Great web­site! I am a psy­chol­o­gist writ­ing a book man­u­script on the bio­log­i­cal basis of self-confidence. Long an admirer of Churchill, I would like to use a quote from the film The Gath­er­ing Storm to demon­strate Churchill’s tremen­dous con­fi­dence. Can you help me find Churchill’s state­ment (in the film) to Ralph Wigram, that when he was a boy, a feel­ing had come to him that one day Britain would be in great dan­ger, and it will fall to him to save Lon­don? —B.J.S.

Thanks for the kind words. Pri­vately the Churchill of early World War II was not so con­fi­dent as in his speeches pro­claimed. In May 1940 he said to his body­guard, Wal­ter Thomp­son, “I hope I’m not too late.” Later he con­fided to Roo­sevelt that the Ger­mans might well invade Britain and install a pup­pet gov­ern­ment. While assur­ing FDR that such a gov­ern­ment would not be run by him, he sug­gested they might install the British fas­cist leader Oswald Mosley “or some such person.”

As France was falling in May 1940, Churchill did not favor seek­ing an armistice with Ger­many. But Neville Chamberlain’s diary for the end of May records Churchill as say­ing that “if we could get out of this jam by giv­ing  up Malta and Gibral­tar and some African colonies, he would jump at the chance.” Of course, he may have just been throw­ing a bone to Lord Hal­i­fax, who was argu­ing for an approach to Hitler through Mussolini’s “good offices.” (The mind boggles.)

Nev­er­the­less, the bril­liant dia­logue in The Gath­er­ing Storm about fore­see­ing the future has its ori­gins in fact. It came when Churchill was 17 years old, as quoted in  Sir Mar­tin Gilbert’s In Search of Churchill, page 215:

…I can see vast changes com­ing over a now peace­ful world; great upheavals, ter­ri­ble strug­gles; wars such as one can­not imag­ine; and I tell you Lon­don will be in danger—London will be attacked and I shall be very promi­nent in the defence of Lon­don. I see fur­ther ahead than you do. I see into the future. This coun­try will be sub­jected some­how, to a tremen­dous inva­sion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in com­mand of the defences of Lon­don and I shall save Lon­don and Eng­land from disaster.…dreams of the future are blurred but the main objec­tive is clear. I repeat—London will be in dan­ger and in the high posi­tion I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Cap­i­tal and save the Empire.

Sir Mar­tin explains that he was given this quote by Churchill’s Har­row school­mate Muir­land Evans, who recalled their con­ver­sa­tion “in one of those dread­ful base­ment rooms in the Headmaster’s House, a Sun­day evening, to be exact, after chapel evensong.…We frankly dis­cussed our futures. After plac­ing me in the Diplo­matic Service…or alter­na­tively in finance, fol­low­ing my father’s career, we came to his own future….”

See also my review of The Gath­er­ing Storm on this web­site.

Tagged as: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt, Gathering Storm, In Search of Churchill, Lord Halifax, Muirland Evans, Neville Chamberlain, Oswald Mosley, Ralph Wigram, self-confidence, Sir Martin Gilbert, Walter Thompson