Sir Martin Gilbert: the story of Churchill's biographer

Four days after the nation marked the 50th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill's funeral the death was announced of a man who could claim to have taught the world more about the great war time Prime Minister than any writer living or dead.

Sir Martin Gilbert, the Oxford historian, was to dedicate most of his working life researching, filming and writing about Churchill, after being appointed as the official biographer.

His life with Sir Winston began in 1962, three years before Churchill's death, when as a promising Oxford historian he was invited to work as a junior member of a research team, headed by Sir Winston's son, Randolph.

The year before Randolph had been asked by his father to undertake the writing of a multi-volume biography and to edit volumes of supporting documents. But Randolph was to die in 1968, having taken his father's story only up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

The hefty task of completing the work fell onto the shoulders of Sir Martin, then a young fellow of Merton College. It would take six hefty volumes to complete the Churchill's story, in what is still viewed as the most monumental British biography of the 20th century.

By Volume V it is said Gilbert had read 13,000 books and 15 tonnes of private correspondence, having spoken to literally hundreds of Churchill's friends, colleagues and contemporaries from Field Marshall Montgomery to the estate agent who negotiated the sale of Chartwell, Churchill's country home.

After hitting 9m words the biography secured its place in the Guinness Book of Records. The final volume alone, Never Despair, which appeared in 1988, was 1,348 pages long. By then the work had taken Gilbert 26 years and 25,000 pages, with a battalion of 13 companion volumes of documents also completed.

"I was told when I started that I should expect to take 10 years on the project, " he observed. "I was so confident in my own abilities that I thought 'I'll do it in eight or maybe six.'"

But when he saw the size of the archives, and weight of new material under the 30-year-rule, he realised just what it was going to take to do Churchill justice.

Sir Martin only met Churchill once, and that was in his sleep. In a dream vividly recalled, he chased after the old man to ask him if he had personally drafted a telegram sent to Admiral De Robeck in the Dardanelles. He had spent months trying to find the answer.

But through getting to know people who knew Churchill well, he ended up almost counting the former prime minister among his close friends. "As the work went on I found him an increasingly attractive figure," Sir Martin told me soon after the publication of the final volume, which took the story from 1945 to 1965. "The quality of his mind never ceased to amaze me; his humour, his kindness, his magnanimity, and generosity.

"I did feel as if I was in his presence," said Sir Martin, who described how he could easily image himself being at Churchill's side as he embarked on his wartime conferences singing his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan. "I like to think I have conveyed that to the reader, My real ambition is for the reader to also feel in his presence, to feel that you are with him, sitting at his writing desk, at the Cabinet table or going through a particular crisis."

Sir Martin, who was born in London, arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1957 after national service, In Oxford he was taught by three of the university's greatest post-war tutors the medievalist Bruce McFarlane, the constitutional historian John Storey and A.J.P. Taylor. "From McFarlane I learnt that no amount of brilliance can replace the plodding aspect of history. There is no short cut to establishing the truth," he told me. But this approach led some to suggest his books were short of analysis and original thought, amounting to "history by laundry list."

While collecting letters of people living in Germany in the Hitler years for his first book The Appeasers, he approached Lady Diana Cooper, wife of the former Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper. She wasted no time in urging Randolph Churchill to meet him. "Darling Randy," she wrote, "Do see him. He's full of zeal to set history right."

Gilbert was invited to Churchill's Suffolk home and arrived determined not to be intimidated by his host's reputation as an aggressive right wing intellectual.The two men drank wine and argued late into the night about France's role in the appeasement of Hitler. Randolph, always a man to admire steel in an opponent, asked Gilbert the next morning to join his small research team.

Mr Martin Gilbert studies documents on the 1914-1918 war in 1969. Beside him a picture of Winston Churchill after a strenuous spell in the trenches in 1916

The job opened up a new world to the young researcher. Soon he was dining with cabinet ministers like R.A. Butler and John Profumo and engaging in debate as an equal. He originally spent three days a week with Randolph Churchill, having been elected to a fellowship at Merton College in 1962.

In order to be closer to the Public Records Office at Kew, he later reluctantly sold his Harcourt Hill house, overlooking Oxford, and moved to north London.

His journeys to India, Jerusalem, South Africa and the Soviet Union led him to write embark on another massive tome, on a subject to which he would repeatedly return. He was persuaded to write a major history of the Holocaust by his close friend Rabbi Hugo Gryn, an Auschwitz survivor. "For ten years Martin immersed himself in the tragedy of the holocaust, " Gryn recalled. "Hundreds and hundreds of survivors were met and befriended."

The book reads like a diary of the Jewish nightmare . Sir Martin said: "I was fortunate in that the Nazi obsession with recording what they did was matched by a Jewish determination to record what was happening, so that the names, suffering and struggles of the victims would not be forgotten."

In another break from Churchill he produced a biography of Anatoly Shcharansky, the imprisoned Jewish "refusenik," whose cause Sir Martin would take up with a passion.

Having completed the Churchill biography his output would continue to defy belief. There would be major histories of the Twentieth Century, the First and Second World Wars, Jerusalem , Auschwitz, the emergence of Israel and numerous history atlases. He also scripted and presented television documentaries.

Sir Martin, who died aged 78, would also find himself close to power. John Major brought him into Downing Street as an adviser and speech writer and he sat in on Major's talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In 2009 he was appointed to the Sir John Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War and made a Privy Counsellor.

In 1990 he was appointed CBE and knighted in 1995, while in 1990 Oxford University conferred on him an honorary doctorate for "the totality of his work."

While there will be academics who always feel Sir Martin's claim to greatness is diminished by failure to pay sufficient attention to "the why", many more would surely agree with the late Michael Foot's assessment: "Whoever made the decision that Martin Gilbert should succeed Randolph Churchill as the official biographer of Winston Churchill deserves a vote of thanks from the nation."