The campaign to “cancel” Winston Churchill has accelerated swiftly since the Black Lives Matter eruption in the summer of 2020. Churchill College in Cambridge—of all places—organized a panel discussion in which he was accused of genocide and the British Empire was compared unfavorably to the Third Reich (with no one on the hyper-woke panel dissenting). The National Trust included Churchill’s home, Chartwell Manor in Kent, on a list of its properties connected to “colonialism and slavery,” despite Churchill having shed blood in a campaign to abolish slavery in the Sudan. Statues of him have been vandalized. Yet the publishing industry doesn’t seem to have been affected, as these eight books demonstrate.
One reason for Churchill’s enduring popularity might be found in Boris Johnson’s foreword to Edwina Sandys’s charming and enlightening book about her grandfather’s favorite hobby, Winston Churchill: A Passion for Painting. “Other hands dithered,” Boris writes, “Churchill took the plunge. And that, amigos, is the final rejoinder to all his earnest doubters and critics.” (It might also serve as a rejoinder to Johnson’s similarly earnest and no less vociferous doubters and critics.) Churchill’s willingness to commit himself fully in any activity he undertook was in such contrast to the insipidity of so many of his contemporaries that it still invites attention over half a century after his death.
In her perceptive essay that accompanies almost 100 full-page reproductions of many of Churchill’s best paintings, Sandys emphasizes four qualities she believes applied to her grandfather’s life as well as to his painting. “He was bold,” she writes. “He was irrepressible. He was filled to the brim with a love of life. And finally he was inspiring, that quality of his which, more than any other, shaped world history.” Sandys’s observations on Churchill’s painting are all the more insightful because she herself is a successful artist.
“Most men keep their work in their office,” she recalls of life at Chartwell, “wherever possible, Grandpapa brought his home. No time or place was exempt. Wherever he went—the drawing room, the bedroom, the bathroom—was where it was at.” She writes of Christmases at Chartwell that “there were little children running around, Rufus the poodle, and the green budgerigar Toby hopping from head to head. On occasion a discussion with a grandchild about the nesting habits of the black swans was as important as an argument with Monty [Bernard Montgomery] about the Battle of El Alamein.”
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