I've been thinking about the memorial service that I attended recently for my late friend and mentor, Sir Martin Gilbert; Winston Churchill's official biographer and so much more. I am, I confess, not a great one for memorial services. To begin with, they're sad, no matter how we try to spin them. Attending one for a total stranger seems to me morbidly importunate. As for acquaintances, I always come away wishing that we simply could have said whatever we all had to say to them while they were alive.
Still, I was drawn to Martin's service, held Tuesday evening, the 24th of November, in London. It was worth a hasty journey across the ocean on the cusp of Thanksgiving to just sit for an hour or so in the proximity of his memory.
Six hundred packed Western Marble Arch Synagogue on Great Cumberland Place; friends, family and unaffiliated admirers of Martin, the man, and Martin, the historian. The range of attendees proved as wide as the boundless focus of Sir Martin Gilbert's writing, including Holocaust survivors, former "Refuseniks," ambassadors, one former British Prime Minister and, of course, many members of the Churchill family.
The capacious, golden-hued synagogue sanctuary conveyed an enveloping current of shared tenderness. I really felt that every person present harbored their own individual sense of having known Martin Gilbert, even if only through his writing.
We were welcomed by Sir Martin's widow, Lady Esther Gilbert. Though I have known Esther for some time, I truly got to know her during the excruciating years of Martin's final illness. Her tenacious devotion to him in this protracted period of such debilitating need reaffirmed for me what I confess has become a waning faith these days in the existence of love as a selfless power.
The former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown followed Esther to the pulpit. I had long known of Brown's friendship with Martin. (I wrote here about one particular back-channel interchange between them some years back, just after Brown became Prime Minister and Barack Obama President). In office from 2007-2010, the Rt. Hon. Mr. Brown did not exactly wow as P.M. but his words about Martin this night were passionately felt and stirringly personal. "Martin," Brown said, "sailed the river of life brilliantly... Our hearts will still ache at his loss but he leaves behind imperishable works that will never be lost, and he lives on in the impact he has on all of us, on the millions whom he never met but who meet him in the pages that he wrote."
Brown revealed that plans were in place at the time of Martin's death to elevate Sir Martin to the House of Lords. He also disclosed the fact that Martin's intended next book, before the onset of his illness, was to be a chronicle of Brown and the Labour Party's period in government. "What he would've made of us all," grinned the former P.M., to gales of laughter, "I guess we'll never know."
Brown also shared a marvelous story about his own first appearance as British Prime Minister before the Israeli Knesset in 2008. Martin wrote his speech. Brown chose a Martin Gilbert book as the gift he would present to then-Israeli premier Ehud Olmert. "It's a reflection of Martin's pre-eminence," Brown went on to observe, "and our shared admiration of him that without either of us knowing it, I had chosen to give Olmert a copy of Martin's The Righteous, and Olmert had chosen to give me a copy of Martin's The Story of Israel."
Many other distinguished speakers spoke in the Prime Minister's wake: Sir Richard Evans, the eminent historian and Martin's former pupil; Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth; Rabbi Nicky Liss, of Martin's Highgate United Synagogue; and Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's Great-Grandson. Each said fine things inimitably. I nevertheless came away still thinking about Gordon Brown. Here was a man who had been Prime Minister of Great Britain but who had never impressed himself upon the world in any Churchillian way. I knew I would now never forget him simply because of how he had expressed his love for his friend. In death, Martin had humanized Gordon Brown and, in so doing, had elevated him -- as he did so many, many historical figures, large and small, purely by pursuing their truth and setting it down forever.