The fame and shame game: how Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener et al fared on the great reputation-go-round

It did not last – at least in his native country, where his reputation took a nose-dive after he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and announced that he had embraced Islam. He was 22. More turbulence followed two years later in 1966, when he refused to be drafted into the US armed forces at the time of the Vietnam War, telling the press: “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me n****r.” As a result, his boxing permit was revoked and his passport was confiscated, punishments which effectively put his sporting career on hold until October 1970.

Received opinion seems to be that Ali’s reputation only took root when he made his comeback in the 1970s, beating George Forman in the iconic Rumble in the Jungle and Joe Frazier in the equally spell-binding Thrilla in Manilla. By the time of his death he was one of the best known and most loved personalities in the world and could rightly assert that he had lived up to his self-proclaimed boast that he was “the greatest”.

Of course, there were places where his reputation had never dipped and where his decision to refuse the draft was recognised not as a drawback but as a noble protest against a war that was becoming increasingly unpopular.

In any case, Ali’s popularity had never faltered in Europe, especially in the UK and Ireland where he fought Al Lewis at Dublin’s Croke Park in 1972 in a bout in which he had the crowd eating out of his hands. Partly the awe was inspired by the sheer magnetism of the man and partly it was because Ali had Irish roots in an ancestor called Abe Grady from Ennis in County Clare. The hero-worship also inspired his many British fans, who celebrated him from the very outset even though he had already dumped their own favourite heavyweight, Henry Cooper, who was considered something of a British national treasure. As Ali’s promoter Bob Arum put it at the time: “Ali slipped into London like it fitted him.”

Arum was right: his man held court in London several times in his life and celebrities flocked to him, drawn by the flame of his presence. The Beatles courted him and Ali’s playful relationship with British television presenters such as Michael Parkinson and Harry Carpenter only added to the lustre. Later still, in the 1990s, Ali’s reputation was enhanced by his association with Nelson Mandela, the South African president, who had also undergone a strange personal transformation, in his case from a terrorist leader feared by most white South Africans to a statesman revered by the rest of the world.

In that respect, the assessment of history can depend on time, place and changing circumstances. Take a very different person, Winston Churchill, who died in 1965 and whose life was reassessed last year. In most parts of the UK he is still highly regarded as an inspired war leader, the prime minister who provided the willpower and energy to defeat Nazi Germany and to extirpate the evil of fascism. But alter the focus a little and another persona comes into view. In South Wales, Churchill’s name is still excoriated for the role he played in the Cambrian miners’ strikes of November 1910 when, as Liberal home secretary, he ordered troops to be used in quelling unrest in the Rhondda town of Tonypandy.

Contrary to rumours which emerged later, there were no mass shootings and the Conservative opposition complained that the Home Office had been too lenient. However, the fact remains that Churchill was blamed for the defeat of the miners in the following year. Generations of South Walians were brought up to believe that Churchill bore the responsibility for deploying troops against civilians and as Welsh historian David Maddox put it at the time of the centenary of the riots: “It stuck in the craw of the miners that a Liberal government would use the army to side with pit owners over the workers.”

Scotland also had a love-hate relationship with Churchill despite the fact that he was Liberal MP for Dundee between 1908 and 1922. For most of that time he was well respected if not entirely liked but his last appearance at the hustings was marred by boos and jeers from a crowd who voted him into fourth place at the election on November 15, 1922, the winner being Edwin “Neddy” Scrymgeour, an independent and the only prohibitionist ever to be elected to Parliament. After his defeat, Churchill vowed never to revisit Dundee and kept his word in the summer of 1943 when he rejected the offer of being granted the freedom of the city, which had been offered to him by the council on a tight vote of 16 to 15.

However, Churchill’s defeat had already had a curious sequel at a time when British cities were being subjected to enemy bombing. When Dundee was first targeted on August 2, 1940, the local newspaper reported somewhat derisively that the only casualties had been “a cat and a flock of swallows”. This gave rise to an optimistic local hope that the city would be spared further damage on the orders of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler because Dundee had inflicted that election defeat on Churchill in 1922. The myth was widely believed, as was another absurd rumour that Hitler’s leniency was prompted by the fact that his grandmother came from Dundee; this was fuelled by the case of Jessie Jordan, a local hairdresser with a business in Kinloch Street who had been convicted of spying for the Germans in 1938.

