Category: Remembrances

Paul Courtenay
Sara and Paul Courtenay (seated) on Paul’s 80th birthday, 2014. Back row (L-R): grandchildren Celeste, Constance, and Charles; daughter Caroline; sons James and William; daughter Lucy; grandchildren Theo, Flynn, Victoire, Delilah. Front row (L-R): grandchildren Bertie, George, Alfie, Hector, Tabitha.
Paul Courtenay 1934-2020: No Better Definition of a Pro

Paul Courtenay 1934-2020: No Better Definition of a Pro

"As I observed him regarding with calm, firm and cheerful gaze the approach of Death, I felt how foolish the Stoics were to make such a fuss about an event so natural and so indispensable to mankind. But I felt also the tragedy which robs the world of all the wisdom and treasure gathered in a great man's life and experience, and hands the lamp to some impetuous and untutored stripling, or lets it fall shivered into fragments upon the ground."

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Thatcher
Barbara Langworth with Lady Thatcher, Washington, 1993.
Margaret Thatcher 1923-2013: A Churchillian Remembrance

Margaret Thatcher 1923-2013: A Churchillian Remembrance

Margaret Thatcher: Excerpted from a tribute, 2013

Every­one is famil­iar with Mar­garet Thatcher’s career. Every­one depend­ing on their pol­i­tics will have their own vision. It is left to say here what she meant to the mem­o­ry of Win­ston Churchill, the prime min­is­ter she revered above all. More than any­one who lived at 10 Down­ing Street, she had real appre­ci­a­tion for him. She read his books, quot­ed him fre­quent­ly, even host­ed a din­ner for his fam­i­ly and sur­viv­ing mem­bers of his wartime coalition.

In 1993 she was in Wash­ing­ton to coin­cide with a Churchill Con­fer­ence host­ing 500 peo­ple, includ­ing 140 stu­dents, a dozen lumi­nar­ies, and ambas­sadors from Britain and the Com­mon­wealth.…

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Redburn
“It was such a happy day.” Owermoigne, Dorset, 28 September 1995. L-R: Jaime Snell Mendoza, Ashley Redburn, Elizabeth Snell, Gert Zoller, Richard Langworth, Margaret Redburn, Garry Clark, Curt Zoller. (Photo by James Snell)
Absent Friends: Ashley Redburn 1914-1996: “England Hath Need of Thee”

Absent Friends: Ashley Redburn 1914-1996: “England Hath Need of Thee”

This trib­ute to an extra­or­di­nary Churchillian was writ­ten twen­ty-three years ago in 1997. Please par­don ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary events no longer in the news, though it would seem that some oth­er Red­burn thoughts are star­tling­ly relevant.

Ashley Redburn, Anglo-American

Cyn­ics some­times sug­gest that West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion needs a war every few gen­er­a­tions to main­tain its sense of val­ues and faith in itself. Ash­ley Red­burn was a man who believed it. “Eng­land,” he declared grim­ly, “needs to be con­quered in war and occu­pied by a venge­ful ene­my before its spir­it can be revived. Ger­many and France between them have ruined Europe for two cen­turies.…

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Humes
“The Inside Story of the Gettysburg Address”: Humes at the Nixon Library, 2011. Scroll to minute 5 at: https://bit.ly/3b117tt.
James Humes 1934-2020: Irrepressible Admirer of Old Excellence

James Humes 1934-2020: Irrepressible Admirer of Old Excellence

James Calhoun Humes … has died at 85. From his celes­tial perch, he is prob­a­bly won­der­ing about this lit­tle trib­ute. He was con­vinced, I heard, that he had giv­en “mor­tal affront” by his imper­son­ations of Sir Win­ston Churchill. Or, in my case, by pub­lish­ing a book of Churchill quotes, many of which he man­gled, some of which he made up. I guess in lat­er life, he thought we’d writ­ten him off. Not quite. = Humes was born in Penn­syl­va­nia to Samuel Hamil­ton Humes and Eleanor Kathryn Gra­ham. He was descend­ed from ear­ly set­tlers of Vir­ginia and Ten­nessee.…

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Alistair Cooke
AC and the author, Bretton Woods, 1988. A hotel guest stopped him: “Did anyone ever tell you you look just like Alistair Cooke?” AC, who didn’t like being accosted, replied frostily: “My mother—often.”
Alistair Cooke: An Introduction and an Appreciation

Alistair Cooke: An Introduction and an Appreciation

My pre­vi­ous note was about Alis­tair Cooke on Churchill in the 1930s. I here reprise my intro­duc­tion to his 1988 speech, and a per­son­al epi­logue. Sir Alistair’s remarks, at the Mount Wash­ing­ton Hotel, Bret­ton Woods, 27 August 1988, are avail­able by email. RML

Sir Alistair Cooke KBE

When, in what we must regard as a stroke of bril­liance, we thought to invite Sir Alis­tair Cooke to talk about Win­ston Churchill, we wrote him with trep­i­da­tion. We were told he had a rep­u­ta­tion for being very hard to get.

