“Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations….’ Or: ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect.’ Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conversational.” —Winston S. Churchill “to my colleagues and their staffs,” 9 August 1940.

Canceling Clichés

Commentator Bill O’Reilly proposes a new Cancel Culture for a collection of jargon that Churchill would define as “grimaces.” A cliché, he says, is “a phrase or opinion that is overused and lacks original thought.” Good on Bill, and we applaud his nominations for grimaces we never need to hear again. He forgot “issues,” but it’s not a bad list….

“Circle back”: A banal term often used in presidential briefings

“Here’s the deal”: President Biden’s favorite.

“Deep Dive” (used interchangeably with “From 30,000 feet”): Supposed to refer to your detailed opinion (from the worm’s eye, or from on high). Often encountered in the media—always painful.

“Perfect Storm”: Description of the 2024 U.S. election.

“At the end of the day”: O’Reilly: “What day? Thursday? Stop it! Athletes in particular.”

“It is what it is.” Dreadful.

“Give a listen.” Used in absence of an intro. Beloved by Brett Baier on Fox. [I added that one.]

“I’ll be honest”: This implies that most of the time you’re not honest.

“Sorry, not sorry”:  O’Reilly: “Sorry, you are a moron.”

“Game changer”: All-purpose slough off.

“We’ll see”: When you don’t know what you’ll see.

“The new normal”: Means you don’t know what is normal.

“Slam dunk”: “The most over-used phrase in the language.”

“By the way”: “What way? Where? Stop!”

Why has this jargon so permeated the media? One of the culprits, O’Reilly suggests, “is the collapsing public education system. In New York City, taxpayers spend $31,000 per student per year and many students cannot speak proper English.”

 Some issues over “issues”

O’Reilly is targeting brief phrases or single words. Somewhat longer “wooly phrases” have also been creeping into our language—for a long time. For decades now, we have substituted politically correct fad-phrases for long-understood words in everyday language.

My pet favorite is the word “issues,” as substituted for “problems” or “difficulties.” The idea is that we must not be judgmental (another popular favorite) about our troubles, because our troubles may be right. After all, a mugger with a knife is only expressing his issues.

No. Issues are subjects on which there are different points of view. Most of the time, when we say we have “issues,” we mean to say we have ”problems.” But we want to be nice.

This word-substitution is subconsciously catching, because we all want to use hip forms of speech. If editors don’t watch out, even we fall for it. I recently had to stop myself from saying that I had “issues” with certain fanatics who are trying to kill us. What I had, of course, are “problems,” if not “violent objections.”

“Reaching out”

Then there is “reaching out.” One doesn’t contact someone any more. One “reaches out.” The theology behind that is that “contact” suggests you are “demanding” something. Like the courtesy of a reply, which might be “offensive.” By “reaching out,” you become a supplicant, making a tentative plea that will not offend anyone. Your contact doesn’t really have to answer. (And have you noticed? Quite a few of them don’t.)

One might expect anyone familiar with the life of Winston Churchill to tilt toward traditional language, and one would be right. I don’t care what you think about the wars in Ukraine or Syria or Gaza, economic policy, immigration, religion, global warming, or the leaders of countries. All those are legitimate, er, issues, over which reasonable people may disagree.

Real issues

Issues (in the legitimate meaning of the word) came up at a scholarly panel over the “percentages” agreement. That was the “spheres of influence” agreement in eastern Europe, between Churchill and Stalin at the “Tolstoy” conference in October 1944. That, it was said at the time, proved that Churchill and Britain were no different than Stalin and Russia. Both sides had identical objectives, i.e., their own national interests. But British interests in Greece involved things like the ouzo concession for Harrods, or maybe Greek support for British Mediterranean policy. Soviet interest in Romania were everything Romania had or could produce.

There are those who would have us believe that the Western democracies are no better than Nazis, Soviets, or Islamofascists. We hear the line quite often nowadays. A High Personage will suggest that the displacement of Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was morally equivalent to the Holocaust.

Right, that’s an issue. Why then are there no “issues” over other forced migrations since 1945? Such as sixteen million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in India; 800,000 Jews from Arabia; Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars “relocated” by Stalin; Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin islanders; or Italians in Istria? What about three million ethnic Germans in Silesia and the Sudetenland? Or, more recently, the Greeks of Turkey and Cyprus and the Vietnamese boat people?

“Many of these refugees built new lives and a higher standard of living than in the lands they left,” wrote Andrew Roberts. “None are today actively demanding the right to murder people who have now lived in their former lands for over seven decades.” Sorry. I digress.

A shade of difference

Celebrate Mr. O’Reilly’s modest proposal: Avoid fashionable filters and fad-words in language. “Short words are best,” Churchill said, “and the old words, when short, are best of all.” His thoughts and deeds, however antique they may sound today, still represent concepts we can understand. No issues there.

Related reading

“Churchill on Jargon: The Language as We Mangle It,” 2019.

“Churchill on Jargon: “Let Us Have an End to This Grimace,” 2024.

“Athens, 1944: Some Lighter Moments in a Serious Situation,” 2020.

“Churchill, Orwell and 1984.” 2022.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

I‘m working on an article and need to know: (1) Into how many languages were Churchill’s Second World War memoirs translated? (2) Into how many languages was his 1959 abridged one-volume edition translated? —G.A., Bilbao, Spain

(Updated from 2012.) According to Ronald I. Cohen’s Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Continuum, 2006, 3 vols., I: 729-30), The Second World War was translated into nineteen languages: Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Not all of these comprised the complete six volumes. The Turkish edition contained only the first two volumes. Wendy Reves, wife of Churchill’s literary agent, Emery Reves, told me that the publishers refused to pay for the rest! The first Russian edition (1956-58) contained only the first three volumes, though Ronald Cohen also lists a later, complete Russian edition published in 1997-98.

On the one-volume abridged edition (1959), Mr. Cohen lists eight translations: Arabic, Catalan, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Slovene.

Official histories

Does Great Britain have an official History of the Second World War, like the American “Green Books”? Where might I find them?  —L.L., Raleigh, N.C.

Yes: several specialized multi-volume series, under the umbrella title History of the Second World War, were published by HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Since 2006, HMSO has been part of the Office of Public Sector Information within the British National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office.

There are five sub-series, for example, Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (five volumes, 1970). Other series were Military, Civil, Intelligence and Medical. HMSO also published individual collections of papers and documents.

The scope is colossal. For example, the Military Series alone comprises thirty-two volumes. There are nine groupings: Grand Strategy, The War at Sea, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, Home Defence, Victory in the West, The War Against Japan, Mediterranean and Middle East, and Civil Affairs & Military Government. Some of these also appeared as abridged one-volume editions.

There are disclaimers in the volumes stating that the opinions are those of the authors. Their quality varied, and some were controversial. Captain Stephen Roskill, who wrote all three volumes of The War at Sea, was one of Churchill’s strongest critics. Books were subsequently published by pro-Churchill naval authorities which disputed Roskill’s conclusions.

You can search for individual titles on Bookfinder, but major libraries should have them; they may also have been digitalized.

Related reading

“Winston Churchill’s World War Accounts: History or Memoirs?,” 2023

”Churchill and the Avoidable War: Book Outline,” 2017.

“Hillsdale College Acquires Cohen Churchill Recordings Collection,” 2018.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 20223.

“Grand Alliance: A Way Out of the Second World War?” 2021.

You want to stress content symbiosis, innovative, provocative and objective thinking, assessment of operational responsibilities, specific parameters targeted at a demographically mixed audience with varying tastes, discernment and intellectual approaches, ensuring that each medium reaches targeted audiences, making it more cross-generationally enticing, using more immediate and responsible electronic media.[1]

Was that jargon? We report, you decide. Such an astonishing number of words, all in one sentence, is liable to confuse somebody whose livelihood depends on communication, not obfuscation.

Jargon versus clarity

I did wonder at the time how Churchill, that peerless practitioner of English, would react to this kind of language. “Short words are best,” he said, “and the old words, when short, are best of all.”[2] Well now….

We can imagine what he would think about substituting fashionable jargon like “challenges” for handicaps or “issues” for difficulties. (“I have issues with my hotel bill,” a guest in front of me said. No, she had problems!)

What would Churchill make of that stand-by cliché “reaching out”? It is intentionally vague—meant to convey niceness. Would he wonder if it means a physical gesture? Or does it mean conversing, telephoning, writing, telegramming, faxing, emailing or tweeting? Instead of “reaching out,” what’s wrong with communicating?

Churchill would snort at catch-all jargon like “the rich” (for anyone earning a comfortable living), or tergiversations like “man-caused disaster” instead of “terrorism.” But even in his day he had his hands full. In 1950 he said:

I hope you have all mastered the official socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word “poor”; they are described as the “lower income group.” When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of “arresting increases in personal income”….

[Homes] are in future to be called “accommodation units.” I don’t know how we are to sing our old song “Home Sweet Home”…. “Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, there’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.”[3]

“Let us have an end of such phrases…”

Churchill learned English from a Harrow master, Robert Somervell, who instilled in him a love of clarity and a hatred of discombobulation. To his colleagues in 1940 he said:

Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect….” Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conversational.[4]

Years later he was still banging away: “In this debate we have had the usual jargon about ‘the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.’”[5]

Alas, woolly jargon has a long shelf-life, and “infra-” and “supra-” are with us yet.

Protesting the Ministry of Defence’s “barren, dismal, flatulent, platitudinous” 1947 White Paper, Churchill said:

It was one of those rigmaroles and grimaces produced by the modern bureaucracy into whose hands we have fallen—a kind of vague palimpsest of jargon and officialese with no breadth, no theme, and, above all, no facts.[6]

“Spit all this rubbish from their lips”

In 1942, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov wrote a turgid memo about the Royal Navy, saying, that Russia “will be in a position to draw the necessary conclusions as to the real state of affairs, particularly in regard to certain irregularities in the actions of the respective British naval authorities.”

Churchill reacted to that remark with one of his favorite pejoratives: “This grimace is a good example of how official jargon can be used to destroy any kind of human contact, or even thought itself.”[7]

In Cardiff in 1950, Churchill added: “I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.”

