That’s what interested me in writing about WW2 to begin with. I read about Churchill during the Wilderness Years in the 1930’s when he was a member of the Conservative Party but a backbencher. I couldn’t believe all the intrigue that was going on in the British government at the time. You had Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain on one side. On the other you had Churchill with his own foreign policy sending spies here, there, and everywhere to report back to him so that in the 30’s he knew more about what was going on in Hitler’s Germany than the Prime Minister did. I learned that Churchill as a member of Parliament if caught couldn’t be imprisoned because of the Official Secrets Act but any of the spies working for him could be. I learned that Sir Samuel Hoare, the Foreign Secretary, had been tapping Churchill’s phone line.
What was my reaction? I thought wow! This sounds much more interesting than anything going on in America at the time. This is where all the action was. Then I found out how sympathetic Neville Chamberlain, etc was to Hitler and the Third Reich and how Britain actually had it’s own Nazi Party. Instead of being a movement confined only to Germany, it seemed to embrace all of Europe including the British Isles. Again America was the dull place to be. This is why I’ve been writing about the time period and studying it over the past several years. In fact, that’s what my husband does. He does most of the historical research. I do all the writing.
Churchill quote