Winston Churchill interviewed in 1939: “The British people would rather go down fighting”

In January 1939, as Germany and Russia rearmed, Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, spoke to the former chancellor and war secretary about the prospects of conflict and how Britain should prepare.

By Kingsley Martin

(Photo By British statesman Winston Churchill speaking to recruits to the armed forces at Mansion House, London, in 1939. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

The Second World War was still eight months away when Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, interviewed Winston Churchill about the need for rearmament and the British attitude to war. Their conversation was published in the NS of 7 January 1939.

A famous journalist once told me of an alarming interview that he had with Mr Churchill some years before the last war. Mr Churchill happened to be in full Privy Councillor’s uniform and emphasised his points with finely executed passes and slashes of his sword. Mr Churchill himself declares that this is a fairy tale; and certainly, when I went to see him the other day, he was wielding nothing more ferocious than the builder’s trowel with which he was completing an arch in the house that he has built with his own hands this summer. He was not, however, too much absorbed to discuss very fully the problem of Democracy and Efficiency.