Aye, and the other democracies with it. Any year now. There is still time, brother.

Endnotes

[1] It led to a long process ending with a resignation, which is something you need to do at least once in your life. I have never regretted resigning or being sacked.

[2] Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The Times Literary Award luncheon, London, 2 November 1949, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VII: 7885.

[3] WSC, Cardiff, Wales, 8 February 1950, In the Balance: Speeches 1949 & 1950 (London: Cassell, 1951), 181.

[4] Sir Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15 Never Surrender, May 1940-December 1940 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 636.

[5] WSC, House of Commons, 27 June 1950, In the Balance, 291.

[6] WSC, House of Commons, 31 March 1947, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 & 1948 (London: Cassell, 1950), 53.

[7] WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), 516.

Related reading

“Speaker Jitters: Churchill Had Them, Necessitating Strategy,” 2024.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Collected Essays, Invaluably Compiled by Michael Wolff,” 2023.

“The Most Important Thing About Education: Churchill at Bristol,” 2023.

“Scaffolding Rhetoric: Churchill in Congress, 1941,” 2022.

The following article, from 2009 and updated in 2023, is republished only to alert readers that six originals of the notorious facsimile thank-you notes have now surfaced! For the details, scroll to “Addendum: the originals” below.

Don’t fall for them…

…those multiple Churchill thank-you letters, each of which is a carefully made facsimile. “The ultimate thrift shop haul,” headlined the Daily Mail. “Budget shopper is left STUNNED after buying a ‘priceless’ handwritten letter signed by Winston Churchill for just $1—after finding it buried in a New York store.”

I kept waiting for the shoe to drop on this story—but the Mail apparently believe it’s true. The letter is a facsimile, one of thousands, worth perhaps $50 if nicely framed. Apparently some are still being taken in. (Updated from 2019.)

“Signed Holograph Letter…

…by the British Prime Minister, on debossed House of Commons Notepaper, thanking a well-wisher for a kind message on his birthday, 1947. Folded once, slightly yellowed from age, otherwise a fine copy. $1200.”

This was an actual offer on the Internet, but the honest seller, alerted by an observer, conscientiously withdrew the item.

More than one collector has been taken in by these remarkable facsimile holograph notes, produced by Churchill’s Private Office from 1945 through at least 1959—some of them so convincing that casual observers swear they are originals.

Facsimile Reproductions

From 1945, at least nine variations of replica holograph notes were reproduced in quantity to thank well-wishers, whose congratulations poured in on Churchill’s birthday and other occasions. They are very well produced and appear original. They were made by a “spirit duplicator,” commonly known as a Roneo machine—similar to, but producing better quality than, a mimeograph. Early examples actually use Churchill’s blue-black ink, though they are not color separations, as I previously suspected. In any case, they are not originals and were not signed by Churchill personally.

The key to identifying a facsimile is its lack of a salutation (“My dear X”). Secretaries would simply place them in envelopes and post them by the hundreds to anyone who sent Churchill a token of respect. The value of these facsimiles on the market is incidental. A true autograph letter by Churchill is, of course, worth much more.

Origins

The first-known facsimile, dated 1945, acknowledged congratulations following V-E Day and sympathies after Churchill’s party’s defeat in the 1945 General Election. In November that year, Churchill’s birthday was the signal for well-wishers to send cards, letters and gifts. But this was not the end, or even the beginning of the end.

From the time Churchill was thrown out of office in 1945 almost until the end of his days, letters, cards and gifts flowed in. They attested to the esteem people all over the world held for him. So from time to time, his Private Office made him sit down with his big fountain pen and ink a note—sans salutation, sometimes dated, sometimes not. The original was reproduced on the Renograph and then destroyed. Run off by the thousands, they were popped into the post. Write to Sir Winston, and chances were good you would get a “handwritten” reply!

Recollection

A former bodyguard, Ronald Golding, told me: “The deluge would start in November and continue through New Year’s. It came in great sacks, delivered daily.” The boss sat down again and drafted a note for his 76th birthday in 1950. After he became Prime Minister again, the birthday greetings reached a crescendo. By then the Private Office decided not to date the thank-you note so that it could be used again the following year. The print on this and later notes is plain black ink.

For his 80th birthday in 1954, Sir Winston received many official gifts on behalf of Parliament and the Nation. This required a new facsimile note. It used light airmail paper, since many congratulations came from abroad.

After Churchill retired in 1955, the Private Office adopted Chartwell notepaper. Sir Winston’s signature was shakier by now, and 1959 may be the last time he penned one for reproduction. Sometimes the notes accompanied unsigned books.

High quality

The spirit duplicator produced convincing facsimiles, especially in the early days. The intensity of the dark blue ink varied with nib pressure, as it does normally. Churchill’s signature usually bears his characteristic flourish, and looks genuine. Of course it was—in the original prototype.

In the beginning, secretaries would often type the name and sometimes the address of the recipient at the bottom of each facsimile note. But soon the workload prevented this modest personalization. Through 1950, most notes bore an embossed House of Commons seal. When Churchill returned to office in 1951 they adopted a printed 10 Downing Street letterhead. After he retired, the heading was Chartwell, Westerham, Kent. After his hand became shaky,  his private office reprinted previous notes, deleting the dates.

Values

A note to an individual, with salutation, entirely in Churchill’s own hand, is worth four figures or more, depending on the recipient. To someone like Lloyd George or Neville Chamberlain, the value would be very high; one to Franklin Roosevelt, assuming any escaped the archives, would be priceless.

But the printed facsimile notes should not command more than $50 or so on todays market. They are nice little items, fun to frame, but by no means rare.

Addendum: the originals!

I often wondered what happened to the originals penned by Churchill, long thinking they were destroyed. Not quite! We now know that at least six survive.

In September 2024 I heard from the owners of six original holograph notes Churchill wrote for reproduction. They were passed down to the granddaughter of Frank Rimell, manager of W. Straker Ltd, a printers and stationers, Ludgate Hill, London.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Strakers reproduced Churchill’s thank-you notes. At leasat six originals still exist, on embosssed House of Commons notepaper. Written between 1946 and 1950, and willed to Mr. Rimell’s heirs, they reside in the original document wallet where Frank Rimell carefully preserved them. Any reader with interest may contact me, and I will forward your message to the present owners.

A note by Sir Martin Gilbert

In 1972 I was invited to tea with Prime Minister Edward Heath in the garden of 10 Downing Street. It was the first and only time I sat in that garden.

The Prime Minister was accompanied by his Political Secretary. At one point Heath asked me how Churchill prepared his speeches, how did his speechwriters work? I interrupted keenly to say that Churchill did not use speechwriters, but dictated all his own speeches, even on occasion writing them out in longhand.

As I spoke, I noticed the young man go somewhat red, and Heath look a little put out. I realized at once that I was in the presence not only of a prime minister but of a speechwriter. Twenty years later the young man, Douglas Hurd, was Foreign Secretary. 

The Churchill method

If not Sir Edward Heath, most of his admirers know Sir Winston did not use speechwriters. We are sometimes asked: Did he speak from a written text? Was he afraid of speaking extempore?

One article declared that “even after giving hundreds of public speeches, WSC still admitted to “butterflies in the stomach” just before he was about to speak.

Soon the young Winston learned not to make a speech without a text handy. Early on, he would commit each oration to memory. But in April 1904, he lost his place in mid-speech and sat down embarrassed. To encourage him, he was cheered from both sides of the aisle.

Today’s politics are less collegial. Live television broadcasts, while shedding welcome light on the workings of government, encourage playing to the camera. A floundering speaker is not treated so courteously.

“When I ‘Dried Up’”

Churchill wrote of this disconcerting experience in a 1934 essay, “When I ‘Dried Up.’” He recalled with pleasure how colleagues offered him “the greatest patience and kindness.” Unfortunately, the essay was never reprinted—not even in the marvelous Collected Essays. A transcript is available electronically to any reader who cares to email thechurchillproject@hillsdale.edu.

After that experience, “disconcerting to the last degree,” Churchill was never a speaker without a text—typed out and triple spaced in “Speech Form,” as secretaries called it, the individual lines broken out and indented as he planned to recite them, like verses in a psalm.

“An hour of prep per minute of delivery”

Each speech was a product of great pains. The late Lord Soames, his Parliamentary Private Secretary in the early 1950s, explained how much trouble Churchill took:

It worked out to be an hour of preparation per minute of delivery, and it was nothing for him but hard work. Then came the skill of pretending, of looking as if it was coming off the top of his head.

He knew how to read without looking as if he wasn’t. In those days there wasn’t this lovely machine that we’ve all got now, which allows you to read your speech while looking around the hall. He had to look as if he was not reading—and sound as if he wasn’t.

Churchill was an excellent speaker because he loved the classics, which informed his composition. His vast sub-text was compiled through extensive reading, led by Shakespeare and the Bible. His capacious memory enabled him to fish up exactly the right quotation to bedizen his points. But it was all carefully rehearsed.

He was not a good ad libber, but often stowed away a good line for the right moment. One evening, after he had fired off a potent retort to some parliamentary critic, Lord Mountbatten asked him how he managed to come up with such devastating ripostes. “Patience, Dickie,” the great man smiled. “I’ve been waiting years to get that one off.”

Speaker jitters

By contrast, Sir Martin Gilbert needed no written text. He would often arrive with a sheaf of foolscap, each sheet bearing a scrawled line or two. Glancing at one, he would lay it aside, ad-lib flawlessly for ten minutes, take up another sheet and repeat the process. But Sir Martin was nervous before a speech. So was Churchill, according to Lord Soames:

Soon after Winston returned from the Boer War he went up to Liverpool, very much in the thick of things. An aspiring politician, he went to address an enormous gathering. He stayed with the Lord Derby of the day, Eddie Derby, and they rode in a carriage together the few miles into Liverpool.

Now Winston was very quiet, as nearly everyone is when they are brooding and have a speech awaiting. Lord Derby, who was nearly three times Winston’s age, turned to him and said, “Are you nervous, Winston?”

“Am I? Hell, I’m nervous as anything, I sure am,” Winston replied.

