January 2020 - Richard M. Langworth

Secondhand but Valid: “If you can speak in this country…”

31 January 2020 Comments 2 Comments

The English-Speaking Union posed a question which illustrates the problem of secondhand quotes. That is, something Churchill said which is not in his published canon. The quote is: “If you can speak in this country [Britain], you can do anything.” It was a concise celebration of the British right to free speech. The ESU has it on their website. But is it verifiable?

In 1966, the ESU Philadelphia Branch hosted an exhibit of my Churchill biographical stamp collection at the Philadelphia National Bank. It was the first public appearance of whatever limited Churchill knowledge I then had, my “awakening” as a Churchillian.…

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Paul Addison, 1943-2020: What Matters is the Truth

26 January 2020 Comments 1 Comment

29 October 1994 A fond and funny memory of Paul Addison is one which few know about. It came during a Washington symposium on “Churchill as Peacemaker,” later published as an outstanding book. During a break, we walked over to the White House, which Paul wanted to see. We stood at the iron fence, gazing at the seat of power across the lawn. . As we chatted, Paul remarked on how close we were to the building itself. “The security seems pretty light,” he said. “It’s not hard to visualize some stray lunatic standing here and spraying the walls with bullets.”…

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Not Churchill, re Germany: “We butchered the wrong pig”

23 January 2020 Comments 6 Comments

Digital scans of 80 million words by and about Churchill, including his books, articles, speeches and published papers, offer no instance of this phrase, either with the word “slaughtered” or the word “butchered.” Neither did I find any statement of his suggesting Britain had “fought the wrong enemy.” One of Churchill's virtues was to recognize the main threat to peace at each juncture in his career. From 1933 to 1945, he was certain that Nazi Germany was not the "wrong pig." He did begin to think, late in the war, that one mortal foe had given rise to another. But he always kept things in perspective.

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Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964

17 January 2020 Comments 0 Comments

Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence, 1937-1964, edited by Sir Martin Gilbert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 415 pages, Amazon $8.95. This updated review was first published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Emery Reves, from the ground up

Admirers of Sir Martin Gilbert were pleased and touched to see his chronicle appear, now over twenty years ago. But few expected it would amount to much more than a useful research tool. We were wrong, and quickly realized why Sir Martin and Wendy Reves were so keen to get it published.…

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“Darkest Hour” Myth-Making? Don’t Mess with Marcus Peters

17 January 2020 Comments 6 Comments

Cue Left: Marcus Peters, May 1940

Marcus Peters (Adé Dee Haastrup) is a neatly dressed West Indian riding the London Underground on 28 May 1940. Whom should he meet but Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman)! The scene (fiction) forms a dramatic moment in Darkest Hour, Joe Wright’s great film on Churchill in 1940.

Churchill, per the movie, has entered the Underground for the second time in his life. (The first was in the 1920s, when he couldn’t find his way out and had to be rescued.) He goes there as the Germans are rolling up Europe.…

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Urban Myths: “Alexander Fleming Twice Saved Churchill’s Life”

11 January 2020 Comments 2 Comments

Fleming as rescuer…

The Fleming myth is updated from an article originally published in 1998.

Is it true that Lord Randolph Churchill financed the education of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, as a result of Fleming (or his father) rescuing Churchill from drowning in a swamp when young Winston was a youth—and a Fleming discovery, penicillin, saved Churchill’s life years later in 1943? A friend of mine has sent me this email regarding it and I wanted to verify . —L.M.

This question comes up regularly, but both parts of the story are untrue. Neither Alexander Fleming nor his father were with Churchill at the times suggested.…

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At the Cairo Conference, 1921. Front, L-R: M. Stevenson, Gen. Walter Congreve (Commander Egyptian Expeditionary Force), Sir Herbert Samuel (Palestine High Commissioner), Winston Churchill (Colonial Secretary), Sir Percy Cox (Iraq High Commissioner). 2nd row, L-R: Gertrude Bell (advisor who favored Arab kings in Iraq and Jordan), Sir Sassoon Eskell (Iraq Finance Minister), Gen. Atkinson, Jafar Pasha al-Askari (Iraq Defense Minister), T.E. Lawrence (Middle East Dept.) Public domain, Beaugosses at the English Wikipedia.

Avaricious Imperialists or Nation Builders? The Middle East, 100 Years On

6 January 2020 Comments 2 Comments

Middle East, Made and Unmade

“A Century Ago, the Modern Middle East Was Born,” announced The New York Times in December. A colleague asks: “Are you not struck by how difficult (impossible?) it is to encapsulate history in an op-ed? Is that really how and when the modern Middle East was born?”

Good questions. The Times’s idea is that after World War I, avaricious imperialists moved in to enslave Turkey’s former slaves. This familiar theme will dominate through the centenary of the Cairo Conference in March 2021. It’s been around at least since 2001, when Osama bin Laden referred to 9/11 as payback for what he then called “eighty years of injustice.”…

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revisioon — “It was a great work, and I wish you could now add another chapter to your own career.” The ghost of John Churchill looks over our author’s shoulder. (E.H. Shepard in Punch, 2 November 1938)

How Churchill Polished and Improved His Writing by Constant Revision

1 January 2020 Comments 0 Comments

Condensed from “Constant Revision,” an article under my pen name for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text click here.

Revision and redraft

We are asked: “As I recall Churchill labeled his manuscripts something like “draft,” “almost final draft” and “final draft.” Do you recall what those categories were?”

We cannot establish that he routinely used those labels. Instead he tended to use “revise” or “revision.” Frequently his finished draft was marked “final revise.” It often took a long time before, with a sigh of relief, his private office staff reached that point.…

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British Election for Dummies: Churchillian Reflections from Afar

1 January 2020 Comments 5 Comments

…In which an ignorant Yank with a slight remembrance of history ponders the implications. (Friends in Hertfordshire write: “What an election. Let’s hope now we can move on and sort this country out and become Great Britain again.🇬🇧“) Electoral map image reproduced under the Creative Commons -Share Alike 4.0 International license. For a detailed map with results by name or constituency, see Bloomberg News. Piers Morgan on ardent anti-Brexit actor Hugh Grant: “Hugh’s sorry now. Corbyn’s celebrity fans weep into their almond milk lattes.” Note: Even Grant approved Johnson’s campaign ad, spun off of Hugh’s charming film “Love Actually.”…

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