The oratory of Winston Churchill

Abstract

Winston Churchill has to be ranked as one of the great political orators, his wartime oratory regularly featuring in collections of the 'great speeches of history' and his style and rhetorical methods often used as the basis of 'how to' advice for budding speech-makers and business executives anxious to project the 'language of leadership' (Humes, 1991;Glover, 2011). He had a feel for words and great artistry in their use -'he gets the last ounce out of the English language', it was once said (Hore-Belisha, 1953: 271) -but also worked extremely hard at his speechmaking (Humes, 1980;Weidhorn, 1987;Cannadine, 2002). Churchill was not a natural or spontaneous speaker but he made himself into a great orator -he studied the orators of the past and actually wrote about the subject -and always relied on detailed preparation, being dependent upon full and carefully worked-out scripts that even included stage directions ('pause'). Though he developed skills in repartee, his limited powers of improvisation meant that his oratory could be rather inflexible and he could give the impression of speaking at his audience (particularly in Parliament) rather than properly debating. However, one of his great strengths as an orator was that 'he could speak in both an arcane, heroic style and a plain everyday style', being able to utilise both an ornate, sometimes even anachronistic, vocabulary and also strong, short and simple words and colourful images to make his points (Rubin, 2003: 46-54).And a key aspect of Churchill's oratory was the performance element: his physical presence, his 'richness of gesture', his sense of timing, his voice, and his manner of 2 delivery (Fairlie, 1953; Weidhorn, 1987: 23-6). The written words alone were not enough, it has been suggested: 'Churchill's speeches, even if delivered verbatim by someone else, couldn't have had the same effect on audiences' (Montalbo, 1990: 13).The length and intensity of Churchill's political career, however, poses a special challenge for the analysis of his oratory. He was an MP for over 60 years, changed parties twice, engaged with most of the big political issues and controversies of the time, and his collected speeches fill eight fat volumes totalling nearly 9,000 pages and over four million words. During the Second World War, it was famously said, he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. His showmanship, rhetoric and charisma projected and inspired confidence and determination. That was the period of his greatest and most successful oratory (Charteris-Black, 2011: 53) and some of his famous phrases from that period became part of the national vocabulary and the collective historical memory. This chapter, however, focuses just on Churchill as Conservative leader in opposition and then back in government as prime minister in the 1945-55 period, a critical period in defining the post-war trajectory of British conservatism. It deals mainly with his oratory on domestic and party issues rather than the grand themes of world affairs and foreign policy that...