Darkest Hour: How historically accurate is it? Churchill’s grandson SPEAKS (EXCLUSIVE)
GARY OLDMAN’S Darkest Hour is released today and Sir Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, has revealed how historically accurate the film is.
Historical dramas are often a mixture of real events and conjured moments for artistic purposes, but where does Darkest Hour fall on the scale?
Express.co.uk had the opportunity to ask a man who knew Churchill personally: one of his grandsons, Sir Nicholas.
Speaking from his office next to the House of Commons where he’s been an MP since 1983, the 69-year-old felt the film was mainly correct and praised some scenes created for drama.
He said: “It’s pretty accurate [when compared to that] remarkable book by George Lukas called Five Days in London, which is about the making of the government of 1940.”
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Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) was and is a British icon. After a long career in journalism and politics he became Britain's talismanic war leader in 1940, where his stirring rhetoric and leadership would help the nation to overcome the Nazis. Defeated at the 1945 election, he returned to office in 1951. In 2002 he was named The Greatest Briton of all time by the public in a nation-wide survey
Sir Nicholas continued: “Obviously it takes artistic license, because it’s a film, but it is true that you had Dunkirk, you had this extraordinary row within the War Cabinet between Lord Halifax, Chamberlain and my grandfather – about whether or not they should make one last ditch attempt against Mussolini and therefore Hitler.”
“It does take great flights of fancy, like going onto the Underground and going missing and all that. But that is done to make a point.
The scene in question sees Churchill board a train to ask regular working people how they felt about the war, what action the government should take and if they were afraid.
He added: “The thing about courage, is that the people who are really brave are people who are afraid and overcome it. That is real courage.”
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While Neville Chamberlain is often caricatured as weak and incompetent, Sir Nicholas felt the film gave a fairer, more historic look at Churchill’s predecessor.
“Even Chamberlain is portrayed in not an unsympathetic way, in that he was trying to do the right thing. He couldn’t bare the thought of another war and all that death and destruction.”
“And yet there was a Prime Minister who appeared, who could do it, who could talk to people.”
Darkest Hour is released in UK cinemas today.
