The Page 99 Test: Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz, and Richard Toye's "The Churchill Myths"

Monday, November 9, 2020

Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz, and Richard Toye's "The Churchill Myths"

Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of a number of books, including A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It

(2014), and is currently writing The Labour Party: from Callaghan to Corbyn.

Bill Schwarz is Professor of Modern Literature and History at Queen Mary University of London. He is completing a three-volume study for Oxford University Press, Memories of Empire, the first volume of which received the Longman/History Today prize in 2013, and has been an editor of History Workshop Journal since 1989.

Richard Toye is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter. His books include Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007), Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2010), The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill's World War II (2013), and Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (2020).

Toye applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Churchill Myths, and reported the following:

I co-authored The Churchill Myths with Bill Schwarz and Steve Fielding so no-one page can be absolutely typical; we each have our distinct approaches and styles of writing. However, page 99 – which in fact was written by me – certainly does reflect the core theme of the book. As we emphasise right at the start, the book is not about Churchill the man, but rather about the ways in which others have made use of his image and reputation in the years since his retirement and death. There is a Churchillian ‘core image’ that has remained fairly constant. But the ways in which he has been debated and portrayed have evolved in response to new revelations about his record and in reaction to changing political conditions. Page 99, then, finds politicians in 2019 wrangling over Churchill’s legacy. The then Labour Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell had described Churchill as a ‘villain’. The Conservative Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg hit back. As the book describes it:
He claimed that ‘the Second World War would not have been fought by us without Churchill, everyone else in the British Establishment was ready to seek peace terms.’ Given that Rees-Mogg wanted to present himself as anti-elitist, despite being a public school–educated Tory MP and the son of a Times editor, casting the aristocratic Churchill as an anti-Establishment ﬁgure was a useful move.
However, what politicians say is only part of the story. The book also covers how Churchill has been represented in popular culture: in plays, on TV, and in films such as Darkest Hour. These help reinforce Churchill as a symbol of Britishness, which means that real or perceived criticisms of him are likely to trigger strong feelings and even a sense of affront. In writing The Churchill Myths our major purpose was to explore this emotional terrain.