“Let me give you a tip,” said Lord Derby. “When I get up to make a speech, I look around the hall and I say to myself: ‘I’ve never in my life seen, gathered together in one room, so many bloody awful looking people!’ And then I go right off!”

If Winston Churchill ever told himself that about an audience before a speech, it was never evident.

Foreign pronunciation

Foreign languages were something with which Churchill notoriously struggled. Whether because he couldn’t get his tongue around them, or because he disdained proper pronunciation, he hardly ever tried to get them right.

Unlike modern newscasters and some politicians, he saw no reason to patronize foreigners by overemphasizing their pronunciation. In fact, he worked very hard to anglicize words that particularly annoyed him.

He frowned on name changes, like “Iran” for Persia or “Ankara” for Angora. In 1939 the Royal Navy cornered the German battleship Graf Spee off the Uruguayan capital—whose name Churchill studiously pronounced as “Monty-viddy-oh.” One wonders how he’d react to “Latine,” which Axios tells us is now the preferred gender-neutral way to refer to Latinos.

“Bad luck,” WSC declared in 1945, “always pursues people who change the name of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past.” 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”).

He looked diffidently upon the newspapers, although he wrote for many. Towards individual journalists he was magnanimous. “Do not be afraid to criticise, young man,” he once told an overawed editor, “I am a professional journalist.”⁶

Further reading

“Scaffolding Rhetoric: Churchill in Congress, 1941,” 2022.

“The Problem with Recorded Churchill Speeches,” 2022.

“Churchill’s Prep for the Iron Curtain Speech,” 2019.

“Churchill at Harvard in 1943,” 2023.

Q: Is it real?

I have a first American edition of Churchill’s Boer war book, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (New York: Longmans Green, 1900, later part of the combined volume The Boer War). On the inside cover is a label with a signature of Winston Churchill.Do you think that it is an original or a signatures label printed in quantities?

The first line reads, “duly Inscribed” and the signature looks like his (suitably aged ink), but I have never encountered “duly Inscribed” on another book signed by Churchill. However, since this is a card obviously pasted in, I suppose it’s possible. —L.C., Quebec, Canada

A: Likely, yes

The pen used had a broader nib than the ones Churchill favored. Of course it might have belonged to someone who handed it to him to inscribe. I believe it’s Churchill’s handwriting, but from a much later date. In 1900 his signature was less expansive than it became in later years, and this looks more like post-1930.

What catches the eye is the “duly Inscribed,” a notation I’ve never before encountered among signatures in his books. However, it seems innocent enough. Told it was for a book, he might have felt it appropriate to “duly inscribe” the label for the owner.

From your photo it looks suitably aged and seems to have been there a long time. Inscribed books or photographs with the signatures pasted in or added to the matte are sometimes encountered. They are not, of course, as valuable as books the author personally inscribed, particularly when he named the recipient.

I doubt this is something that was printed in quantities, like the well-known printed holograph thank-you notes. I cannot tell for certain from a photo that it’s written in ink, although it seems to be.

Q: Printed signatures

I recently acquired a copy of Painting as a Pastime, reprinted 1965.  Across  from the title page is the memorable photo of Mr. Churchill at an easel.   Under this photo is his signature.  The signature seems authentic, but I am not an expert and am unsure.  For this edition, is there a  signature printed under the photo?  —W.R., Seattle

A: A typical example

Yes; it’s a printed signature, present in every copy of the book. When Churchill actually signed copies, it would usually be on the first free endpaper, or occasionally on the title page.

Painting as a Pastime, Churchill’s charming essay on his chief hobby. (He had other hobbies—he was also big on books and bricks.) The essay was first published in The Strand magazine in 1921. Reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures, it was first published as a volume in its own right in 1948. It has nothing whatever to do with war or politics, and everything to do with having fun. Numerous reprints make it readily available.

For lovers of his paintings, the complete catalogue is  Sir Winston Churchill’s Life through His Paintings and Churchill: The Artist and His Paintings (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003). This documents all 550+ paintings, traces their whereabouts, and pictures most of them in full color. I also recommend Paul Rafferty’s masterful Churchill Painting on the French Riviera (London: Unicorn Publishing, 2020). See link below.

Related articles

“Don’t Fall for Them! Facsimile Churchill Holograph Signatures,” 2023.

“A ‘Paintacious’ Masterpiece: Paul Rafferty on Churchill’s Riviera Art,” 2021.

“Painting à Deux: Churchill’s and Alexander’s Portraits of Lake Como,” by Paul Rafferty, 2020.

“Provide for Your Library,” 2010.

(Updated from 2015.) This historical niche site is exercised over misquotes and tall tales about Winston Churchill that bedizen the Internet—by everybody from sports figures to authors and politicians (see “Churchillian Drift”). They cover everything and everybody from his ancestor Marlborough on up. (See also “Fake Quotes” herein.)

They range from ““Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” (Fred Tilton said that, but Churchill didn’t) to the fiction that Alexander Fleming twice saved Churchill’s life.

But here’s an amusing example of Churchill himself destroying a Churchill myth—about that early forebear, John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough. Reference is to the early pages of Marlborough: His Life and Times, vol. 1.

Barbara Palmer

At the beginning of 1671 John Churchill was enjoying the company of Barbara Palmer, First Duchess of Cleveland. She was twenty-nine, he twenty. Winston Churchill writes:

Affections, affinities, and attractions were combined. Desire walked with opportunity, and neither was denied. John almost immediately became her lover, and for more than three years this wanton and joyous couple shared pleasures and hazards…not severed until the dawn of his love for Sarah Jennings [later his Duchess] in 1675.

“You are a rascal, but I forgive you”

Unfortunately or fortunately (we report, you decide), the lovely Barbara had also excited the passions of King Charles II, the product of which were several of Barbara’s children. Churchill continues:

Two of the adventures of the lovers are well known. The first [is] that, being surprised by Charles in the Duchess’s bedroom, John saved her honour—or what remained of it—by jumping from the window, a considerable height, into the courtyard below. For this feat, delighted at his daring and address, she presented him with £5000.

The second anecdote is attributed to the French Ambassador, Barillon. The Duke of Buckingham, he says, gave a hundred guineas to one of his waiting-women to be well informed of the intrigue. He knew that Churchill would be one evening at a certain hour in Barbara’s apartments. He brought the King to the spot.

The lover was hidden in the Duchess’s cupboard (she was not Duchess till 1670). After having prowled about the chamber the King, much upset, asked for sweets and liqueurs. His mistress declared that the key of the cupboard was lost. The King replied that he would break down the door.

On this she opened the door, and fell on her knees on one side while Churchill, discovered, knelt on the other. The King said to Churchill, “Go; you are a rascal, but I forgive you because you do it to get your bread.”

Churchill’s take

Now Winston Churchill loved a good fable as well as the next fellow. When his literary collaborator Bill Deakin challenged a well-known myth in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill declared: “At times of crisis, myths have their historical importance.” But he was having no nonsense about his ancestor John Churchill:

It is a good story, and the double-barrelled insult is very characteristic of Charles. But is it true? Barillon, who did not himself arrive in England till September 1677, probably got it from his predecessor, Courtin. He fixes the date as 1667….

Here is a fine exposure of these gossips. There can be little doubt, as we have shown, that nothing of this kind can have occurred before 1671. It is therefore one of those good stories invented long afterwards and fastened, as so many are, on well-known figures.

Churchill was correctly predicting exactly what has happened to him on the Internet—a medium he never dreamed of.

Marlborough Drift

We have dwelt herein on falsehoods known as Churchillian Drift. File this one under Marlborough Drift.

Churchill was nevertheless under no illusions about the faults of his ancestor. “What a downy bird he was,” he wrote his wife in 1935…

He will always stoop to conquer. His long apprenticeship as a courtier had taught him to bow and scrape and to put up with the second or third best if he could get no better. He had far less pride than the average man.

More Marlboroughh

“Marlborough: His Life and Times for Gift Giving,” 2023.

“The Eleventh Duke of Marlborough 1926-2014,” 2015.

Hillsdale College Churchill Project:

Anna Swartz: “English-Speaking Peoples: Queen Anne and Marlborough,” 2022.

Andrew Roberts: “Marlborough: In It, Churchill ‘Laid the Basis for His Own Greatness,'” 2019.

“Do you know where Churchill made this statement? ‘Here is a law which is above the King which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it.'” —J.F., Phoenix, Ariz.

A: The Birth of Britain, 1956

His “Above the King” quotation occurs in Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (London: Cassell, 1956), 256-57. He was explaining Magna Carta, the Great Charter of Freedoms, one of the towering benchmarks of Western Civilization. Churchill wrote:

If the thirteenth-century magnates understood little and cared less for popular liberties or Parliamentary democracy, they had all the same laid hold of a principle which was to be of prime importance for the future development of English society and English institutions.

Throughout the document it is implied that here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it.

The reign of Henry II, according to the most respected authorities, initiates the rule of law. But the work as yet was incomplete: the Crown was still above the law; the legal system which Henry had created could become, as John showed, an instrument of oppression.

Q: “All will be well”: repeated remark or one-off?

“Churchill had a famous phrase, ‘All will be well.’ Was this a one-time appearance or an habitual expression?”

A: Habitual. Thank the Boers

Although not exclusive to Churchill by any means, “all will be well” was a very frequent expression. In South Africa in 1899-1900, the young Winston had picked up the Afrikaans phrase alles sal regkom—which translates “all will come right.” He used both “all will come right” and “all will be well” interchangeably because they expressed his sentiment. As he said at least once: “For myself I am an optimist—it does not seem to be much use being anything else…” (Guildhall, London, 9 November 1954, Churchill by Himself, 10.)

There are a half dozen instances of “all will be well” in my quotations book and many scores in his speeches. For example: “…live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.” (1932, Churchill by Himself, 20.)

The most famous use of the phrase was on 9 February 1941 in Churchill’s broadcast reply to Roosevelt, who had sent him the Longfellow poem, “Sail on, O Ship of State”:

What is the answer that I shall give, in your name, to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation of a hundred and thirty millions? Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: “Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” (Churchill by Himself, 6-7.)

