Churchill’s censorious remark about Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was not, I was pleased to learn, his last words. Once again his characteristic magnanimity prevailed. My thanks to my colleague Dave Turrell for this information.
June, 1947Sir Martin Gilbert published the arresting assertion by Churchill in 1947 (In Search of Churchill, 1995, 106). In June, WSC was invited to send a letter (I would think for a festschrift) on Baldwin’s 80th birthday, August 3rd. Writing to an intermediary, Churchill refused. “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.”…
At long last we have a meeting. Please save the date: January 15th, 2022 11am to 2:30pm at the Presidio Golf Club in San Francisco.
From Gregory B. Smith, Chairman
Churchillians by the Bay. Telephone: 707 (974) 9324. Email: [email protected]
Our speaker will be Richard Langworth, Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian who will speak on the “State of Churchill Scholarship Today.”
Please note that to attend you need to do three things:
1. Send me a check made out to Churchillians by the Bay for $50. Email or phone for address 2.…
“Rapscallions”: Excerpted from an article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just fill out SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW (at right). Your email address will remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
On cancelling WinstonMary Ellen Synon is a feisty Irish journalist who doesn’t mind taking a contrarian’s position on popular orthodoxies. Writing to oppose the latest uproar over Winston Churchill, she first explains that she’s entitled to be offended by him: “If you think Churchill was heavy on Indians, Muslims and Africans, brace yourself for what he said about the Irish.”…
I am completing an English assignment which looks at the speeches of Winston Churchill and would like to read press conferences or interviews Churchill gave during the Second World War. So far, I have been able to find only speeches. Please could you advise me whether any such interviews are in existence? —E.L.
Washington, 1941Churchill rarely gave interviews—only two that I know of as a young man, and those reluctantly. Speeches (live) were his preference. However, on his 1941 visit to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt ushered him into his first press conference.…
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors…many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.” —Edward Winslow, Mourt’s Relation: A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1621.…
“A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.”
The wisecrack, wrongly attributed to Churchill, was actually uttered by his Liberal ally, David Lloyd George. (Allegedly LG said it in 1909, during their battle to reform the House of Lords,) It didn’t make Churchill more welcome at Blenheim Palace, where his cousin the Duke of Marlborough forbade the name of LG in conversation.
The Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII) and the 2nd Duke of Westminster are occasionally attacked for their “near-treasonous activity in support of the Third Reich.”…
Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), 608 pages, illus., $35, Kindle $15.99. First published in The American Spectator, 9 November 2021.
“Who’s that man on the horse?”……I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)
Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs.…
