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The
Two Winstons
Tuesday
18 June, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ TWO
In the final episode of A History of Britain, Simon Schama deals
with some fundamental questions about the past and its meaning.
Is history something to celebrate or disown? Is it largely irrelevant
to life in a new century, or should lessons be drawn from it?
To focus on these questions, Schama draws on the lives of two contrasting
figures, Winston Churchill and George Orwell, men who wrote and
made history and whose lives touched many of the key events of the
20th century - World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the end
of empire and the rise of socialism. Both men too had a huge personal
impact on Simon Schama.
Although politically poles apart, there were similarities between
the two men. Churchill went to Eton and Orwell to Harrow. Orwell
learned to reject imperialism while serving as a policeman in Burma;
the young Winston was radical and his most famous early speech was
a denunciation of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, and
the House of Lords.
Both men had a deep hatred of totalitarianism and saw fighting Hitler
as a patriotic duty. Both used language to mobilise and, while Churchill
regretted the loss of Empire and Orwell applauded it, both saw the
dangers in erasing our history.
In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four Orwell painted a horrific portrait
of a society which outlawed its past. Churchill's final legacy was
to write about the past in his great work, A History of the English
Speaking Peoples - a gift to a future generation which says that
our history will always matter.
"In 1965", writes Simon Schama, "something immense
had happened. The death of a patriarch. The passing of a certainty
about what it meant to be British, what it meant was to be the inheritor
of an astonishing history." Â… "I was listening to
a different Winston - rebellious, suspicious of cheerleading claptrap
- Winston Smith - the reluctant hero of George Orwell's nightmare
parable of the future."
"Orwell's history then was not the kind that wallowed in self-congratulation
but the kind that asked hard questionsÂ… 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 Orwell, look
at Churchill and you will understand what happened to Britain in
the twentieth century, how the past shaped the future."
Produced and directed by Clare Beavan.
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