Martin Gilbert

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 20:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

We've cast away on our desert island this week the historian and biographer Martin Gilbert.

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First question is, how well could you endure loneliness? Well, I've never really had to experience it, and I can't say I'm looking forward to it. But no doubt with the help of these records, I'll stagger through somehow. Just eight records. How much of an interest in music do you have? Is it important? I'm totally unmusical. At the same time, I always enjoy listening to music, and strangely enough, I find I can write better if there's some musical background. Really? Even when you're doing creative writing, apart from researching? Yes, I can't do it with vocal music, but any form of orchestral or even sometimes a fine solo violin. It seems to focus my mind on the documents, although not blotting out the music. Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you sing or play the piano or whatever? None at all. I embarked on piano lessons at school.

Presenter1:22

Martindale Sidwell attempted to put my fingers onto the right keys, but it didn't work, and I abandoned it, I think, at the age of about eleven. Oh dear.

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What's the first record you've chosen? Well, the first record is actually the first song I can remember when I went as a boy of three and a half to Canada during the war. As an evacuee? As an evacuee, and felt intensely patriotic.

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But the only

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bit of England that seemed to be around me was

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My aunt.

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And uh

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There was a song which suddenly became popular, as I recall it, There'll Always Be in England.

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And I felt, well, this really is where I belong.

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And the people about whom this song is sung, they are my people. You were hearing it, of course, in Canada. I was hearing it in Canada, where everybody was exhorting.

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Canadians volunteer, Canadians fight.

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And I couldn't understand well, where is

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England. Well, it appeared in this song rather miraculously. And who sings it or plays it? Well, we've searched about the different recordings and one sung by Robert Ashley is particularly welcome to me in a way because in my historical work on Churchill I've paid a lot of attention to the fate of those young men with whom he came in contact.

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say during the wilderness years, what became of them?

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Many of them perished in the war, and I tried to go out of my way to

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Bring this into the volumes.

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And uh Robert Ashley himself, who sings the version I've chosen, was killed during the war using the Royal Air Force. So I felt it rather tied in with my own current work and thoughts.

Martin Gilbert2:58

There'll always be an invan

Presenter2:58

There'll always be an

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Uh

Martin Gilbert3:02

While there's a country lane, Wherever there's a cottage small, Beside a field of grain, There'll always be an England

Martin Gilbert3:21

While there's a busy street where

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Robert Ashley, with Jack Payne in his band, They'll Always Be in England.

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Let's go straight into your second record. What's that to be?

Presenter3:34

My second record is.

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The only song I was ever put on the stage to sing. Where's that?

Speaker 23:40

Oh, where's that?

Presenter3:40

It was while I was still at school at Highgate, and uh I think it was just before my voice broke, which of course destroyed any chance of my ever singing again. But it was a marvellous piece from uh Sampson, from Handels, Sampson, and I always remember it with affection, and sometimes when I'm driving along.

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The motorway I find myself desperately trying to repeat these

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Beautiful echoes of school.

Martin Gilbert4:04

Oh no.

Martin Gilbert4:10

Archer's whole scorn is hard.

Martin Gilbert4:16

Oh, I don't need at all.

Martin Gilbert4:20

Oh, I couldn't be at a blow, no, I couldn't be at a blow.

Martin Gilbert4:29

Oh, is it?

Martin Gilbert4:33

Who comfort me?

Martin Gilbert4:47

Thy hope was more.

Presenter5:05

Honour and Arms from Handel's Opera Sampson, sung by Benjamin Luxon.

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Now you've said you were schooled at Highgate, so you're a Londoner.

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I am indeed. I was sent off from London to Canada and returned to London actually while the

Presenter5:20

V bombs were still falling. That was bad timing. Your family background, of course, is from abroad. Yes, all my four grandparents were born in what was then

Presenter5:30

called Russia, and now is Poland.

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My parents were both born here.

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But of course as a boy, as a child, I remember vividly my grandparents and their stories of these remote, distant wildernesses, the Pripit marshes that I later learnt in geography were so foreboding. When you were a child, were there a lot of books about the house?