Churchill’s reputation in Scotland was further damaged by a widespread belief that he had sacrificed the 51st (Highland) Division during the British retreat from France in May and June 1940. There was some validity to this belief as the division was attached to the French Third Army and Churchill was keen to maintain pressure on the French to keep fighting while the bulk of the British forces withdrew through Dunkirk. As a result, the Highland Division was forced to surrender at St Valery-en-Caux and this gave rise to a belief that Scots had been forfeited unnecessarily while the rest of the British Army had been allowed to escape. And as had been the case in South Wales, Scottish miners never forgot or forgave Churchill’s involvement in Tonypandy.

As for Churchill’s wartime deputy and political rival, Clement Attlee, his reputation has also suffered fortune’s swings and roundabouts. Of all Britain’s prime ministers, he is one of the most elusive: even his autobiography, As It Happened, is remarkably unforthcoming and there is a case to be made that he conforms to Churchill’s jibe that he was a modest man with much to be modest about. However, all that was subterfuge as Attlee was a patriotic socialist who shied away from the limelight and whose government of 1945-1951 was one of the most creative in British history. Just consider its legacy: in its six years of office it created the welfare state, not least the National Health Service, introduced a programme of nationalisation, began the decolonisation of large swathes of the British empire, and committed Britain to the Atlanticism that has defined British foreign policy ever since.

On that score alone, Attlee should be one of the nation’s heroes, a politician and leader worthy of respect, yet his reputation has never hit the heights. In the words of the constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor, Attlee remains “the enigma of British 20th-century history”. No scandal was ever attached to his name and he made no egregious political errors; he was never a cult figure and to most people unaware of his achievements, he probably emerges as colourless and lacking charisma. Losing the elections in 1951 and 1955 did not add to the shining hour but he was lucky in that his two main rivals, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, hated each other more than they hated him. Only after Attlee’s death in 1967 did he come to be appreciated more than he ever was during his own lifetime.

That should provide a clue – death can cancel all debts – but while it is a comforting thought it’s not strictly accurate. Take the case of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, the centenary of whose death was commemorated last weekend and whose reputation is being reassessed as part of the commemoration of the First World War. At the outbreak of the conflict in August 1914, his appointment as secretary of state for war was met with huge excitement and enthusiasm. To the man in the street, all was well now that Britain had secured the services of its greatest soldier in its hour of need, and much of the anxiety that had gripped the nation evaporated when the headlines announced Britain’s new warlord. In their eyes Kitchener could do no wrong. His imperial progress had seen him defeat all who had dared to oppose him and his very presence – his huge frame, the luxuriant moustache, the fixity of his gaze – had become a symbol of British pluck and resolve.

With the exception of Churchill in 1940, no other British war leader has excited so much public enthusiasm and in the early part of the war Kitchener’s distinctive features adorned many of the country’s recruiting posters, including “Your Country Needs You” with its famous pointed finger and bristling moustache. Later, the prime minister’s wife Margot Asquith, who had once lionised Kitchener, remarked unkindly that he might not be a great man but at least he was a great poster. Her throwaway remark was gleefully repeated by Kitchener’s enemies and after his death in 1916, his most famous recruiting poster seemed to mock its original intentions; and when it was revived in the 1960s it was as little more than a crude advertising symbol, the motif of Carnaby Street and “Swinging London”. By then, Kitchener’s star had also fallen and the famous moustache had become a joke, a relic of Britain’s long lost past. By then, too, he was associated with the butchers and bunglers who had sent so many men to their deaths in the trenches and it was conveniently forgotten that this was the man who cut short talk of alleged German atrocities by exclaiming: “What is the good of discussing that incident? All war is an outrage!”

To others, he admitted his sense of despair about the high casualties and those close to him remembered his anguish about the loss of friends. But that was the private man and not the public soldier made prisoner to his moustache. In Kitchener’s case – and in many others – it seems that reputations can depend as much on style as on substance.

Trevor Royle is the author of The Kitchener Enigma: The Life And Death Of Lord Kitchener Of Khartoum 1850-1916, The History Press, £25