In those days, a lot of people thought Churchill was whistling in the wind. And so did he on occasion–privately, of course–up until Pearl Harbor. From then on, he had no doubt about victory.

Related reading

“Churchill Quotations: Youth, Maturity, Principle, Regulations,” 2023.

“Quotations: The Best Telegram He Ever Sent,” 2023.

“Churchill Quotations: The Artist, The Invalid and the Sybarite,” 2022.

“The Biblical Churchill: His Largest Single Source of Quotations,” 2021.

Quotations Department, since 2009.

Macaulay wrote in  Lays of Ancient Rome: “Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate.” That was William Manchester’s kind inscription on my volume 2 of The Last Lion. It reminds me that Bill was himself for many of us “Captain of the Gate.” His death in 2004 bid fair to deprive us of finale of the most lyrical Churchill book ever written. Would the story end with his second volume, on the brink of 1940? Not quite. Twenty-four years on, Little Brown published the third and final volume.

The first two volumes of The Last Lion were the most celebrated Churchill works of their time. More than twenty years in the writing, Volume 3 was completed by his friend Paul Reid. It was a faithful portrait, positive but not without criticism. Reid was particularly revealing on Churchill’s thinking about the Second Front and Allied strategy in the Second World War.

On a personal level, too, Reid was sound, correctly portraying Churchill as enjoying alcohol but no alcoholic, no megalomaniac, no victim of the overblown “Black Dog.” Last Lion 3 correctly evaluated WSC’s mental state. As Jim Miller wrote in The New York Times Magazine:

After studying Mayo Clinic mental-health protocols and consulting other experts about Churchill’s probable state of mind, Reid came to a conclusion at odds with Manchester’s opinion that Churchill suffered from mental illness. He just lived in stressful and depressing times. “I don’t know why Manchester imparted that dark side to Churchill,” he says. “Every writer puts some of himself into his story. My take on the issue of depression is vastly different than Bill’s was.”

Beyond his brief

Paul Reid also did something William Manchester never intended. He extended the book beyond 1945, to a period Bill told me was superfluous. He insisted all that was a mere coda to the epic of the Second World War. Paul pondered this and decided to take the story to its end. He provided a little (though not a lot) on Churchill’s scintillating performance as leader of the opposition (1945-51), his second premiership (1951-55), and his noble, fruitless quest for a permanent peace. Frankly, those later years were better covered by Andrew Roberts’ equally seminal biography, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (2018).

Churchill himself said: “Nothing surpasses 1940.” Last Lion 3 begins there, just after he became prime minister. Britain and its Commonwealth stood alone against the might of undefeated Germany. The Churchill conjured up by Reid is a man of indomitable courage, compelling intellect and irresistible will. He explains how the Prime Minister organized Britain’s defense and worked “to drag America into the war.”

Here is the “never surrender” ethos that helped earn the victory. Here too is the rapid shift of world power to America and Russia. “I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” he said. He did not; others did that. Yet he saw the end coming quite early, and towards the end he was resigned to it—not without a proud nostalgia.

Manchester and Reid

William Manchester was a hugely successful popular writer with a unique, inspiring style. His books include his memoir of the Pacific War, Goodbye Darkness (his personal favorite); A World Lit Only by Fire; The Glory and the Dream; The Arms of Krupp; American Caesar; and The Death of a President.

His description of climacterics in these books are classics. Recall his telling of MacArthur’s valedictory address at West Point. Or Churchill during the Fall of France: “Another bloody country gone west.” Or Lee Harvey Oswald with his gun in the schoolbook depository at Dallas: “Ready on the right, ready on the left; all ready on the firing line.” Manchester’s passages will be recalled as long as English is spoken.

Paul Reid of North Carolina, a longtime feature writer for the Palm Beach Post, was an award-winning journalist. What matters too is that he was Manchester’s friend. In 1998, in the midst of research for Volume 3, Bill suffered two strokes that left him with mental faculties but unable to write. In October 2003, he asked Paul to complete the volume, saying: “I wanted a writer, not a historian.” It was an informal conversation, Paul Reid recalls, “sealed with a handshake.” In April 2004, two months before Bill’s death, they signed a formal agreement.

A great work

Paul Reid completed the research and transformed more than forty tablets of Manchester’s notes—“clumps” as he called them—to produce Last Lion 3. With others, I had the joy to be called on to vet his manuscript, as I had Bill’s Last Lion 2. The reviews assured Paul of a variety of opinions and reduced the chance of minor errors of fact that crept into the previous volumes. (I found quite a few in volume 2 and not all of them were fixed.) Manchester fans will find much of Bill’s trademark pace and cadence in this last installment of a classic. Last Lion is a mesmerizing journey through what Lady Soames called “The Saga.”

In a flourish suitable to a great work, Paul Reid ends his story on January 30th, 1965 with the best words Lord Moran ever wrote:

The village stations on the way to Bladon were crowded with his countrymen, and at Bladon in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to English earth, which in his finest hour he had held inviolate.

Bill Manchester would like that.

Richard II and “This Sceptr’d Isle.”

We are asked: “Churchill quoted Shakespeare’s famous lines, ‘This scepter’d isle,’ in one of his speeches. They are the words of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, from Richard II, Act 2, sc. 1. Could you direct me to the speech?”

Churchill knew his Shakespeare and had a near-photographic memory. Darrell Holley’s Churchill’s Literary Allusions tells us he alludes to Shakespeare more than any other English author. King John, Richard III and Hamlet are his most frequent references. Henry V also moved and inspired him. He also closely read Richard II, generally accepting Shakespeare’s portrayal of his cruelty and vindictiveness. (Alas, Holley’s book enjoyed only one brief printing and is now rare and expensive. It is a standard work and richly deserves reprinting.)

“Let’s Boost Britain”

Churchill quoted the “Scepter’d Isle” passage in part, but not in whole. It first appeared in his article, “Let’s Boost Britain,” in the weekly Answers, for 28 April 1934. (His topic has considerable relevance at present.) Answers was one of the most obscure periodicals to which Churchill contributed. Fortunately, the late Michael Wolff, one of Randolph Churchill’s assistants on the official biography, scoured its pages to compile The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (1975). The essay, thus reappeared, is in volume IV, Churchill at Large. It begins:

This week we celebrate St. George’s Day, which is also Shakespeare’s Day, who wrote the noblest tribute ever penned to this England of ours:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise …
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea …

“Time-honoured Lancaster”

Churchill however was not finished with John of Gaunt, famous scion of the House of Lancaster. Ultimately, he and others deposed Richard II and installed Gaunt’s son Henry IV. Another quotation occurs in The Birth of Britain, the first volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Writing of Gaunt’s death, Churchill refers to him as “time-honoured Lancaster.” That phrase is from Richard II, Act 1, sc. 1.

“Some love, but little policy”

How closely Churchill read and absorbed Richard II is suggested by another deathless line he deployed at least twice. In negotiating her husband’s exile, Queen Isabel begs leave to go to France. Knowing they might then raise an army and return, the Earl of Northumberland exclaims: “That were some love, but little policy.” (Richard II, Act V, sc. 2.)

Churchill remembered that turn of phrase. In 1916, disgraced over the Dardanelles, he was fighting at the front. His wife Clementine, and his friend Archibald Sinclair, urged him to stay there until the time was ripe for his return to politics. Anxious to be back in the thick of debate, Churchill wrote Sinclair: “I can almost hear you and Clemmie arriving by the most noble of arguments at the conclusion that I must inevitably stay here till the day of Judgement: NO NO – ‘That were some love, but little policy.’”

Twenty years later, writing his Life of Marlborough, Churchill described one of Marlborough’s enemies: “Why, then, should he give up his weapon and the chance of setting a hostile House of Commons loose upon him? ‘That were some love, but little policy.’”

Interestingly, in both cases, Churchill put Shakespeare’s words in quotes but did not cite the author. That was a time when every English school child knew Shakespeare thoroughly. He simply didn’t have to.

“Death of Kings” 

Churchill’s best-known line from Richard II comes in The Gathering Storm, his first volume of Second World War memoirs. He writes of his visit to the fleet after becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 for the second time, Uniquely, he had last held that office almost exactly twenty-five years earlier…

My thoughts went back a quarter of a century to that other September when I had last visited Sir John Jellicoe and his captains in this very bay, and had found them with their long lines of battleships and cruisers drawn out at anchor, a prey to the same uncertainties as now afflicted us. Most of the captains and admirals of those days were dead, or had long passed into retirement… It was a strange experience, like suddenly resuming a previous incarnation. It seemed that I was all that survived in the same position I had held so long ago …. I motored from Loch Ewe to Inverness, where our train awaited us. We had a picnic lunch on the way by a stream, sparkling in hot sunshine. I felt oddly oppressed with my memories.

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

Once again, Churchill didn’t bother to reveal the source of his quotation. In that time a grammar school education was truly comprehensive, and not only in Britain. Churchill simply assumed that all his readers would know. 

Further Reading

“Churchill, Lincoln and Shakespeare,” by Lewis E. Lehrman

“Churchill and Shakespeare,” by Richard M. Langworth

“Churchill, Shakespeare and Agincourt,” by Justin D. Lyons

“Mirrored in the Pool of England,” lecture by Richard M. Langworth

Q: Did Churchill ever quote from Romeo and Juliet?

“I knew that Sir Winston Churchill was an avid Shakespeare reader and quoter. But can someone tell me if he ever quoted from Romeo and Juliet?”

A: Once, perhaps twice…

Darrell Holley’s excellent book, Churchill’s Literary Allusions, offers only one reference to Romeo and Juliet. The Churchill Project’s digital resource of Churchill’s eighty million published words by and about Churchill offers another, but his private secretary thought it was bogus. We are not so sure. Read on and decide for yourself.

Holley’s book is one Churchill scholars should keep at their desks. Long out of print and pricey, it is an outstanding specialty study deserving reissue, even as an e-book. We have tried to find the author without success. (Reader assistance welcome.)

