August 2015 - Richard M. Langworth

Urinal Humor: Churchill & Attlee

23 August 2015 Comments 4 Comments

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer cited an amusing encounter between Churchill and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the Members’ urinal at the House of Commons, circa 1951. Attlee is standing over the trough as Churchill enters on the same mission. Observing Attlee, Churchill shuffles as far away as possible.

Attlee: “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?”

WSC: “That’s right. Every time you see something big you want to nationalise it.”

I labeled this an unattributed quip in the “Red Herrings” appendix to my quotations book, Churchill by Himself. I am happy to say that I was wrong, thanks to the help of columnist Christian Schneider, who also recently published the quote in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. …

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Viking’s Danube Waltz (7): The Pleasures of Prague

6 August 2015 Comments 2 Comments

June 7-9th: Prague, Czech Republic “You Must Remember This…”

concluded from part 6…

Two full days in Prague, an optional extra on the Danube Waltz Tour, costs an additional $1500 per couple, and includes three nights at the very handsome new town Hilton. Breakfasts there are the same comprehensive assortment from nuts to soup that we encountered aboard ship. The coach ride from Passau, Germany, takes four hours through the historic Sudetenland, the dispute over which ended in the fateful Munich Agreement of 1938, last stop on the road to World War II.…

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Churchill on Horses

5 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

“We need a horseman for our next president,” writes Gary Hodgson in the Fort Morgan Times, who then goes on to quote “the famous reining champion, team roper and all around cowboy…Sir Winston Churchill,” who allegedly said: “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

Unless Mr. Hodgson has found a new attribution, that charmer is not Churchill’s. It’s listed in the “Red Herrings” appendix in Churchill by Himself, page 575, with this note:

Repeatedly attributed to everyone from Woodrow Wilson’s physician to Ronald Reagan. “Clergyman Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) is one person to whom the thought was attributed in his time.…

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legacy — Presentation of Churchill’s honorary citizenship, 9 April 1963. L-R: Acting Secretary of State George Ball, Lady Ormsby Gore, British Ambassador Sir David Ormsby Gore, Winston Churchill (grandson), Naval Aide Tazewell Shepard, President Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Randolph Churchill. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.

A Fresh Look at the Churchills and Kennedys by Thomas Maier

4 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, by Thomas Maier. New York: Crown Publishers, 784 pages, $30, Kindle Edition $11.99. Written for The Churchillian, Spring 2015.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed.…

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