Literary Review - August 2007

Page 48

GENERAL

of the Industrial Revolution. I was intrigued to read, for example, that the first public lighting system using electric bulbs was installed not by Edison in the USA, as is often claimed, but in the more prosaic setting of Godalming in Surrey, using bulbs invented by Joseph Swan, a chemist from Northumberland. The book abounds in telling details. It was also interesting to learn that parts of the boots used by British soldiers during the Peninsular War were actually made of clay to give them a more solid appearance, but they turned to liquid mud during the rainy campaigns. For all its depth, there are some odd omissions. I was surprised that there was almost nothing about the discovery of manned flight, certainly the most far-reaching of all inventions in the Edwardian age. Nor is there much about radio, the subject of one of Weightman’s previous books. And at

times I felt that the author could have provided more direct quotations from contemporary diaries or records to illuminate his characters and give more variety to the text. The book inspires a feeling of nostalgia for the industrial culture that Britain has lost in recent decades. Again and again, Weightman stresses that our nation was at the forefront of the revolution, almost a century ahead of France in terms of technological development. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a symbol of that enormous self-confidence, when British engineering dominated the world. Yet today, unlike almost every other major developed economy, we have hardly any home-grown manufacturing capacity left. The 1851 Exhibition displayed our industrial greatness, the 2000 Millennium Dome our national hollowness. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

MICHAELCOREN THE BIG SMOKE

CHURCHILL’S CIGAR

★By Stephen McGinty (Macmillan 213pp £12.99)

ASFREUDTHEfraud famously said, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. He was right. And a thin monograph about Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke is sometimes, well, just a thin monograph about Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke. The problem is that there just isn’t enough to say about the great man’s Cuban habit. Mind you, the author certainly tries. The most tenuous connections are explored, from the chronological chain of ownership of the various shops where Winston bought his cigars to the bureaucratic correspondence concerning wartime cigar gifts and whether they were politically acceptable or even physically dangerous. These attempts during the war years to protect the Prime Minister from poisoning make up the most enjoyable part of the book – a delightful combination of the comical and the grotesque, as quintessentially British security agents argue whether they should simply dump all of the cigar gifts or have them tested for toxins. They invariably decided on the latter, but scientists in laboratories could only learn so much and it was left to loyal guards to smoke a random selection from each box. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? It’s disarming to remember how many people were willing to risk their

life for someone they genuinely saw as the leader of the free world. And Stephen McGinty makes this point particularly well. Churchill was the magician of hope, his cigar the wand. So he waved it around for effect, chewing on it and sometimes not even smoking the thing at all. It was a limb of defiance, used to make points in Cabinet meetings and certainly exploited to show the difference between free democracy and non-smoking, non-drinking Hitlerism. The book is also rather good on Churchill followers who went to bizarre lengths to collect even the butts of his cigars. Not as dumb an idea as it seemed, with even the most flimsy memorabilia selling for vast amounts of money. The author also celebrates the sheer magnitude of his subject, the lust for life and all of its grand possibilities. The cigar was part of that cacophony of relish. Big, bombastic, smelly, and damn the consequences. McGinty is delightful in his conclusion, where he tours Chartwell and describes the myriad cigars and cigar boxes that are on display. The house, he explains, is now a National Trust building and thus aggressively smoke-free. The author retreats to the garden. ‘After the third attempt the match flared,’ he writes, ‘my cigar caught and smoke once more began to perfume the air.’ Try as it does, however, the book still gives us little that is not found in the admittedly enormous biographical work that already exists, and Churchill’s Cigar never manages to escape the feeling that it is just another chronicle, this time with an emphasis on nicotine. Seldom more than a pleasing distraction and sometimes straining to justify its theme, it is far more likely to satisfy the cigar monomaniac than the Churchill enthusiast. To borrow and twist old Freud again, sometimes a nice idea ought to remain just a nice idea. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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