Chartwell

In recent weeks some publicity has been given to the notion that certain institutions like Tate Britain or the National Trust are not “exciting” or “relevant” enough for some sections of society. One’s instinctive and ungenerous response is “long may that continue”, for the subtext underlying these complaints is predictable and does not need unpicking here. More generously, I would urge that for anyone seeking excitement and relevance – whatever their background or circumstances – few places are potentially more rewarding than Chartwell, the Kentish home of Sir Winston Churchill, and now in the care of the National Trust.

The dining room at Chartwell

I visited Chartwell just over a week ago, on a day when the rain was so heavy that a tour of the wonderful gardens was impossible, but which meant that more time was available to spend inside the house. Here one may view the domestic environment and many artefacts associated with the greatest Englishman ever. Churchill earns that accolade, not only for seeing us through the Second World War, but because of his extraordinary passion for life. Though he lived to the age of ninety, he was a man seemingly constantly aware of transience and mortality, and determined to live life to the fullest.

Admittedly very comfortably privileged by birth, and often helped by being well-connected, he created his careers (plural) by himself. He was fortunate in that dire circumstances contrived to permit him the unique role as saviour of the nation and the postwar glories that followed, to complete that “walking with fate” for which he had long prepared, despite frustrating years in the political wilderness. Quite apart from that supreme role, what he crammed into those ninety years was breathtaking. Though in some respects a flawed personality, attention seeking, egocentric, often perceived as wayward and politically fickle, prone to unwise decisions and to depressions and excesses which hint at bipolar disorder (the curse / blessing of the creative), Churchill remains hugely relevant and exciting as an example of what a human being can achieve. He acknowledged, tongue in cheek, that history would be kind to him because, not only did he create it, but he would write it up afterwards. He knew exactly what he was doing. Chartwell is the living record.

In our current era, when so many people – often not very happily, it seems – lay great emphasis on their “identity”, and usually on one or more of the commonplace, fundamental and hence not very interesting “identity” labels which one way or another we are all tagged with – ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, body shape, religion – Churchill remains the star of multiple identity, of refusal to be typecast or imprisoned by a single vector of personality. He’s just like us all, in a way, but writ large, with latent potential fully realised, and fitted to the circumstances of the times. Each one of us carries more than a single label. Each of us is a minority of one, and is to be respected as such, a unique combination of many roles and characteristics, inherited or otherwise; Churchill took this truth to the extreme and made the best use of it.

Chartwell, with its rooms stuffed with memorabilia, photographs, documents,  paintings, uniforms, medals, awards, and artefacts of all kinds, recalls Churchill’s astonishing CV of multiple roles and abilities. Here we can find the soldier, military strategist, constituency MP, world statesman, writer, orator, gardener, builder, historian, wit, family man, bon vivant and socialite, artist, and fighter - for freedom, for tolerance, for fairness, for the subtlety and beauty of the English language, for a better and safer world, for the best in everything, for life - all rolled into one superlative existence.

To compare this colossus of a man with some of the sour, shabby, whining, thick, inarticulate, twisted, crabby, humourless, mean-spirited, incompetent, single-issue, up-themselves individuals who strut (or waddle) today’s political stage (and not just in this country) is to be deliberately and unavoidably cruel. For Churchill was a giant who could be at home in the highest society, who could negotiate with the great and the good and the not so good from around the world, who could be reduced to tears by the plight of ordinary families blitzed out of their homes, who could mastermind the winning of a world war almost single handedly, a man for whom everything was his oyster. And his cigar, and his champagne. One can’t imagine Churchill yelling impotently at Hitler to “get lost”, or having much truck with some impudent harpy from television news, or inspiring a nation facing imminent invasion by tweeting “… we shall never … oh bugger, I’ve run out of characters”. His was a more substantial age than ours; is anything flimsier than software? His was an age when victims in their millions were bombed, imprisoned, tortured, starved, gassed, shot, incinerated, thrown anonymously into huge pits. Such were the fates that he saved us from, in an era when racism and fascism were more than lazy reflex hyperbolic slurs, an era in which victims weren’t offered counselling or compensation or someone’s head on a plate or star billing on daytime television after being offended by a text message or an act of unwanted affection.

When we crave excitement and variety and relevance – and above all inspiration as human beings – Churchill is there. Today we enjoy the basic freedoms that he was so central in defending. Those freedoms still need protecting and nurturing, for there are plenty of people around ready to destroy them. Among our freedoms is that of not being trapped by simplistic notions of identity, the freedom to be as much as one is capable of in the short time available, the freedom to make the best of it.

Go to Chartwell and be inspired to do something with your life.