Mr. Holley devotes an entire chapter to Shakespeare, citing nearly fifty Churchill allusions to the Bard in his writings and speeches. To no other English author, he writes, does Churchill allude so often:

Both by formal quotations, some quite lengthy, and by well-known phrases almost hidden in his text, Churchill makes allusion to many of Shakespeare’s plays. Somewhat surprisingly, he makes no reference to any of the sonnets. It is certainly not surprising, however, that Churchill should allude often to the histories and tragedies, King John, Richard III, and Hamlet being referred to most.

“Yoke of inauspicious stars”

Churchill’s Literary Allusions offers one citation from Romeo and Juliet. In his biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston writes: “Would he, under the many riddles the future had reserved for such as he, snapped the tie of sentiment that bound him to his party, resolved at last to ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars’….?”

As so often in that better-read age, Churchill didn’t bother to cite the play, assuming most of his readers would know the source.

Darrell Holley found this allusion in Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Sc. 3, almost at the end of the play, where Romeo slays Count Paris and lays him in his tomb before taking his own fatal draught:

Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!

“In three long hours…”

On 18 June 1940, Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville records another allusion to Romeo and Juliet. Colville felt certain this was not accurate:

I asked him if he would see General Sikorski tomorrow. “I will see him,” he said, “at noon,” and then went on to quote some entirely bogus quotation about that time of day, which he pretended was spoken by the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

It wasn’t a good idea to challenge Churchill’s recall of Shakespeare. And so we wondered, re-reading the play, whether Churchill had the quote right but not the speaker? The answer is: quite possibly. In Act 2 Juliet, talking to herself, says:

The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse.
In half an hour she promised to return….
Now is the sun upon the highmost hill
Of this day’s journey, and from nine till twelve
Is three long hours, yet she is not come.

So, the Nurse was due back at 9:30 but she’s been gone three hours and it is noon. That is the time Churchill specified for meeting General Sikorski. If he repeated those words of Juliet’s ascribing them to the Nurse, he had the quote right but the speaker wrong.

A note on my co-author

Valerie Lillington, born in England in 1932, lived in Trinidad and Canada before emigrating to Australia in 1962, where she taught high school English and drama for almost thirty years. That included a year’s teacher exchange to America. Twice a candidate for Parliament, she enjoys an active life of travel, acting and directing. Currently she runs fortnightly sessions on Shakespeare in the local library, where Romeo and Juliet was a recent topic. She also writes and talks copiously on Charles Dickens. Valerie writes:

I saw Churchill once in London, and remember gathering round the wireless, as we called it then, to hear him speak. I was almost seven when the war started, over twelve when it finished. As members of our family, became involved, it became urgent to hear anything we could. Two of my uncles were killed and another seriously wounded. There wasn’t anyone in my class at school who did not have similar stories to tell.

More Churchill and Shakespeare

“Churchill’s Memorable Allusions to Shakespeare’s Richard II,” 2019.

“The Pool of England: How Henry V Inspired Churchill’s Words,” 2019.

“The Burton-Churchill Eruption: Coming Soon in Your Neighborhood,” 2016.

(Updated from 2012.) I am a post-doc at Tübingen University writing a paper about Sir Winston Churchill’s appreciation of Thucydides. Did he possess a personal copy of the ancient historian’s History of the Peloponnesian War? I would be very grateful for any help. —O.S., Germany

A: Powerful influence

I cannot confirm that Churchill owned a copy of Thucydides’ Pelopponnesian War. His original library is not intact. It would seem logical that he did. Churchill certainly read and appreciated the works of the great Greek historian. And the writings of Churchill have often been compared to those of Thucydides.

Churchill first read Thucydides as a boy at Harrow or Sandhurst (where it was in the curriculum). In September 1913, on a cruise aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, Churchill and his private secretary, Eddie Marsh visited Greece and Sicily. The Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, a great scholar of the classics, was on board, and Marsh recorded that Asquith “brushed up on his Thucydides for the occasion.” Churchill and Asquith then held forth on the Peloponnesian War.

T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) compared Churchill’s memoir of World War I, The World Crisis,with the writings of the Greek: “I suppose [Churchill] realizes that he’s the only high person since Thucydides and Clarendon who has put his generation imaginatively in his debt.”

Similar comparisons of Churchill to Thucydides were made by the historian R.W. Thompson about Churchill’s memoir, The Second World War (1948-54); and, more recently, by Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College about Churchill’s The River War (1899).

“A possession for ever”

In 1905 the literary agent Frank Harris read the manuscript of Churchill’s biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, writing to Winston Churchill: “[I]t will be as Thucydides said of his own history a ‘a possession for ever. ’”

In 1931 Oliver Locker-Lampson, reviewing The Eastern Front, Churchill’s final volume of The World Crisis, wrote:

No greater writer of the English language exists today. Mr. Churchill is our modern Macaulay; or rather today’s Thucydides…. Some day someone will do justice to this great Englishman. Meantime, let us read his resounding record and be renewed by the vigour of his patriotism and versatility.

Churchill himself wrote nothing specific about Thucydides, but mentioned something Lord Beaverbrook sent him in 1942. Beaverbrook was Minister of Aircraft Production, where he had proven invaluable. Churchill wrote:

He also sent me, undated, the following quotation from Thucydides, which he had perhaps tried in vain upon himself: “Open no more negotiations with Sparta. Show them plainly that you are not crushed by your present afflictions. They who face calamity without wincing, and who offer the most energetic resistance, these, be they States or individuals, are the truest heroes.” —The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1950), 74.

By “Sparta” Beaverbrook was referring to Churchill’s critics. The war had been going badly, but Churchill had won a vote of confidence by 464 votes to 1 in January. The quotation was good advice for Churchill. It was also for Beaverbrook, but he didn’t take it. Shortly after sending this message, he resigned.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill’s Three Best War Books,” 2020.

“Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia: A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars,” 2020.

“Greeks Fight Like Heroes, Heroes Fight Like Greeks,” 2021.

“Lt. Churchill: A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals,” 2017.

Greats by a Great

How would you like to read great novels in the words of Winston Churchill? Such a collection exists. In 1933, Churchill retold a dozen of “The World’s Great Stories” for The News of the World. Six also appeared in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Five were reprinted in 1941. Then they were forgotten, lost among his “potboilers” of the 1930s. In 1975 they were briefly resurrected in the limited edition Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill. The publishing history is entry C393 in Ronald Cohen’s masterful Bibliography.

Why would Churchill wish to retell such classics as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote, or A Tale of Two Cities? Because he was paid well to do so! Never independently wealthy, he worked hard to maintain his luxurious lifestyle—and the heavy entertainment and travel overhead of an active political career. “I earned my livelihood by dictating articles which had a wide circulation not only in Great Britain and the United States,” he wrote, “but also, before Hitler’s shadow fell upon them, in the most famous newspapers of sixteen European countries. I lived in fact from mouth to hand.”

His 1930s articles ranged from the esoteric (“Are There Men on the Moon?”) to the whimsical (“Are We Too Clever?”) to the historical (“Moses”). Interspersed were thoughtful reflections on civilization (“Mass Effects in Modern Life”) or international developments (“How Germany is Arming”). Somewhat dismissively, Churchill and his staff called some of these “potboilers.” “Very exciting,” remembered his secretary Grace Hamblin: “They were quickly put out and sent off usually the next day. He got his money very quickly, which he liked too. We all liked doing potboilers.”

Genesis of the “Great Stories”

Churchill rarely had to “shop” his material—publishers came to him. In mid-1932 it was newspaper baron Lord Riddell, who wrote:

Would it appeal to you to write six articles “Six Great Stories of the World Retold by Winston Churchill”? Sensational things like Monte Cristo, Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone, Rider Haggard’s She, Ben-Hur, Anatole France’s Thais, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—5000 words each article. What would you want for them to be published in the News of the World. You would have an enormous audience—3,500,000 per week.”

Churchill replied by return, acclaiming Riddell’s “brilliant idea.” Not omitting to note that Collier’s were paying him $1500 (£312) an article, he offered Riddell six stories for £2000. He then hired his onetime private secretary and literary collaborator Eddie Marsh to help write drafts at £25 each—a modest overhead! “If I had read about 2500 words of your ideas on each of the selected books,” he wrote Marsh, “it would be a foundation on which I could tell my story. I shall of course be reading them all again myself.”

“The art of the deal”

Good salesman that he was, Churchill then interested Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune in the American rights for £1800. His combined fee was £3800 ($18,000, or $380,000 in today’s money). The Tribune could not start until January 1933 but Riddell was ready to go. Churchill had a problem, since he’d promised McCormick simultaneous release. “[I]t never occurred to me till you said so the other night that you would want to publish them till after the end of the year,” he wrote Riddell. “I hope therefore that you will not mind waiting till January 8, or at your convenience later in the month.”

Riddell was so pleased with the first four stories that he asked for more. “Good news,” WSC wrote Marsh in December. “They like them so much that they have ordered another half dozen.” Riddell suggested some titles, but left the choices to Churchill. (McCormick settled for the original six, although he replaced Ben-Hur with Jane Eyre from the second set).

“Rot, padding, feuilleton and pemmicanisation”

Retelling whole novels in 5000 words each posed a major task of condensation. Marsh submitted a summary of The Count of Monte Cristo. No good, Churchill replied: “[W]e are not writing great stories summarised, but great stories retold. It is essential to select the salient features of the tale and make them live in all their fullness, leaving the rest in darkness. In Monte Cristo I shall give 1000 words to the plot against Dantes and 2500 to the terrific prison drama and 1500 to the revenge. That pretty well fixes the dimensions.” Anyone who has read Monte Cristo will appreciate that Churchill had his emphasis right.

Along with Dumas they liked Dickens, but Churchill knew he’d have to jettison vast verbiage. This gave him opportunity to exercise his vocabulary: “Both Dickens and Dumas mixed up a lot of rot and padding in their writing for feuilleton purposes,” he told Marsh, “all of which goes overboard through my lee scuppers.” He knew A Tale of Two Cities well, “though I suppose I shall have to re-read it. It certainly lends itself to dramatic pemmicanisation.”

