Sir Martin Gilbert — Winston Churchill’s official biographer, a Hillsdale College distinguished visiting fellow, and one of the most important historians of the 20th century — died Tuesday in London. Gilbert battled illness following a heart arrhythmia in April 2012. His last visit to the college was in the fall of 2007, and he is survived by his caring wife, Esther.
“He had the greatest capacity that I’ve ever seen to understand and marshall a story of great events and all the details connected to them. This made him always extremely interesting to hear from and talk to,” College President Larry Arnn said. “He cared very much. He wanted to get it right. Anybody who was around him saw in him a very significant man.”
Gilbert’s biography of Winston Churchill — tasked to him in October 1968 — is the longest biography ever written, and his work in publishing all of Churchill’s documents is even more extensive. He completed 16 of the volumes and started the 17th before he became ill. Arnn published the 17th volume of the documents series last year, and the college plans to publish six more.
“He was impatient. If you were good at working, and understood the importance of it, you could get along really well. If things got in his way, and they would, he would move quickly and speak abruptly. He was an intense man,” Arnn said.
“But you understood that it was intensity with a great purpose. Had he not had that great purpose, he would not have got nearly as much done. It took a lot of strength of character to do what he did,” Penny Arnn said.
Immense are Gilbert’s contributions to the intellectual development of many, including Arnn. As Gilbert’s research assistant in the late 1970s, Larry Arnn worked with Gilbert to gather all of Churchill’s writings, correspondence, letters, notes — in essence, all of the great statesman’s published and private works. The late Harry Jaffa, another teacher of Arnn’s, introduced Gilbert and Arnn in London, and they began working together three days later.
Gilbert’s hand in Arnn’s life exceeds the academic. Gilbert is responsible for the meeting of Larry Arnn and Penny Houghton. Penny (Houghton) Arnn was hired to work on Gilbert’s research two weeks after Larry Arnn joined Gilbert’s staff in August 1977. Penny drove to work in an undependable black Austin Mini, while Arnn rode a scooter.
“I would go to the basement in the library, now in the Churchill College of Cambridge, and I would mark stuff to be photocopied,” Larry Arnn said. “Then, every couple days, Penny and I would take Churchill’s actual files and photocopy them, and we would go to lunch.”
“They had to be returned by nighttime,” Penny Arnn said. “Sir Martin only dealt with the photocopies.”
“We courted over the copy machine,” Larry Arnn said.
The Arnns agreed that Gilbert was very focused and very disciplined, but also extremely kind.
“One time he telephoned me late at night in my flat in Oxford, and he was really cross because he was out in Israel and a journalist had tracked him down at his private number and telephoned and awoken his baby. He thought that I had given the journalist his phone number and told me to never do that ever again,” Penny Arnn recalled. “Thirty minutes later he apologized because he found out where the number came from and it wasn’t me. He was nice enough to call back from Israel, which was a big deal because long distance calls were expensive. He felt bad that he balled me out for sharing a private number.”
As a devoted Jew, Sir Martin Gilbert frequented Israel often, and committed much of his life to studying Jewish history and refuting Holocaust deniers. He knew personally many Jews who were persecuted by Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union.
“Survivors of the Holocaust would seek him out because he had a lot of information that helped them track down the fate of their relatives. He was very generous with his time and patient because he understood what it meant to those people to have some closure, I suppose you’d call it,” Penny Arnn said.
Larry Arnn considers himself lucky to have traveled frequently with “the greatest tour guide ever born.” Gilbert even planned the Arnns’ honeymoon, down to where they should stay, visit, and eat every single day.
“We had adventure days,” Larry Arnn said.
One time, Gilbert visited the Arnns in California, and while traveling around the area, became fascinated with a casino in San Marino on an Indian reservation. After Gilbert left, he had the Arnns do weeks of research on American laws and treaties that allowed the Indians to have that land. He took an interest in everything around him, the Arnns said.
“On a plane he always sat on the window seat, and he would send up messages to the pilot if he was wrong in announcing what they were flying over,” Larry Arnn recalled. “He knew everything he flew over.”
In Larry Arnn’s first trip to Jerusalem, Gilbert drove him around the city until they reached Mount Scopus. Gilbert had Arnn close his eyes, and when he opened them, Gilbert explained that they were at the spot where the first Roman consul first beheld Jerusalem.
Gilbert taught at Hillsdale for five consecutive falls until 2007. In 2012, the college received his archive of Churchill’s papers to continue the work of compiling them into document volumes. President’s office employees Soren Geiger and Kyle Murnen work with George Washington fellows, student employees of the president’s office, and graduate students to read through and compile the documents.
“If we didn’t do it, nobody else probably would,” Geiger said of the college’s mission to fulfill Gilbert’s work.
Today is Gilbert’s funeral in the historic village of Beit Shemesh in Israel. Visitors will be received for Shiva in London for the next several days.