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My father was an avid reader, and always encouraged me to read books.

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We lived only in a very small flat, and I remember the books sort of somehow propping up.

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tables and at the side of beds and squeezed in behind doors, and there were also, which was really the first record I can remember.

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A seventy eight, which I played and played until it simply scratched itself away.

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But it was, I think, the first record that uh

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I ever owned and ever sort of fell in love with.

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and so I have chosen it as my next.

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piece. It's from a martyr and it's Gili singing.

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Bye.

Martin Gilbert7:20

Read it.

Presenter7:24

Gilly singing Mapari from Flotto's opera Matte.

Presenter7:29

So you went to school in Highgate. What were you best at at school? I was best at geography, but geography was not considered really a serious subject to take up at the university. And then the history masters rather pushed me towards history, which I did very willingly since I had absolutely no scientific bent and was glad to get out of the chemistry laboratory. So you got yourself a scholarship to Oxford. You had a couple of years of national service to put in first. I had to do that first. And that, I must admit, was almost totally lacking in any musical interest whatsoever. Where were you and what were you doing?

Presenter8:04

As many soldiers, I was here and there. I was at one time in Cornwall, another time in Scotland, and for quite a lot of months in military hospitals lying on my back.

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Oh dear, what did you do to yourself?

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Hurt my toe.

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What a sensible thing to do. Got you out of a lot of marching, I suppose. It did indeed. I was permanently excused wearing boots for my last year as a soldier, which was rather unusual.

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So to Oxford, which college? I went up to Maudlin. Yes. I read modern history, of course, modern history in Oxford, beginning with the barbarians and the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes, all of whom were then and remain rather a mystery to me. What subject did you choose for your thesis? My thesis, which was actually never written, took many different forms. First of all, I was going to do a great work on a Russian revolutionary figure. And when I'd completed my sixth month, a distinguished professor in Helsinki completed his sixtieth year on the same subject and published a magnificent two-volume work. So I had to abandon that. And I then turned to Indian history and unfortunately put a small joke in my thesis. And.

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My supervisor said we don't really approve of jokes in this university and theses, so in despair I gave it up and went to

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what later became my life, diplomatic and political history of this century. You moved on for some research? I moved on to St Anthony's College, where I did two years' research, and then to Merton, where I became a research fellow. And in fact, I've researched ever since. I although I've enjoyed some teaching.

Speaker 29:27

Or

Speaker 29:28

Guys

Presenter9:34

My life has been archives and research.

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What were your other interests in the university as an undergraduate? Were you mixed up in politics or theatricals or sport or what? The centre of my life for a year and a half was the Isis magazine. I started as poetry editor and ended as features editor.

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And uh that was quite an interesting time.

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One of my

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University Hero Stephen Potter was the editor and he encouraged me.

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So that uh what spare time I had was really writing articles for ISIS.

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And at St Anthony's, what sort of research were you doing there? Well, there, as I say, I started on Russia and moved on to India.

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but got more and more absorbed in British history, and this led me to

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Looking at Churchill's career.

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and taking up a an invitation to spend the evening with Randolph Churchill, which I did rather reluctantly, as he had a reputation for being quite a savage.

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and intemperate person.

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And the evening became.

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A day and the day became.

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A temporary job for

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Three months, and the temporary job became five years of

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Apprenticeship for the Churchill Biography.

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Right, let's have your fourth record. What's that been?

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That is a piece of music which I first heard when I was at university.

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The

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Slow movement.

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of the winter.

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segment of Vivaldi's four seasons, which I think is one of the most

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Beautiful and comforting pieces of music I know, and which I always listen to when I'm feeling in need of comfort.

Presenter12:06

Itzak Perlman playing the violin and conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in The Slow Movement of Winter from Bivaldi's The Four Seasons.

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So you went to work with Randolph Churchill on the monumental

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Biography of his father which he was starting. How did that come about? How did you get your introduction to him?