This tells us much about Churchill’s command of the assignment and direction of the writing. Eddie Marsh, a brilliant polymath, was the perfect foil and draft writer. As the work continued, Marsh wrote an increasing portion of the drafts, especially after the first six. Nevertheless, Churchill finalized them. His special take on each novel is what interests today’s readers.

The first six

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
2. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
3. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
4. Ben-Hur, by Lewis Wallace*
5. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
6. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

* The Chicago Sunday Tribune substituted Jane Eyre.

** Save for The Moonstone, these stories were reprinted in the Sunday Dispatch in 1941. For books or e-books, enter titles in Amazon.com or Bookfinder.com.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Count of Monte Cristo were the first choices. Churchill rejected She—“a slight work though very exciting. I think that King Solomon’s Mines is the best of Rider Haggard’s books.” He thought Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s works “too great to be dealt with in this way, except Faust, which can always be told.” He considered A Tale of Two Cities, Ivanhoe, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Treasure Island, Ten Thousand a Year, Robbery Under Arms and Faust.

Ultimately the last four were dropped, while Ivanhoe made the second cut. Lawyers consulted copyright holders, who were mostly fine with what they saw as welcome publicity. Only Harper & Brothers, publishers of Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, withheld permission.

Omissions and an addition

Churchill decided against Anatole France’s Thais, and Marsh agreed: “[I]t would be difficult to do justice to the diseased, suppressed sexuality (of which it is so terrible a story) in the course of a 5000-word article….. [It is] much better done at length in French, than in abrupt and abridged English.” From Chicago, Robert McCormick suggested Wuthering Heights, but they’d already settled on Brontë’s Jane Eyre. McCormick mentioned Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but Churchill hadn’t read that mammoth tome, and Riddell didn’t want it.

Nor had Churchill read Ben-Hur, which he considered “mere popular sentiment.” But Lord Riddell liked it, so Eddie Marsh tackled a draft. “Golly what a book!” Marsh wrote. “The seafight is really fun, so I’m making that a ‘high-light,’ and there will be another in the chariot-race; but there are terrible unmanageable tracts between—I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in such bad English.” In the final version, Churchill gave a beautiful flourish to Biblical story of the Wise Men at the birth of Jesus.

The second cut

1. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë*
2. Adam Bede, by George Eliot
3. Vice Versa, by Thomas Anstey Guthrie
4. Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott
5. Westward Ho!, by Charles Kingsley
6. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

*Substituted for Ben-Hur in the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

When Riddell asked for more titles, Churchill sent further ideas to Marsh for comment. Both agreed on Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, Westward Ho!, Ivanhoe and Vice Versa. The Cloister and the Hearth, The Wandering Jew, East Lynne, Vanity Fair and The Last Days of Pompeii were rejected. Riddell was still pushing Faust, and Churchill thought “the full German story would be magnificent,” but it proved too unwieldy for a 5000-word retelling. He also wondered whether Vice Versa “was not below the middle-class level which goes to these schools.” Marsh thought Vice Versa—a light Victorian novel—a break from the other, mostly gloomy stories.

Instead of Goethe, Riddell got Cervantes. “His Lordship thinks that Don Quixote would be a good thing,” wrote Violet Pearman, Churchill’s secretary, “although you find it rather heavy and with not much plot.” Riddell had learned of an upcoming film adaptation starring George Robey. “This should inspire you,” WSC informed Marsh. The film debuted in May, and Riddell saw to it that Churchill’s version appeared in March. It was the last in the series.

What makes these stories unique is, of course, Churchill’s vast background and experience. His telling adds poignant reflections and Churchillian phrases to the famous novels.

Links: Churchill’s stories one by one

For accounts and excerpts from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Moonstone and Ben-Hur, click here.

For Tess of the D’Urbervilles, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, Vice Versa, Ivanhoe, Westward Ho! and Don Quixote, click here.

Updated from “Churchill and the Kilkenny Cats,” 2012… A Churchillian friend who has written to her Senators writes: “This brief video by Senator Rand Paul is a good example of why the United States Congress has only a 10% approval rating.

“Who is in charge in the clattering train? The video explains why the Congresshumans are an insult to the American people.” (Senator Paul, on a point of order, was demanding extra time to read a 600-page Senate bill scheduled for an up or down vote in eight hours.)

I’ve given up on the U.S. Senate, myself. (And lately, the House of Representatives with it.) I’m glad somebody is still writing them letters.

Churchill invokes the Cats of Kilkenny

Naturally there is a Churchill quotation which suits the habitual behavior of the United States Congress. (There is a Churchill quotation for just about everything.) Speaking in the House of Commons on 18 March 1912, young Winston remarked:

We must expect that in a fleet battle between good and efficient navies equally matched, tremendous damage will be reciprocally inflicted…. Indeed, the more we force ourselves to picture the hideous course of a modern naval engagement, the more one is inclined to believe that it will resemble the contest between Mamilius and Herminius at the Battle of Lake Regillus, or the still more homely conflict of the Kilkenny cats. That is a very satisfactory reflection for the stronger naval Power. It will always pay the stronger naval Power to lose ship for ship in every class.

From Churchill by Himself, pages 226-27: “The Battle, possibly mythical, was described in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which fascinated WSC as a boy. It was a Roman victory, led by Mamilius over Herminius and the Etruscans, possibly between 509 and 493 BC.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes a Kilkenny cat as ‘one of a pair of cats fabled to have fought until only their tails remained.’ Hence the phrase describes ‘combatants who fight until they annihilate each other.'” (The cats were from County Kilkenny, Ireland)….

There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many.
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit
Till, excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails
Instead of two cats there wer’n’t any.

The World Crisis Hillsdale Dialogues

The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt. They currently offer an extended discussion of Churchill’s The World Crisis: his outstanding memoir of the First World War.

Upon publication in 1923, the first two volumes drew close attention. Churchill’s colleague Arthur Balfour (who quite admired it) referred to “Winston’s magnificent autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe.” A century later, Dr. Arnn considers it one of Churchill’s best works. It ranks with Marlborough and The Second World War for its lyrical style and powerful message. Chancing across Volume 1, 1911-1914, he marveled at the beauty of the writing and the somber warning Churchill conveyed.

Mr. Hewitt, for his part, considers The World Crisis a baleful portent of a world not unfamiliar now. He asks, does reading this great work make you pessimistic today? “No,” replies Dr. Arnn. “It’s a glorious story. Churchill is good proof against trouble. He always expected war to be hell. And he always expected to prevail. One must reason about that, of course—but one must cultivate the attitude.”

What follows is a modest accompaniment to these important Dialogues, which are worth one’s time. Discussions of the early chapters proceed at this writing. The links appear here as the sessions continue.

Availability

Many connoisseurs of Churchill and the Churchill style, who found him through The Second World War or A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, soon learned of his earlier, multi-volume memoir of the First World War. Published 1923-31 by Thornton Butterworth, Scribners and Macmillan of Toronto, it was an immediate best-seller.

Abridgments began as early as 1931, but for many years a complete set was obtainable only in the early editions. (The 1963-64 Scribners illustrated edition had a small press run and was harder to find than the originals.) In 1991, I persuaded the Easton Press to issue a complete edition with the postwar Scribners illustrations. Later, booksellers offered an inexpensive complete text by combining the unabridged 1939 Odhams two-volume edition (covering 1911-18) with two volumes Odhams did not publish: The Aftermath and The Eastern Front (from theCollected Works)

Today, availability is much better, and prices considerably lower. Bloomsbury publishes the six books as paperbacks, while Rosetta offers e-books. See Amazon.com. For earlier editions, search Bookfinder.

The volumes

Though commonly described as a six-volume work, The World Crisis is actually five volumes in six books. The middle two volumes, subtitled 1916-1918, sold as a pair, slipcased together in the USA and Canada. The fastidious refer to them as “Volumes 3a and 3b.” Thus the last two volumes, The Aftermath and The Eastern Front, are correctly Volumes 4 and 5 respectively. Booksellers describe the full set as “5-in-6.”

Volume 1, 1911-1914, begins with the great power rivalries that led to the war, and the opening campaigns. Volume 2, 1915, is the most personal, largely devoted to Churchill’s failed efforts to break the deadlock in Europe by forcing the Dardanelles, knocking Turkey out of the war and succoring the Russians. The third volume, 1916-1918 (two parts) covers the carnage on the Western Front, the German victory over Russia, Germany’s near-victory over the Allies in 1918, and the final, exhausted end of the war. Volume IV, The Aftermath, chronicles events involving Churchill during the ten years after victory, including the Irish Treaty. The final Volume V, The Eastern Front, recounts the titanic battles between Russia and the German-Austrian armies.

It is important to note two major additions not in the original text. In 1931 for a one-volume abridgment, Churchill added extensive commentary on the Battle of the Marne (1914) and Lord Fisher’s resignation (1915). Be sure to read these in the 1931 abridged one-volume edition or the unabridged 1939 Odhams two-volume edition (both covering 1911-18 only), or modern editions (such as the Kindle e-book) which incorporate these vital additions.

The World Crisis: An Appreciation

Asked to recommend a “big work” by Churchill, I always suggest The World Crisis. Like all of his war books where he was involved, it a personal testimony, tending to defend his role in affairs. But one of his worthy characteristics was his unabashed honesty: he learned from his mistakes and was forthright in admitting them. He stoutly defended the personal approach. He declared it was “not history, but a contribution to history.” Later, of The Second World War, he would say similarly, “This is not history; this is my case.”

It is hard to think of another 20th Century statesman who not only spent most of the two World Wars in high office and was able to write about them in beautiful prose. Even those who do not usually read war books admire Churchill’s account of the awful, unfolding scene. The “war to end wars” is described as if the reader were a colleague, observing the march of events over Churchill’s burly shoulder.

The virtues Churchill honors are, awfully, those of the peoples smashed in the general wreckage. It is above all to demonstrate how the chronic infirmity of political and military command made them suffer as they did that Churchill writes this history.

“Are you quite sure?”

