Winston Churchill and the British public: propaganda and perception, 1939-1945

Winston Churchill is viewed in the popular memory of the Second World War as the epitome of British tenacity and bullishness, of courage and determination, and, as A.J.P. Taylor wrote in his famous footnote, the saviour of the nation. Through his speeches, Churchill provided the memorable rhetoric of die war and is seen to have unified the country both by his determined effort to win the war as well as by the adoration he inspired among the British public.

This thesis challenges these assumptions about Churchill’s personal popularity during the war, and traces the fluctuations in the public’s opinion of him. Rather than the apogee occurring in 1940 as die popular view would hold, the thesis argues that it came in 1943 when military victories, optimism for the post-war world and the emergent Churchill Legend converged. This provided an unrivalled platform for his reputation, but thereafter it began to fail as frustration and disappointment set in, so that by the General Election of 1945 Churchill’s stock amongst the British public was exhausted; any vestigial popularity was based upon retrospective gratitude for his leadership in 1940 and his growing Legend.

In tracing the changing fortunes of Churchill’s popularity, the thesis also explores which aspects of Churchill’s public image appealed to die British people and which antagonised. It examines how Churchill’s image was portrayed and to what extent it was manipulated by the media, the Ministry of Information and by Churchill himself. It is argued that the common aims of wartime propaganda facilitated the emergence of the Churchill Legend and that diere was a discreet yet determined effort to popularise him, especially in the early days of the war.

Extensive use is made of die Home Intelligence Reports of the Ministry of Information and of Mass-Observation's File Reports to identify the public’s opinions, whilst Churchill’s papers and other sources reveal die programme of deliberate publicity that surrounded him during the war.