August 2024 - Richard M. Langworth

Chief Great Leader: The Myth of Churchill’s Iroquois Ancestors

30 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

"Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case, the object of this enquiry is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocahontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe." —Randolph Churchill, way out in fiction, to South African Immigration officers in the days of Apartheid.

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Churchill’s V-Sign (both ways) and the Peace Symbol

26 August 2024 Comments 2 Comments

It is virtually certain that Churchill was unconscious of the meaning of the palm-in V-sign. Former secretary Elizabeth Layton Nel told me he was "astonished" when (with some embarrassment) she told him what it meant. This moment is humorously reenacted in the great film "Darkest Hour, "with Gary Oldman as WSC and Lily James as Elizabeth.

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Confessions of a Rootes Autoholic

20 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Meet the Tiger: Remember, I’d been driving an Alpine, so the rest of this car seemed more or less familiar. At the Rootes showroom on Fifth Avenue, they rolled down the plate glass and gingerly drove to the waterfront. Then I got onto the East Side Drive and put my foot down. Lightning struck! I had one thought: I’ve got to get one of these!

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Re-Rat Awards 2009 to Senators Gregg Arlen Specter

15 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” He was prescient. Re-Ratting is a lost art.

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Winston Churchill as Motorist: Always in a Hurry

11 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Habitually late, Churchill would typically “pile into the Humber around 5:30 for a 7:00 speech a hundred miles distant. As his chauffeur swings into the high road, Churchill crouches, with a flask, on the edge of the back seat and urges him to greater speeds. Once, doing 80 on a curve, a rear tyre blew and “a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles.” Realizing who it was, they helped fix the tyre. “Churchill made no sign of apology but cried, ‘Drive off!’ The constables saluted humbly.”

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Speaker Jitters: Churchill Had Them, Necessitating Strategy

5 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Unlike modern newscasters and some politicians, Churchill saw no reason to patronize foreigners by overemphasizing their pronunciation. In fact, he worked very hard to anglicize words that particularly annoyed him. Britons, he said, should stand forthrightly behind Anglicized nomenclature: "If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris 'Paree.' Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St. George’s Day." Churchill as speaker was devoid of faddish jargon. (Imagine what he would make of vernacular like “reaching out” (for “contacting”) or “issues” (“for problems”).

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