Among the grand passages of Volume 1 was a favorite of the late General Colin Powell, who asked for its attribution (pages 48-49 of the first edition). Churchill is describing the Agadir Crisis when, amid calm, diplomatic messages, Germany and France almost went to war in 1911. Agadir was a stark warning not lost on Britain, and propelled Churchill to the Admiralty. It summarizes General Powell’s prudence about resort to arms, something he shared with Churchill:

So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing…. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.

“The Vials of Wrath”

In the first Hillsdale dialogue on The World Crisis Dr. Arnn examines Churchill’s arresting first chapter, “The Vials of Wrath.” Here, he realized on his first encounter, was something out of the ordinary. A great writer was setting a dramatic stage. This quotation is the best possible argument for reading The World Crisis:

It was the custom in the palmy days of Queen Victoria for statesmen to expatiate upon the glories of the British Empire, and to rejoice in that protecting Providence which had preserved us through so many dangers and brought us at length into a secure and prosperous age. Little did they know that the worst perils had still to be encountered and that the greatest triumphs were yet to be won….

It seemed inconceivable that the same series of tremendous events through which since the days of Queen Elizabeth we had three times made our way successfully, should be repeated a fourth time and on an immeasurably larger scale. Yet that is what has happened, and what we have lived to see.

“Fearful agencies of destruction”

The Great War through which we have passed differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought….

Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals often on a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries….

When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.

Further reading

“Wikipedia: Churchill’s War Accounts: History or Memoirs?” (2022)

Novels in crises

Law professor and radio show host Hugh Hewitt wrote an arresting column in the Washington Post: “Fiction has even more value when the real world is in crisis.”  Reading novels while the world is in turmoil? Some great leaders did. There must be reasons why. Mr. Hewitt offers four:

First, fiction can keep anxious minds from chewing themselves to bits…. Second, reading can give a sense of proportion, which our distracted age needs most urgently…. Third, novels can take us into unfamiliar worlds and better prepare us to live in our own…. Fourth, and finally, time spent with a worthwhile novel is not time sucked away and spat out. It is time, and the lessons of time, brought into focus.

As leading proof of these assertions, Hugh Hewitt offers Churchill: “When his nation, and the free world, took its own pulse each morning in 1940 and 1941, the greatest statesman of my lifetime escaped into a collection of “Captain Hornblower” novels, Moll Flanders, Phineas Finn and Pride and Prejudice, according to the military correspondent and historian Thomas Ricks.”

During his research Mr. Hewitt asked the Churchill Project what novels WSC read in those perilous days. Typically we piled on far more information than he needed. Our report however may interest readers.

H.G. Wells

Fred Glueckstein has elsewhere explained how closely Churchill read H.G. Wells. In 1931, weeks after publishing “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” his forecast of a dystopian future, Churchill praised Wells’s The Time Machine. He called it “a marvellous philosophical romance, in the train of Gulliver’s Travels.” Wells, Churchill wrote, “knew that hell was going to break loose and knew exactly what it would look like and feel like when it did.”

On into the Second World War, Churchill was motivated by Wells’s views of military science in war: “The irresistible Juggernaut, driving through towns and villages as through a field of standing corn—a type which Armageddon itself could not achieve….” That was an accurate description of the Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. More circumspectly, Churchill called it “a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks.” He then admonished Britons: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour.”

Novels retold

In 1932 Lord Riddell proposed that Churchill retell some famous novels for News of the World. Between January and March 1933, WSC reviewed twelve of “The World’s Great Stories”: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Moonstone, Ben-Hur, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, Vice Versa, Ivanhoe, Westward Ho! and Don Quixote. Eddie Marsh wrote the drafts; Churchill re-read each novel and finalized the texts.

The essays are worth reading because they are not just reviews or abridgments. They offer Churchill’s personal  impressions. Take for example Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reflecting on how inextricably slavery was woven into Southern life, Churchill made points rarely heard:

One fact alone reveals the powerlessness of the community to shake itself free from the frightful disease which had become part of its being. Over 660,000 slaves were held by ministers of the Gospel of the different Protestant Churches. Five thousand Methodist ministers owned 219,000 slaves; 6,500 Baptists owned 125,000; 1,400 Episcopalians held 88,000, and so on. Thus the institution of slavery was not only defended by every argument of self-interest, but every pulpit championed it as a system ordained by the Creator and sanctified by the gospel of Christ.

C.S. Forester

Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels enthralled Churchill. Desmond Morton, a onetime associate, said WSC devoured each as it came out. They were “almost as a draught of pure wine to a thirsty man.” Asked why this was so, Morton replied:

There are lots of possible explanations…. Of course he hated any kind of life, action or thought that he would consider “sordid.” Equally, he was the “never-grow-up” type of boy that you have seen him to be. Nevertheless this particular trait was endearing…. Actually there is something fundamentally of importance in this. Of course, he saw himself in all the heroic roles; does not a boy do this? But there is much more to it than only this.

En route to meet Roosevelt in August 1941, Churchill devoured a Hornblower novel, saying: “I find Hornblower admirable.” This caused perturbation in the Middle East Headquarters. “It was imagined that ‘Hornblower’ was the code-word for some special operation of which they had not been told.”

Nor was Forester a wartime fixation, according to Edmund Murray, Churchill’s bodyguard from 1950 to WSC’s death. Sir Winston’s affection for Hornblower, Murray thought, was its “accurate historical allusions…. He was such a devotee of the celebrated Captain, in fact, that Forester would send him, from his home in America, an autographed copy of each new work. When the author came to visit England he was invited to Chartwell for lunch.”

Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen

Churchill’s pace in wartime was heavy for a man pushing 70, and in 1943 he twice fell ill with pneumonia. Confined to bed in February, he picked up Defoe’s Moll Flanders, “about which I had heard excellent accounts, but had not found time to test them.” Finishing it, he gave it to his doctor, “to cheer him up.”

Later that year found Churchill reading Jane Austen’s classic novels on the landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Again pneumonia struck. He repaired to Marrakesh for recuperation, joined by his daughter Sarah:

I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought it would be better than its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.

Trollope and more Forester

Despite his liking for Austen, Churchill came late to Trollope, in 1953. According to his doctor, Lord Moran, he had not read Trollope’s novels before. Now he read three. “At parts of Phineas Finn I became very tearful,” WSC said, “though it is not at all a moving story.” Next he read The Prime Minister.

Churchill’s favorite Trollope novel was The Duke’s Children. It offered, he said, “a good picture of an extraordinary world that has gone. The Duke is, of course, a poop; a Liberal he calls himself, yet he is so narrow-minded.”

Later in 1953, the PM was flying to the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower and French Prime Minister Joseph Laniel. For reading en route, Churchill acquired another Forester. Moran found WSC with “his nose in it throughout the meal.” Landing at Bermuda, he was still engrossed in it. “I must get Christopher to put it away before they come,” he quipped. The title was Death to the French.

Fair and balanced

In his best-known book, Robert Vidal Rhodes James said he aimed to prove that Winston Churchill was human. He was immediately asked: wasn’t that a superfluous mission? Sir Robert replied that Churchill had been almost completely deified—so it was high time someone brought him down to earth. Churchill: A Study in Failure (1970) was a comprehensive catalogue of the great man’s outrages, miscalculations and errors which left WSC, through the late 1930s, admired for his drive and brilliance and distrusted for his supposed lack of judgement. A Study in Failure was not a pioneering work, since critical books about Churchill had been appearing since the 1920s. But it was the best of them: carefully researched, deftly argued, elegantly written, a model.

The politician-writer

Like Churchill, Sir Robert was that rare combination, a politician-writer. Unlike many today, he didn’t make politics his sole career. He clerked in the House of Commons, returned to All Souls College as a research fellow, taught history at Stanford and the University of Sussex, and worked for the United Nations in New York. In 1976 he stood as a Conservative in a by-election for Cambridge, a marginal seat. He held it despite strong challenges until he retired in 1992. 

Aside from A Study in Failure, Robert left a huge corpus for laborers in the Churchill vineyard. His first book, Lord Randolph Churchill (1959), was the first biography of Sir Winston’s father since WSC’s and Lord Rosebery’s early in the century. In 1964 he published a biography of Lord Rosebery himself.

Biographies followed on Prince Albert (1983) and Anthony Eden (1986). Like most of us, he was sometimes uneven. Bob Boothby (1991) bordered on hagiography. Boothby, Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in the 1920s, who later fell out over ethical lapses, hardly puts a foot wrong in that book, which etiolates Churchill. Perhaps this was because Robert and Boothby both liked to stir the political pot. But most of the time, like Churchill, Rhodes James was a skilled politician-writer.

His greatest contribution was Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 (1974). It took up eight thick volumes, with two well-organized and comprehensive indexes. He shocked me once by confiding that he had been paid only £5000 for the whole job—55 pence per page. Out of that he had to pay his student researchers. It’s a safe bet that he derived little from the later abridged editions, such as Churchill Speaks. But he was proud of the effort, and smiled when told it’s among the most sought-after of the multi-volume Churchill works.

Rhodes James as I knew him

I met him in Washington in 1994, where he spoke at a symposium, later quantified in Churchill as Peacemaker (1997). He sniffed that his hotel room lacked the bottle of whisky he’d enjoyed at his last symposium in Texas. He was affronted by America’s no-smoking diktat, then almost universal: “In a few year’s time everything in your country will be illegal, except sex between consenting adults of the correct persuasion. I like smoking. Oh dear.” One evening the ebullient James Humes, after too good a dinner, introduced Lady Rhodes James as “an English rose.” Robert murmured, not quite sotto voce, “Who is that dreadful man?” 

At our symposium he griped that speakers had to stand up, then took on Professor Manfred Weidhorn, who said Churchill objected to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland. Walking briskly to the podium after Manny’s presentation, Robert announced: “Churchill said nothing about the Rhineland, nothing at all. He was hoping to get into the Cabinet and so he kept his mouth shut.” Then bang, he sat down again. No questions, thanks very much.

Nevertheless we found Robert a grand personality, full of stories about Churchill and Parliament. Paul Addison remembered “what fun he was to be with. Such a warm and generous character—he sparkled with gossip and was full of enthusiasms.”