Presenter12:28

I owe it entirely to Lady Diana Cooper, whom I had gone to see in connection with some of my rather more prosaic historical work, and she urged me to go and see Randolph Churchill in his own right, not because he was his father's son, but because she thought he would have something to impart to me about the nineteen thirties as he remembered them.

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And he received her letters, sent me telegrams. I finally turned up and...

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was drawn into the web. You were living in in in his house? I lived in I had a sort of three day a week appointment. Randolph rather determined what constituted three days. Sometimes it seemed to go over to four or five days. And I would be released and have a sort of breather and then come back. It was a beautiful house in Suffolk, at East Burkhold.

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And uh I must say that for all the storm

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which sometimes could be created around him. He was a very generous and amusing

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person to work for, but I think personally the great excitement for me was that he taught me how to set about discovering documents and discovering material. He had an incredible zeal for searching into hidden corners. Was all Sir Winston's archive in Suffolk at that time? Yes, what were called Churchill's papers were there.

Presenter13:41

But Churchill wrote many letters of which he kept no copies, and of course there were people who observed him in action who kept their own notes and diaries. And my job was really to go and find these things which were in other archives and even other countries. A lot of travelling.

Presenter13:55

A lot of travelling, and particularly as many of the retired people who had known him best seemed to live in the gre in the extremities of the land. I was always going down to Devon or up to Scotland. Who do you remember in particular being excited at interviewing?

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One of the most exciting moments was finding a letter in the Churchill Papers from the fiancé.

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of one of his flying instructors who had been killed.

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immediately after giving Churchill a lesson.

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And this was in nineteen thirteen, and she wrote and said how moved she'd been by the wreath which Churchill had sent to her fiancee's funeral, and how he in his letters to her

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had always described the flights and described Churchill so vividly.

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But of course the idea of letters written describing Churchill learning to fly

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But how to find some one who was only a fiancee?

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who had a name which had no relation, of course, to the name of the young man who had been killed.

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and I worked my way round the telephone books of England.

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until finally when I reached Worcestershire somebody with the same name of the fiancee first denied all knowledge of her, and then said, Goodness me, that's my cousin I haven't seen her for fifty years. She lives in and from that moment

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I was through, and I spoke to her.

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And she said,'It's strange you should telephone. Only last week I was looking through my fiance's old letters, and I thought,'Should I burn them'? and something told me,'No.

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And she put them in the purse for me.

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So you had this hitherto completely unknown information about Sir Winston.

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Yes, a y a young man, excited, of course, to have an important minister learning to fly under his direction and writing frankly to his fiancée, sometimes quite critically, of course. How long did you work with Randolph Churchill? For five years, from'sixty two to sixty seven. He had undertaken this massive task. How many volumes was the work to be in?

Presenter15:49

Well, Randolph completed two what we call main volumes, two story volumes, and he also completed five volumes of Letters and Documents. I've tainted on from him. I've already done another three main volumes and another eight volumes of documents.

Presenter16:06

And probably about four or five remain to be done. How many researchers did Randolph Churchill have in his team? Well, he had a fluctuating team. When I joined him there were two and I was the third. When there was a panic on, it could be swollen to seven or even eight, I think, on one occasion.

Presenter16:23

And when things went badly and he was in a bad mood, it could go right down to one, or even I think on one occasion none. You were only thirty two, I believe, when you took it over, but you'd already published a dozen books in your own right, as it were.

Presenter16:38

Yes, I'd I mean I'd been very interested in maps, as I say, and geography, and I'd published some atlases and went on doing little historical sketch atlases from time to time. And two books about uh appeasement before the outbreak of World War Two. Uh what else? Well, one of my favourite books was a biography of a marvellous British diplomat called Sir Horace Rumbull.

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who ended up as British ambassador in Berlin.

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and because he had a very sensible

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attitude that almost all foreigners were pretty reprehensible.

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The moment Hitler came to power, he of course saw at once that this was even wor even worse, this was a true foreigner, and therefore totally to be condemned from the start.

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Let's have another record.

