The late Martin Gilbert brought to his work a classic devotion to accuracy and original sources.
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Historian Martin Gilbert in 1968, working at his home near Oxford, England.
Photo:
Keystone Features/Getty Images
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By Larry P. Arnn
In summer 1940, as war raged, the British government sent several
hundred children, including 3-year-old Martin Gilbert, to safety in
Canada. The children berthed aboard the Duchess of Bedford in a 50-ship
convoy, and after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was
attacked by the Germans and five ships sank.
The Duchess sailed
on safely, past the icebergs of Labrador, “marvelous for children to
behold [and] among my first memories,” Gilbert wrote. Soon after,
another boat with 77 children evacuees was sunk by the Germans, drowning
them all, and the scheme was abandoned.
In summer 1944,
Winston Churchill
—who from the start had disliked the idea of sending British
children overseas, calling it a “scuttle”—arranged for many of the young
evacuees, including Gilbert, to return aboard an American troopship
from New York.
Churchill specifically asked the Admiralty to
make sure, amid other responsibilities in the aftermath of the Normandy
landings, that there be enough life jackets for the extra children.
So
began the life of
Sir Martin Gilbert,
who died at age 78 on Tuesday in London. He is best known as
Churchill’s official biographer. He served as adviser to Prime Minister
John Major and was soon after awarded knighthood in 1995.
Gilbert
taught as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He wrote 88 books,
including histories of the Holocaust, of the world wars and of the 20th
century. Regarding the Holocaust, he said that the “tireless gathering
of facts will ultimately consign Holocaust deniers to history.”
The
Churchill biography is a thing of magnificence. It is the largest
biography ever written, befitting one of the largest lives ever lived.
It is now 25 volumes and more than 25,000 pages, with six document
volumes that Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale, Mich., has been tasked
with completing in his absence.
Churchill was prolific: hundreds
of speeches, 50 books, and thousands of articles, memos and official
minutes. Thus, Gilbert’s biography is monumental. To do this work, he
had the “treasure trove” of the Churchill archives, traveled to public
and private archives throughout Britain, and corresponded with hundreds
of Churchill’s contemporaries, many of whom became his friends.
Gilbert
utterly rebelled against the view that the facts of history change with
time. In this way he agreed with the classics. He wrote the biography
faithfully, from primary-source materials and with the greatest care to
tell the story as it happened. Gilbert’s stewardship is significant, as
Churchill is a man of our time and one of its greatest blessings.
I
was privileged to work as research assistant to Gilbert on the
biography in the 1970s and continue as his friend and colleague
afterward. For years I witnessed and wondered at the care and energy he
put into his work. He desired original sources, nothing less. “You must
get everything. We must have it all here,” he once told me.
He
would say, “You have a good memory, and I have a good memory; we do not
rely upon our memories.” I learned to look things up again and again. If
you used the term “perhaps,” his eyebrows would go up, and he would
say, “Perhaps not!”
I have never known anyone so tireless in his
vocation. Once he was stricken with Bell’s palsy, which paralyzed part
of his face, yet he worked regardless, the same hours, holding his pen
in one hand and in the other a handkerchief pressed against his mouth to
keep it closed.
Gilbert’s Oxford tutor, the historian A.J.P.
Taylor, told him in 1960 that “if you go in for historical research, you
will work for weeks on end and find nothing.” Gilbert was persevering
and fierce, but his manner never so.
He sought to give life and breath to history. In 1997, he said in an interview with C-Span that he wanted to be remembered
“as someone who brought ordinary people, or people, into the equation,
not merely governments and powers and themes, but human beings with
flesh and blood and names and ages.”
Mr. Arnn is president of Hillsdale College.
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