On 4 June 1929, a photograph of Winston Churchill appeared on the back page of the Daily Herald. It showed him outside 11 Downing Street, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s residence which he had not yet vacated following the defeat of the Conservative government at a general election a few days earlier. The picture showed Churchill carrying a book with the one-word title – ‘WAR’ – clearly visible. The caption to the photograph suggested that war was ‘one of his favourite subjects’. But was the photograph genuine? Churchill angrily concluded that it was not, after a member of the public wrote to Churchill comparing the Herald’s shot with a similar one that appeared in another paper; in this version the word ‘WAR’ could not be seen. On Churchill’s instructions, Edward Marsh, his friend and private secretary, wrote to the Herald’s editor, William Mellor, in outraged terms. ‘Obviously your photographer, or someone at your office, has deliberately faked or forged a copy of the photograph which was published in the Daily Herald for the purpose of sustaining a prejudicial caption’, he claimed. Churchill cried fake news.

Churchill on Budget Day in 1929.

To understand why Churchill jumped to this conclusion, it helps to know of the bad blood that had long existed between him and the radical Herald. Ten years before, when he was Secretary of State for War and Air, it had passionately opposed his support for the ‘White’ anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War. He, in turn, had issued orders that the War Office was no longer to facilitate the circulation of the paper to British troops in France and Germany, because it contained ‘propaganda of an essentially disloyal and subversive character’. Some copies that had already reached their destination may have been destroyed. The anti-war poet and former soldier Osbert Sitwell had been moved by this to pen the following lines:

‘The DAILY HERALD
Is unkind.
It has been horrid
About my nice new war.
I shall burn the DAILY HERALD.’

Now, perhaps embittered by the Labour Party’s success at the polls and his own loss of office, Churchill was seen by his enemies to be lashing out once more. The Herald, for its part, was absolutely sure of its ground, to the point of appealing as a referee to the organ that was its ideological polar opposite. This was the Morning Post, sometime defender of General Reginald Dyer (the ‘Butcher of Amritsar’), and former employer of Churchill himself as a young correspondent three decades earlier. The Morning Post’s experts examined the materials submitted to them and were ‘unanimously agreed that they can find nothing in the negative to suggest that it is not perfectly genuine.’ The contact print from the negative and the enlargement from which the reproduction in the paper was made were also genuine and bore no trace of having been touched. Whereas in the printed version the word ‘WAR’ had been made blacker and more distinct, this was ‘merely an emphasis of definition such as is employed in every process room to make clear some point of special interest in a picture.’

Ludwig Renn in 1954

The book, it turned out, was a recently published anti-war novel by Ludwig Renn. Clearly, Churchill had casually picked a copy up, carried it with him in the street, and then forgotten having done so. Other papers’ photographers had taken their pictures from slightly different angles, and although the lettering was not quite as legible as in the Herald, the title, on close inspection, was visible enough. Checkmate, it seemed. But Churchill declined to say sorry for his wrongful allegation, instead offering bland thanks to the Herald for its ‘assurance’ that the photograph had not been tampered with. Mellor demanded a complete and categorical withdrawal and apology, but Churchill took the view that the Herald’s ‘abusive campaign’ against him absolved him ‘from the need of making any further amends’. It was the Herald, though, that had the last word, with its cartoonist’s suggestion of the book Churchill should read next: The Manners of Gentlemen.

At one level, the Morning Post was right to describe this episode as a storm in a teacup. There were no lasting consequences and the story appears to have been forgotten down to the present day. Yet Churchill’s cry of ‘fake or forgery’, and his refusal to back down when proven wrong, are in many ways instructive. Today, in the era of Trump, authoritarian populism, and social media, cries of ‘Fake news!’ are ubiquitous. In fairness, just as Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill was no Donald Trump. He may have refused to apologise to the Daily Herald, but he did not actually continue to assert, in the face of the evidence, that he had been right all along. Churchill’s legendary capacity for magnanimity was generally not much in evidence when it came to the press, but during the 1930s, he and the (now politically tamer) Herald even found some common ground over the threat posed by German rearmament.

It could well be argued too that Churchill’s contribution to the defeat of Hitler was a great gift to the cause of press freedom; by comparison with which, his recurrent outbursts of anti-press venom pale into insignificance. Yet, however we judge his personal record, there is one thing about the Herald episode that deserves celebration. In the face of an unjustified allegation, the Morning Post offered an unbiased assessment of the evidence rather than simply attacking its left-wing rival. Today, in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide, that type of journalistic solidarity may be needed more than ever if a free press is to survive. Churchill cried Fake News.

Richard Toye is an author and academic at the University of Exeter and has written a number of books on Churchill. His latest is Winston Churchill: A Life in the News.

Churchill cried Fake News