Book review: The Roar of the Lion, by Richard Toye

by Richard Toye
Oxford
4 stars
David Reynolds

Winston Churchill's wartime speeches are woven into legend: "their finest hour", "we shall fight on the beaches", "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" - such phrases have become immortal. His oratory has even been credited with helping win the war.

Surprisingly, the British prime minister's words have not been subjected to close scrutiny - an omission Richard Toye rectifies in this thoroughly researched, readable and fascinating book. He uses the drafts in the Churchill archives to show how the speeches were composed, while Home Intelligence Reports and the Mass Observation archive throw light on how they were received.

In early life, Churchill tried to emulate his father, Lord Randolph, by preparing a text and learning it by heart. But after one mortifying occasion when he went blank in the House of Commons, he adopted the practice of speaking from a detailed set of notes based on a full text that he had dictated to secretaries and then refined over many hours.

Contrary to his autocratic image, Churchill the speechmaker was often highly collegial. Toye shows how his "fight on the beaches" speech, just after the Dunkirk evacuation, reflected in tone and wording the advice of an American journalist about how to influence opinion in the United States.

One of the virtues of this book is that it does not fixate on 1940. The war lasted nearly six years and by covering the whole of that conflict, Toye helps us to demythologise how Churchill's rhetoric was received. Much of his success as a speechmaker stemmed from his essential honesty. Those rare occasions when he resorted to eyewash were quickly detected and resented, as in February 1942 when two German warships escaped from Brest, in Brittany, and proceeded all the way up the English Channel. Churchill's excuses over the air attracted comments such as: "What a bleedin' cover-up."