Michael Dobbs

Chartwell, for 40 years the family home of Winston Churchill is in the most beautiful position overlooking the weald of Kent, and protected by the hills. This was also the place that so many famous men and women beat a path to to meet him. Members of the royal family, presidents of the United States such as Harry Truman, other prime ministers and great entertainers like Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier.

It was his redoubt, his castle, the place where he went forward to launch his attacks on his opponents and also the place where he came back to lick his wounds.

There is one room at Chartwell which is perhaps more important than all of the others, Churchill’s study, but, you know, when you’re walking in the footsteps of history you often have to take off your shoes. This is really hallowed territory.

This was the heart of the great Churchill enterprise. The place that he wrote his books, dictated his speeches and churned out an enormous number of newspaper articles. It was from here that he created the great works that won him the Nobel Prize for literature.

Around him he had the things that inspired him, the things that meant most to him, starting off with a wonderful painting of Blenheim Palace, where he was born, the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough. There is also a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch that he adored, and President Roosevelt, a man with whom he had a terribly complicated relationship, nowhere near as simple as he later pretended it to be.

The one portrait above all that I think is significant is a portrait of a man whose image followed him everywhere. It’s here in his study, it’s in his bedroom, it’s everywhere that was important to Winston, that of his father, Lord Randolph.

Lord Randolph was a failed politician and a failed father. He was appalling to Winston and treated him often with contempt but the memory of that father stayed with him.

His father’s ghost sat on his shoulder throughout those desperate dark days of the war, whispering in his ear, “Winston, you’re not good enough, you’re not up to this job”. Winston, being obsessed, driven on, belied that he had to show his long dead father that he was really up to the job after all.

Winston’s desk tells you so much about the man. Not only was the desk itself inherited from his father, but all the way round the edges you see those telltale burns from his cigars which were always present with him. You’ve got his glasses, you’ve got his pens. Much more important, I think, are the photographs. The people that meant most to him in his life, not only his historical heroes but his family. All of his children and his beloved Clementine.

I think quite splendidly, the thing that’s closest to him when he was writing was a little model of his poodle Rufus. Winston was a man of great emotion, he would often burst into floods of tears.

He was also a man of tremendous physical energy as well. No one seat could retain him, he would often be walking up and down his study dictating to secretaries well into the early hours of the morning, who would type all of his words on a silent typewriter.

At a stand up desk, a present from his children, he would lay out the proofs and the drafts of everything that he had to go through.

Winston was a man of many foibles, occasional meanness, but at the end of the day a man who, over an extraordinary lifetime, achieved so many things.

In this room, with his words, Winston Churchill not only made many fortunes and won a Nobel Prize, but he also changed the course of our history.