I’m currently analysing a few of Churchill’s speeces for an academic paper. After listening to the audio files and reading along I found a lot of paragraphs which were left out in the radio speeches. It’s especially evident in “Their Finest Hour” from June 18th, 1940 where only a fifth of the text made it to the radio. At one point it sounds like the audio file has been edited. Were the audio files full radio speeches or just excerpts? —N.K., Copenhagen
What you are listening to is likely a postwar recording of speeches Churchill made for HMV/Decca, which were edited and truncated in later versions. However, the June 18th speech was rebroadcast in full by Churchill that evening over the BBC.
Levenger’s book, The Making of the Finest Hour, includes a CD containing the full broadcast. But many Churchill Speech CDs, and LPs before them, contained only excerpts. Some of these were taken from the BBC broadcasts, but most were recorded by Churchill years later.
No recordings were permitted in the House of Commons at that time, leaving us with two inferior possibilities: Churchill’s broadcast speeches over the BBC, or in some cases postwar recordings, both of which—said those who heard them in the Commons—lack the fire of the originals.
See Sir Robert Rhodes James, “Leading Churchill Myths: ‘An Actor Read
His Speeches over the Wireless,’” Finest Hour 92, posted on the Churchill Centre website.
Sir Robert noted: ‘Problems then arise from the records, Harold Nicolson lamenting that it was necessary to bully Churchill into broadcasting, and, referring to a June 18th broadcast, “he just sulked and read his House of Commons speech over again.” Nicolson was Information Minister at the time. Churchill never liked broadcasting, but there is no evidence whatever that he was replaced by anyone, and speech researchers have confirmed this.’
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.
