Abstract
Winston Churchill’s mental health has long been the subject of popular interest. In 1966 his doctor, Lord Moran, published a controversial tell-all memoir which suggested that his famous patient had suffered from ‘prolonged fits of depression’. ‘Black dog’, he said, was Churchill’s term for the feeling that settled upon him at these times. Moran’s references to this issue were rather limited, but a little later the psychiatrist Anthony Storr used them as the basis for a celebrated essay. Storr argued that Churchill’s efforts to escape his recurrent dark feelings drove him towards excitement and adventure, and thus contributed to his genius for political leadership as revealed in 1940. This interpretation is often used in campaigns which seek to de-stigmatize mental illness; in these, Churchill becomes an ‘inspirational’ figure, who serves as proof that victims are in the best of company, and that their problems may in fact be a sign of their innate creativity.
To what extent are such well-meaning publicity efforts based on solid biographical fact? Wilfred Attenborough’s new account rightly takes a cautious approach to the evidence, even if at times he seems to push scepticism to excess. He points out that there is only one directly-recorded instance of Churchill using the phrase ‘black dog’ himself. This was in a letter to his wife, Clementine, in 1911, and the reference was in the past tense; he spoke of a doctor he might consult if the conditioned returned. We might note, however, that he clearly expected her to be familiar with his use of the term. Moreover, he wrote at other times of ‘terrible and reasonless depressions’ (p. 86) and of ‘deep and ceaseless torment’ (p. 88). Friends and colleagues observed signs of depression, and without doubt he could sit, self-absorbed and silently brooding, for long periods of time. Attenborough is correct, though, to cast doubt on the ‘gothic’ (p. 2) versions of the story that have made their way into the literature. His basic point is that Churchill was not habitually crippled by depression, and that he generally recovered quite quickly from his psychological low-points, which are at any rate substantially explicable by the troubles and cares which attend those responsible for affairs of state.
Attenborough establishes this carefully, albeit somewhat repetitively. He is not the first to point out that Moran’s evidence, on which Storr relied, was problematic. What Moran presented in his book as excerpts from his diary had been heavily reworked from his contemporary notes. Many sections of Moran’s papers at London’s Wellcome Library remain closed, so it is generally not possible to reconstruct what he originally wrote. However, Attenborough is able to demonstrate that Moran interfered retrospectively with key entries from the 1940s which appear to show that Churchill entertained thoughts of killing himself (or at least suffered from the fear that he would give in to some sudden suicidal impulse). The book’s most significant contribution, in fact, is in the attention it gives to Churchill’s tendency to fear and anxiety. Attenborough’s patient research has uncovered the identity of ‘an American book on the nerves’, which Churchill told Moran interested him ‘a great deal’ (p. 52). This was W.S. Sadler’s The Physiology of Faith and Fear (1912), which concluded that ‘worry might truthfully be called “a spasm of the attention” or a continued fit of mental concentration’ (p. 54). It may well be that Churchill’s mind had a habit of locking on to particular issues and he found it difficult to make it let go. His hobby of painting, which he took up after his fall from power during World War I, seems to have helped him in this regard.
This book contains much valuable incidental detail, and will certainly be of use to Churchill scholars. From the point of view of the history of psychiatry, the really interesting tale here lies with Storr (a successful popularizer) and with what his account, which many people have over the years found very attractive, might tell us about societal attitudes to psychological distress. That, however, is territory which Attenborough chooses not to explore, and it would scarcely be fair to criticize him for not having written a different book. As it is, the author may be thanked for an exhaustive enquiry into the mind-set of an ever-fascinating individual.