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I thought one of Churchill's own favourites, one which was actually

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a song which was sung at his funeral.

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And a song which often brought great tears to his eyes. He was very.

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much a student of the American Civil War, and wrote about it.

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And the battle hymn of the Republic was a song he loved to sing himself and to hear being sung.

Martin Gilbert17:39

I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps They have builded him an altar in the evening news and damps I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps

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My love.

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Fire the thin wind flaring climb

Martin Gilbert17:55

His day is marching far.

Martin Gilbert18:03

That's all.

Martin Gilbert18:10

Uh

Martin Gilbert18:13

I'm a little bit.

Martin Gilbert18:16

It's frozen.

Martin Gilbert18:32

Bespent my soul to answer him, He drove almost my feet.

Presenter18:39

The Battle Hymn of the Republic by the Robert Shaw Korral with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter18:45

So you took over this mammoth task when Randolph Churchill died. How long did you think it was going to take to complete it? Originally I thought it would be possible to finish it within well within a decade. Ten years. Ten years, which seemed of course formidable, an interminable amount of time looking at it from the beginning. But unfortunately Harold Wilson who was Prime Minister at the time decided to create a thing called the Thirty Year Rule, to throw open the archives, which hitherto had been closed for fifty years. So I, in common with all historians, found ourselves with a great Aladdin's cave of material. This changed the whole scene for writers of modern history. It changed the whole scene, and also even for Churchill, whose own archive was so voluminous. It changed the whole perspective of what he had really been doing, what had been going on behind the scenes. And it was possible not only to write, as it were, about his opinions, but how he operated to get his views put into action, put into practice. This means that one day you will have to go back and rewrite the first two volumes.

Presenter19:47

Well, now they can be seen very differently, his his early days. When you started work, did you continue to employ the same team that Randolph Churchill had had?

Presenter19:56

I decided to try to have one researcher and I persuaded a young man from Glasgow University, Sidney Astor, to come and be with me to take off a year from university. And that worked well. I always felt I had to see the documents myself and be totally absorbed and of course do all the writing. And the larger the team, the more you would distance yourself really from the original material.

Presenter20:21

And then after a number of other research assistants, one of whom actually went off and joined Harold Wilson's team, so I felt, as it were, doubly aggrieved, he gave me a double amount of work. But uh I then uh was very lucky too.

Presenter20:35

Have a request for again a temporary job, rather as I'd applied for Randolph. I can only work for three months. I couldn't possibly commit myself to more.

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But it was a a very hard working young lady. She started working on index cards and

Presenter20:49

went on to documents and remained with me to this day and is in fact now my wife. Well that's an ideal arrangement, isn't it?

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Now the Churchill archive is enormous, I gather.

Presenter21:00

Millions of pieces of paper. Physically it i in terms of the weight of the paper, it's fifteen tons weight. And it's all got to be examined. Yes, it's everything he received and quite a lot of the things he sent out.

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And some of it is actually quite fascinating because, for example, it includes

Presenter21:16

his laundry bills, but among the other laundry bills those when he was travelling, and he went, for example, in nineteen thirty four, to Jerusalem, and this appears in No Churchill biography.

Presenter21:27

But I found his laundry bill from Jerusalem in 1934 and from that was able to reconstruct his visit and find people who had been there at the time who of course remembered it. And you have to elide the material in his own personal archive with the official archives, which I presume are in the public record office. Yes, now with the opening of these archives, I would say more than a half of the Churchill story actually has to come from the official archives, which are which are actually even vaster and even heavier. And of course you've advertised in the Times for further documentation and all sorts of stuff has turned up. I have. In fact now I'm working on the Second World War volume.

Presenter22:05

I'm particularly keen that people who actually had contact with him, however small, should not be shy in forwarding their recollections. Now these are large volumes, are they not? I mean, a thousand pages or more. Yes, a thousand, twelve hundred. And with each volume goes a companion book.