To our delight, he defied the odds.…

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Cooke
It is sobering to reflect that British deaths from the Coronavirus only recently surpassed those on the first day of the Somme battle. Above: the road to Pozières, 1 August 1916, looking toward Contalmaison, which was being shelled. Australian troops from the I Anzac Corps passed along this route to the fighting at Pozières and Mouquet Farm between July and September 1916. (Australian War Memorial, Crown copyright expired, public domain)
Alistair Cooke: Why didn’t They Listen to Churchill?

Alistair Cooke: Why didn’t They Listen to Churchill?

Alis­tair Cooke addressed this ques­tion over thir­ty years ago. I’ve quot­ed his words repeat­ed­ly over the years. A recent com­ment (reprised below), encour­aged this revi­sion from 2011. Mr. Cooke’s full speech is avail­able by email. RML

Back in the 1930s, who all denounced and crit­i­cized Churchill for his beliefs in the rad­i­cal Nazi Ger­many? Who specif­i­cal­ly mocked him? Obvi­ous­ly Churchill was right about Hitler and his plans but who in the polit­i­cal, intel­lec­tu­al, or enter­tain­ment are­nas vil­i­fied him? —A.H.

The answer to your ques­tion, I think, is “just about every­body,” from the Roy­al Fam­i­ly to ordi­nary cit­i­zens, most of the media, his own par­ty, the Labour and Lib­er­al par­ties, and cer­tain­ly most intel­lec­tu­als and enter­tain­ment personalities.…

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Alex Tremulis
Alex Tremulis (left) and Romeyn Hammond with their radio-controlled Ford La Tosca, 1955. (Ford Motor Co.)
The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 3: Streamlining and Speed

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 3: Streamlining and Speed

Con­clud­ed from Part 2. My Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

Alex Tremulis in the 1950s

When Kaiser left Wil­low Run, Alex Tremulis decid­ed it was time to work for a com­pa­ny with a future. In Dear­born, Ford Chief of Design George Walk­er hired him with an unchanged job descrip­tion: chief of advanced styling. There he joined Bob Thomas, who wrote warm­ly of him in 2008. “Alex thought he was back in the Army Air Corps, turn­ing out scores of 3/8th scale mod­els of futur­is­tic things like fly­ing cars and nuclear-pow­ered vehi­cles.…

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Alex
Alex Tremulis as Chief of Advanced Design at Kaiser-Frazer, 1951-53. (Author’s collection)
The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 2: Tucker to Kaiser-Frazer

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis, Part 2: Tucker to Kaiser-Frazer

Con­tin­ued from Part 1. My Alex Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

Alex and Tucker

Like Bob Bourke’s famous 1953 Stude­bak­er “Loewy coupe,” the 1948 Tuck­er was almost entire­ly the work of one design­er. Of course many helped, and both Bourke and Tremulis gave them cred­it. But as near as one comes to design­ing a car by one­self, they did.

Alex set to work in a stu­dio at Tucker’s large, ex-Dodge plant in Chica­go. As chief design­er he had to inject prac­ti­cal­i­ty into Pre­ston Tuck­er’s enthu­si­asm. First con­cepts includ­ed a car with cycle fend­ers that turned with the wheels, a periscope rearview scan­ner, and vast expans­es of com­pound-curved glass.…

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Tremulis
The Greatness of Alex Tremulis: A Car Designer from Another Era (1)

The Greatness of Alex Tremulis: A Car Designer from Another Era (1)

My Tremulis piece was pub­lished in full in The Auto­mo­bile, March 2020. 

“That was a dif­fer­ent time,” Alex Tremulis told me, recall­ing his hey­day in car design. “The For­ties through the Sev­en­ties. Back then a sin­gle per­son could often influ­ence the shape of a car. Some­times the whole car. Of course, lots of our ideas were sheer rub­bish. But now and then, by luck or force of per­son­al­i­ty, we put some­thing good into production.”

Many famous auto­mo­tive designs did have whim­si­cal begin­nings. Bill Boy­er put port­holes on the rear roof quar­ters of the 1956 Ford Thun­der­bird to recall “the coach­work her­itage.”…

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RML Books

Richard Langworth’s Most Popular Books & eBooks


Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality

Churchill by Himself

Churchill in His Own Words

Churchill and the Avoidable War

The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill

The Patriot’s Churchill

Triumph Cars - The Complete Story
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