2015 - Page 4 of 5 - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill, Troops & Strikers (1)

26 May 2015 Comments 0 Comments

This is a time when we often question the actions of police forces. In America, governors occasionally call in the National Guard during riotous protests. Local residents are always the main victims of such events. Churchill’s experience with strikers is worthy of study, his magnanimity worthy of reflection.

Did WSC Send Troops Against Strikers?

For a century it has been part of socialist demonology that Churchill sent troops to attack strikers during a 1910 miners’ work stoppage in Tonypandy, Wales. In 1967 an Oxford undergraduate wrote that Churchill faced down strikers with tanks. This was very prescient of him, since tanks didn’t exist in 1910.…

Read More Read More

Misquotes: “At your throat or your feet”

21 May 2015 Comments 4 Comments

The Huffington Post reports that the National Memo’s Joe Conason criticized Joe Scarborough’s ambivalent attitude toward the Clintons by misquoting Churchill: “It’s what he said about the Hun, which is, ‘They’re either at your feet or at your throat.'”

“You just used a Winston Churchill quote to compare me to a Nazi because you don’t like the facts,” Scarborough replied.

“No, I didn’t compare you to a Nazi,” said Conason. “He wasn’t talking about the Nazis, he was talking about World War I. [The Huns] were not Nazis.”

Ah, all Huns are not Nazis, but in Churchill’s context, most Nazis were Huns!…

Read More Read More

Churchillnomics: The “Stricken Field”

18 May 2015 Comments 3 Comments

Young Winston Churchill’s second speech in Parliament was a bravura performance taking up his father’s theme for economy in the budget.

In Churchill in His Own Words (p 45) I date this quotation 12 May 1901 and cite Churchill’s Mr. Brodrick’s Army, his 1903 volume of speeches (facsimile edition, Sacramento: Churchilliana Company, 1977), 16:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to raise the tattered flag I found lying on a stricken field.

The “tattered flag” was Lord Randolph Churchill’s campaign for economy in the late 1880s.…

Read More Read More

Driving in Britain Then & Now

15 May 2015 Comments 0 Comments

Drive…if you dare

A friend headed for England who heard about their speed cameras asks how many he’ll encounter. Answer: a lot. Even out in the country, they’ll snap away at you.

Since 1974 I’ve logged 80,000 UK road miles, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Islands from Jura in the Hebrides to Guernsey in the Channel. For a long time it was a driver’s paradise. More recently UK driving turned from a joy to drudgery. Of course a lot has to do with the huge growth of cars on cramped roads. The modern depredations of the State are a result rather than a cause.…

Read More Read More

“Rats in a Hole”: Churchill’s Apology

12 May 2015 Comments 0 Comments

Imagine if the President of the United States declared, “We will dig out terrorists ‘like rats in a hole.” Many would applaud and think maybe they had misjudged him. Or would they?

A colleague sends an exchange in the House of Commons on 7 March 1916. “Colonel Churchill,” recently returned from the Front but still a Member of Parliament, was speaking about the naval war with Germany. British naval planners must provide, Churchill was saying,

against what will be a continually increasing element of the unknown. I must also just point out another argument which shows that, great as were the anxieties with which we were faced in the first four months of the War, they have not by any means been removed, or, indeed, sensibly diminished by the course of events.…

Read More Read More

Churchill and Professor Lindemann, Lord Cherwell

4 May 2015 Comments 2 Comments

I reviewed the 1940-45 visitors books at Chequers. I was struck by how often Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann) was there—far more than family and staff. He visited more than Bracken and Beaverbrook, or the Chiefs of Staff. What do you make of him? What’s best to read on him? —A.R., London

Most frequent visitor

After the death of the F.E. Smith, the first Lord Birkenhead, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell (1886-1957) was probably Churchill’s closest friend. His signature is also the most frequent in the visitors book at Chartwell, where it appears 86 times, more than anyone else (Brendan Bracken only 31, although visitors usually signed only when staying overnight, and Bracken frequently returned to London).…

Read More Read More

Churchill’s Average Voter

28 April 2015 Comments 1 Comment

(Or: “Churchillian Drift,” Part 1,398….)

On the eve of the British General Election, Metro UK declares: “Winston Churchill said the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

This is alas a reappearance of an ever-popular red-herring quote that Churchill never said.

Churchill had thoughtful critiques of democracy. See in particular his essay on “Mass Effects in Modern Life” in his book, Thoughts and Adventures. But he also had more respect for the average voter than this non-quote suggests. In the House of Commons on 31 October 1944 he said:

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper [we still vote that way in New Hampshire]—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.…

Read More Read More

Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary

25 April 2015 Comments 0 Comments

Anzac Day, April 25th, marks the Centenary of the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula, in the end a tragic failure, with heavy losses of British, Australian and New Zealand life. Churchill usually comes in for (and deserves) some of the blame, but rarely does everybody “get it right.” Such is a piece in Forbes: “Winston Churchill’s Terrible Leadership Failure.”

This piece gets several facts wrong and oversimplifies to the point of confusion. Churchill’s failure was over the Dardanelles naval attack of 18 March 1915; the landings on Gallipoli came in late April, after the naval attack had failed, and were not directed by him.…

Read More Read More

Churchill-Mussolini Non-Letters

12 April 2015 Comments 3 Comments

(Or: “You Haven’t Looked Hard Enough”)

“The Untold Story of Mussolini’s Fake Diaries” (Daily Beast, 12 April 2015) evaluates Mussolini’s supposed diaries, letters or documents peddled over the years, while raising some incriminating charges, or suppositions, about Winston Churchill:

Before the war, Churchill offered Il Duce a deal. After the war, British intelligence tried to destroy their correspondence…. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he tried, in a series of letters, to dissuade Mussolini from joining the Axis powers. He was ignored. Three weeks later Italy joined Nazi Germany and declared war on Great Britain.…

Read More Read More

“The Vintage Triumph” and Triumphs in My Life

30 March 2015 Comments 0 Comments

All Triumphs All the Time: Issue 150 of The Vintage Triumph magazine, 2015

Harry Barnes was to have been our first editor, but quickly decided he couldn’t do it. I was elected, producing issues 1-18 from 1974 to 1977. Looking at those productions, I’m struck that while Triumphs haven’t changed much else has in half a lifetime.

Annual dues were $10—equal to $48 today, but didn’t buy as much. Imagine a world without computers! You printed off sheets of clean, “camera-ready” type. We couldn’t afford typesetting; those who didn’t have electric typewriters put a brand new ribbon in their Remingtons and banged hard on the keys.…

Read More Read More