Presenter22:23

Yes, with each volume goes two and in some cases three sets of letters and documents, which is the raw material, and of course much material for which there was no room in the main volumes. In other words, if you're quoting from a document, then the whole document is printed in the companion volume. Yes, if I say Churchill described Neville Chamberlain as, quote, rather wearisome, unquote, I like to have in the document volume the whole letter from which this quotation is taken.

Presenter22:49

How do you assemble your material? I mean, the sheer bulk of it is is formidable. Do you have charts?

Presenter22:56

I have charts when I write, but when I assemble it I am a slave for chronology. I believe that if I can only put everything in its correct day by day order, and within the day,

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Morning

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Noon and afternoon order.

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then I will begin to understand what made him tick and what made the events tick. But of course once I come to write, then I have sheets of paper on the wall in which I try to link together all the different strands from the chronology in different colours. One might have blue for diplomacy, green for Russia, yellow for China.

Presenter23:30

Try to sort of link it all.

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Let's have some more music. Well, one of my recent research trips took me to Poland.

Presenter23:37

and to a one of these terrible slave labor camps.

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that existed in the East. This one had British prisoners of war, it had Jews, it had Poles, all working in intolerable conditions.

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and I was wandering about.

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Through these stocks.

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Buildings

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Intact.

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substantially built during the war.

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and untouched since then with the weeds growing up.

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and suddenly out of the stillness and the horror of the surroundings,

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There burst forth the sound of a popular tune.

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which when I'd left England three or four days before had been my son's he was then aged two his favourite tune, and I was so staggered to hear this little piece of, as it were, pop music from my Oxford home suddenly blaring out in the middle of remote Silesia.

Presenter24:31

that I thought I'd choose it to remind myself of my son himself and his first choice.

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and the curious way that research and personal life sometimes dovetail.

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It's a supertrooper, the name of a blazing light, a great light.

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And it's by Ever.

Speaker 324:50

Super truper beams are gonna blind me, but I won't feel blue.

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But I won't

Speaker 324:58

Like I always do.

Speaker 325:02

Cause somewhere in the crowd there

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Super Trooper by Abbott.

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Now from the immense amount of research you've done on on the Churchill story, there have been spin-off books from material that there just wasn't room for. This this was fortuitous.

Presenter25:34

Yes, the first of the of these books was actually a photographic portrait of Churchill, which was published by the

Presenter25:41

Official Biography Publishers.

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simply from the enormous number of photographs, negatives, even glass plate negatives, which people who read the volume

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were stirred to send in discovered in their own.

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Draw

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And of course my great excitement was five years ago when

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It was decided that the fifth volume of the biography, this twelve hundred pager,

Presenter26:04

uh actually merited being turned into a television drama and that of course there would have to be a short book to go with it. You were acting as consultant on the television series about Churchill. Well, my wife and I did it together. We studied the scripts and we put our comments forward, but of course

Presenter26:21

It was a drama in some places it was fairly fictional.

Presenter26:25

And uh the best we could do was really make sure that a percentage was historical. Well, you've been so busy on Churchill for for so long, for so many years, you must be far behind with the work which you had planned to do on other subjects for yourself.

Presenter26:39

Actually, I've just finished a book on

Presenter26:41

Auschwitz and the Allies, the response, the Allied response to the news.

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of the terrible things happening behind uh

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Enemy lines

Presenter26:51

And this arose out of a single Churchill minute, a single suggestion by Churchill that something should be done to help those who were trapped by the Nazis. And this was going to be a twenty-minute talk and then perhaps a short article in a learned journal. And it ended up a 365-page book. So I suspect if one Churchill sentence can lead to three sixty-five pages, I shan't be.

Presenter27:14

Too short of

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Material. We've got to record number seven.

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Well, we're in the deep in the Second World War. I'm deep in the Churchill volume which covers the Second World War.

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And as I said, I've just finished this book on how the news of the Jewish fate during the war reached the Allies.

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And the song which I've uh chosen actually relates to the town in the remote east of Poland.

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from which some of my wife's grandparents came.

