing compared with what separated them both from the Nazis and the defeatists.
Orwell's TB at this stage was still undiagnosed, but his coughing fits were bad enough for his application to join the army to be rejected.
Instead, he broadcast propaganda for the BBC and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard.
During the Blitz, there were the two of them, in the thick of the action, drawn like small boys to danger.
Orwell, someone said, felt at home amidst the bombs, bravery and danger.
Churchill was supposed to sleep somewhere safe, like the Cabinet War Rooms, but to the horror of his staff, he kept going back to Number Ten.
Sometimes he'd climb on the roof to see the "fireworks".
Churchill and Orwell both drew on a vision of British history for why we were fighting, but they were different visions.
Churchill's was more like a Shakespearean history play, with the war leader stalking through the night camp, drinking the affection of ordinary people.
George Orwell looked around at the millions of ordinary heroes, air raid wardens, the Women's Volunteer Service, and saw the real heirs to Cromwell, the Levellers and the Chartists.
The working people of Britain were not taking on the Luftwaffe to make the nation safe for the likes of Lord Halifax and the owners of country houses, but to create a nation that would finally help the miners of Wigan, and millions like them, have their share of the common decencies of life.
The trouble was the way that war had to be won - not by the people's army of old England, but by the people's army of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Churchill was not a lot happier about this than Orwell, but if being a junior partner to America was the price for defeating fascism, so be it.
Churchill was, in any case, less of a Little Englander than Orwell.
He loved the punch-in-the-ribs gusto of America as much as Orwell flinched at it.
For Churchill, democracy was a big, expansive transatlantic thing.
For Orwell, democracy American-style was just a species of carnivorous capitalism.
For Britain, when the war ended, one thing was clear - if war had meant dying together, peace was going to mean living together, not in the slums of Britain, but in a country where everyone had a fighting chance.
Newspapers carry the astonishing news to an amazed public.
Let's face it, whoever imagined such a result? Labour Landslide I In the General Election, Churchill received the thanks of the nation by being handed a tremendous drubbing.
Labour took office with a huge mandate for reform.
The socialist press greeted the triumph as the coming of the New Jerusalem.
But instead of joining the Hallelujah Chorus, Orwell, like Churchill, was profoundly worried about a new world order where we would be slaves in another way.
(CHURCHILL) From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals (RADIO) Faeroes, Fair Isle, Bailey, Hebrides, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Tyne, Dogger.
Winds moderate, variable, mainly westerly, gradually becoming To clear his head of the static hum of post-war London, Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain, to the very edge of the kingdom, the Hebridean island of Jura.
No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.
And it was here, in a remote cottage, typing in bed with the machine on his knees, knowing he hadn't much longer to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain - the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers.
As Churchill issued his grim warnings, Orwell created a common or garden plain man's Winston - Winston Smith.
The year was 1948.
The only love is for Big Brother.
The only laughter, in triumph over a defeated enemy.
No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment.
But always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
To picture the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
When we think of "1984", most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother, an upside-down world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth.
But Orwell's last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical when it describes Winston's resistance to dictatorship, a guerrilla action fought not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties, reclaiming the ordinary pleasures of humanity - a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.
Winston Smith did all these forbidden things, prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were all absolutely normal.
The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory.
The greatest horror of "1984" is the dictator's attempt to wipe out history.
Churchill and Orwell shared this romantic devotion to the past, the belief that it was the treasure house of freedom in an age dictated to by bureaucrats and boardrooms.
It was what made the aristocrat and the socialist, on the face of it such an impossible couple, the most unlikely of allies.
George Orwell died in 1950.
He was 46.
The very last thing he wrote for publication was about Winston Churchill, a review of his war memoir, "Their Finest Hour".
Though you'd expect him to be repelled by Churchill's warrior heroics, he bestows on the book the greatest compliment he could think of, that it read like the work of a human being, not a public figure.
And it was a verdict shared by the thousands who lined the streets of London when Churchill finally died in 1965.
When it counted, neither Churchill nor Orwell did the predictable thing, toed the party line.
More important was their common belief that if Britain was to have a distinctive future in the age of super-states, it had better keep faith with the best traditions in its long history, the history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty.
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia.
It's written, not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living.
It's our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are, telling us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented, to celebrate what should be celebrated.
And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot, I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much, and, as a matter of fact, neither do I.