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And it was written by a carpenter who became a popular singer of his day, a great singer in the Yiddish language of Polish Jury.

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who was himself killed by the Nazis in nineteen forty two.

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And it's a beautiful song about his home town which he can no longer see because he's now trapped in a ghetto somewhere else.

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And the theme of the song is

Presenter28:07

Keep up your courage and keep up your hope.

Martin Gilbert28:32

I sech nichonder, a groisa mergedo, a troilicerd hom, an mund von hefke, full undum vonoid, are she hoerber was all emptinit horit.

Martin Gilbert29:03

Y'all is talk my hey, maybe all is

Presenter29:09

Bialistok is My Home, sung in Yiddish by Abraham Samuel Reddick.

Presenter29:14

Have you any outdoor interests, Martin? Have you anything, any skill that would help you with a desert island existence?

Presenter29:21

Well, I suspect if one had to do these things one would learn, though one might end up with some quite nasty blisters on one's uh hands. Well, this is a desert island hazard. Blisters. I like swimming, though, and of course the one thing a desert island will have is plenty of sea around it. Have you had any fishing?

Speaker 229:36

See Arod.

Presenter29:38

I've never done any fishing, but when my wife and I were

Presenter29:42

Spending some time on the Gallipoli Peninsula during the writing of the Gallipoli section of the Churchill biography, a local fisherman would seize the fish in the sea, and I would take over from there, and was able to light the fire, gut the fish, cook it, and serve it up fairly presentably. This is good stuff. Well done. Would you try to escape?

Speaker 229:57

Fairly present.

Presenter30:01

Again, all my reading and writing deals with these brave escapees.

Presenter30:07

Whether I would be inspired by some of their stories to have a go at it, I don't know. I should think I'd be rather scared of risking the the sharks and the dangers. Right. Well, let's have your eighth record.

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When I reached the period of the Churchill biography when he became Colonial Secretary in nineteen twenty one,

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and was involved suddenly, with his friend Laurence of Arabia, in the settlement of the Middle East.

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I went out for the first time to Jerusalem to pursue my researches, and actually to meet some of the people who had entertained him there sixty years ago.

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and I fell in love with the city.

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and I've gone back every year, and tried to spend three or four months every year there.

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And Jerusalem, Nike, London.

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has, by God, its problems, but it also has such enormous attractions. It's such a beautiful city.

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And such fun to be in.

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So I've tried to choose a song which has always moved me.

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which in a way links the two cities, and links perhaps the aspirations of the two peoples.

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that something good will emerge despite all the turmoils of contemporary life.

Presenter31:13

And so I would like to hear Jerusalem.

Martin Gilbert31:29

And in those faiths in ancient times, walk upon England's mountain screen.

Martin Gilbert31:43

It was

Martin Gilbert31:50

And in this present must your sea.

Martin Gilbert31:56

Then did the Countenance Divine Shine for the board a clouded hill

Presenter32:15

Perry's setting of William Blake's Jerusalem sung by Jared Baker.

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If you could take only one disc out of the eight that you've chosen, which would it be? I think it would be the Gile to remind myself of my father. Right. And one luxury, one useless object that you'd like to have with you? Ah, well, I've thought about this for a long time, and it's impossible. But what I will take is a two-sided picture frame, and on one side I will have the latest drawing my son has done of me, Daddy with Monkeys.

Speaker 332:44

Don't

Presenter32:46

And on the other side, my daughter, who's fourteen, has just done me a most marvellous map and town plan, no doubt, specifically for the desert island.

Speaker 332:46

Okay.

Presenter32:55

Right. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare which are already there.

Presenter33:01

Well of course I I have the perfect answer. I will take the document volumes of the Churchill Biography, because they will remind me for as long as I last of all the marvellous people I've met.

Presenter33:11

The fun I've had

Presenter33:13

The work I've done.

Presenter33:14

And above all

Presenter33:16

my wife's incredible contribution to this task, and I shall simply read them day by day and bask in the past. Right. And thank you, Martin Gilbert, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Presenter33:28

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 233:36

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.