The Washington Post said Robert “could be a congenial companion to those he counted as his intellectual near-equals.” But he “never lost the superior manner commonly displayed by clerks of the House of Commons.” On balance Sir Robert remained pro-Churchill, and hoped to write a post-1939 volume entitled A Study in Success. 

Tory Wet

I was sure that Robert and I weren’t destined to become chums. He was a “Tory wet” (think RINO Republican, conservative Democrat). He believed in Little Britain within the European Union, and regarded Margaret Thatcher as a rather nasty aberration. I was a right winger who had voted for Goldwater and Reagan and Steve Forbes, and would have voted Thatcher if I could, who believed that the EU was a globalist con-job for the benefit of the Franco-Germans. The best Great Britain could do was to revive Commonwealth Free Trade and join the North American Free Trade Association. (Oh dear, indeed.)

We disagreed about the Churchill Official Biography. Randolph Churchill had sacked Robert from his research team of “young gentlemen,” and Robert never forgave him (or his dislike of Eden). He always maintained that the O.B. was the same “case for the defence” Sir Winston had already made in his own books. Robert always said exactly what he believed—in the most forceful terms available to a gentleman. In an age of prevaricating phonies of Left and Right, such a character is rare. Winston Churchill would have loved him.

Flogged then forgiven

We tangled over the Rhineland issue, because Churchill did and said things about it which ought to be considered. Sweeping generalizations, I argued, have no place either in a biography or a seminar. Robert ended the discussion with a preemptory note. “I am one of Churchill’s strongest admirers, but I cannot accept claims that have no merit or justification. I see no point whatever in continuing this correspondence.”

And that, I thought, was that. Yet a year later he wrote to offer me a very good piece: “Myth-Shattering: An Actor Did NOT Give Churchill’s Speeches.” Instantly we renewed our correspondence, in which I was rewarded with a treasury of keen observations.

Robert’s shrewd thoughts on Churchill and politics, delivered ad hoc with an entre nous intimacy, were a privilege to read. (I share some below, all food for thought.) He even agreed to consider whatever I would write about Churchill and the Rhineland. I came to realize that here was a wise and opinionated Diogenes, to shed a kindly light over my own insignificant Churchill studies.

Alas the Rhineland piece was set aside, because like most of his friends and admirers I expected Robert would be with us a good while yet. Now if I write it, he will never read it, and then hammer me in cordial debate.** He died too young, of cancer on 20 May 1999, his second Churchill volume unpublished. I mourned the loss of a first class intellect and, as Churchill said on occasion, “a good House of Commons man.”

**See “Churchill and the Rhineland: ‘They Had Only to Act to Win.'”

Robert Rhodes James on Churchillians

From correspondence with the author, 1995-98.

Anthony Eden 

“I do not think that WSC developed ‘a cold hatred’ for Eden; certainly their correspondence would belie this. But the abandonment of the Suez Canal base in 1956 angered Churchill, as did Eden’s manifest impatience with WSC’s procrastination about retiring.”

George VI

“The relationship between Churchill and the King during the war is important. It has been consistently underestimated, and even on occasion ignored. It began stickily but developed into the closest collaboration between monarch and prime minister in modern British history. The Queen Mother was very affectionately amusing about WSC, as was the King when Churchill’s letters became especially flowery. On one occasion WSC enthusiastically responded to a plea for help in preparing a broadcast by the King. He sent His Majesty a speech he had composed specially. Of course, it contained words and phrases the King could not get his tongue round. While splendidly Churchillian, was so out of character for the King that it was politely rejected. Sadly, his draft seems to have disappeared.”

Harold Nicolson

“His position was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information between May 1940 and June 1941. This was a junior ministerial post in the Churchill Coalition Government. Alfred Duff Cooper was a disaster as Minister, and Harold’s career suffered thereby. But as his son Nigel has frankly admitted, ‘he was not a fit person to run a department in wartime.’ Indeed, much as I loved Harold, he was marvellously unfitted to administer or run anything. When WSC, who needed a Labour minister to balance the Coalition team, had to sack Harold, whom he greatly liked and respected, he made him a governor of the BBC. This was his true métier.”

Alfred Duff Cooper

“I too thought that John Charmley’s biography of Duff Cooper was much better than his Churchill book, though I thought he was unduly censorious about Duff’s drinking and womanizing. If his wife was tolerant of both, then I think we can be. I prefer red-blooded people to time-servers and sycophants. And Duff had real guts, in war and peace. And he wrote so wonderfully, gracefully and simply—particularly on a hot summer afternoon after a long lunch with beautiful women and plenty of champagne, good wine, and brandy. But this is now terribly unfashionable and non-PC!”

Lord Randolph Churchill

“I never believed the canard that he died of syphilis. When I was researching my Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1950s I discussed it with an eminent elderly specialist in the disease. He told me that, having looked at the symptoms, syphilis was the least likely cause of his decline and death. He was certainly treated for it, by a physician who was on public record as declaring that all nervous diseases were syphilitic. This, of course, we now know is nonsense. John Mather’s conclusion that the treatment only accelerated Lord Randolph’s mental collapse and death seems to me to be fully justified.

I am rather surprised that some of the Churchills told you they believed the story, although Randolph, ill-advised as usual, did. But the Churchills do like to tease. Clarissa Avon [WSC’s niece who married Eden] once told me that ‘of course’ her father Jack was illegitimate, knowing full well that this was nonsense, but rather chic. Jack’s son John was physically almost an exact replica of his Uncle Winston, and with an even more formidable capacity for alcohol. He lived to a much greater age than the modern Puritans deem possible, and was also a very good artist.”

The following, just resurfaced, were not in my original post but shed more light on the great character he was….

Churchill symposia

“I am glad your last Symposium went much better, and the style that I had advised was adopted. The great Austin Conference on WSC* was made memorable and enjoyable by the provision of the smoking room in the LBJ Library, and, by a stroke of added genius by Roger Louis, a bottle of bourbon for each participant. No wonder it was a triumph. And WSC would have greatly approved.” *Published as Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War, Lord Blake and William Roger Louis, editors (1993).

WSC’s grandsons?

“We had a fine dinner meeting of The Other Other Club in Madison. I cut down my contribution drastically, as the old boys were longing to get at their oysters and Pol Roger…. I did the same at the Anniversary meeting in Zurich, where I spoke from the same podium as WSC had in 1946. Alas the Swiss Foreign Minister gave an interminable and hardly relevant speech, Mine went well, and there were many requests afterwards for the full text. The Swiss Press got rather confused and described Nicholas Soames and me as WSC’s ‘two grandsons.’ This puzzled the multitude, as the physical resemblance is absolutely nil. Nicholas, of course, thought it hilarious.”

The weed

“If we have another Winston Churchill symposium it really must recognise that a non-smoking Churchill Conference is a contradiction in terms, almost as idiotic as a non-smoking Churchill Cabinet! Auberon Waugh has formed a club in London in which smoking is compulsory. This may be taking the counter-revolution rather too far, but he is making a point against the PC fanatics.”

The Memoirs: An Appreciation

We were welcomed here like people returning from the Promised Land of Utopia. A million questions…. “What do they really think?” “Do they think us phony?” “Are they on our side?” “Why is the betting going against us?”…. And weaving through the alarms was the conviction of Parliament and the people that Winston must take the helm of our scandalised ship. He must shoulder our hopes and our efforts and imbue us with courage, or the ship would sink. —Lady Diana Cooper, returning from America, March 1940, Trumpets from the Steep, 1960.

*****

Let us begin by recording the main criticisms of Churchill’s The Second World War. It is not history. Its grandiose prose was inflicted on apathetic readers who only wanted peace and a quiet life. It is biased—the author never puts a foot wrong. He publishes hundreds of his own memoranda and directives—but few replies to them. He moralizes incessantly about dictators and their empires—but not Britain’s. The impact of the war on Britain, the details of Cabinet meetings, are vague. Churchill alone confronts the French, Hitler, the Soviets, the Americans. “Every instance of adversity becomes an occasion for the narrator’s triumph.” Finally, Churchill didn’t write it himself—he relied on a team of researchers, military and political.

In the words of Arthur Balfour, these indictments contain much that is true and much that is trite. “But what’s true is trite, and what’s not trite is not true.”

“This is not history—this is my case”

Professor J.H. Plumb referred to Churchill’s work as A History of the Second World War —and then said it was not history. Churchill himself contributed to the confusion: “…it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” He also referred to his “history” in letters to Truman and Eisenhower. But it’s a memoir, not a history—like The World Crisis, his volumes on the First World War. There he had explained his approach:

I must therefore at the outset disclaim the position of the historian. It is not for me with my record and special  point of view to pronounce a final conclusion. That must be left to others and to other times. But I intend to set forth what I believe to be fair and true; and I present it as a contribution to history of which note should be taken  together with other accounts.

Some thought Churchill dissembled and was too modest. John Keegan called The Second World War “a great history” of “monumental quality…extraordinary in its sweep and comprehensiveness, balance and literary effect; extraordinary in the singularity of its point of view; extraordinary as the labour of a man, already old, who still had ahead of him a career large enough to crown most other statesmen’s lives; extraordinary as a contribution to the memorabilia of the English-speaking peoples.”

“Britain was led by a professional writer”

If that seems too positive a view, consider Manfred Weidhorn’s evaluation: “a record of history made rather than written…. No other wartime leader in history has given us a work of two million words written only a few years after the events and filled with messages among world potentates which had so recently been heated and secret. Britain was led by a professional writer.”

As a professional writer wishing to build a legend, goes another refrain, our author ignored or buried unpleasant facts, or twisted them to suit his purpose. I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t. Yet few memoirs are so magnanimous, as illustrated by a principle Churchill adopts in his preface: “Never criticising any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about it.” The effect, Keegan tells us, “is to invest the whole history with those qualities of magnanimity and good will by which he set such store, and the more so as it deals with personalities.”

Intensely personal

So much for the non-trite and non-true. Other criticisms are hardly crippling. That Churchill assigned passages of military and political  history to teams of specialists should hardly surprise us. When he began the writing he was over 70, not in the best of health, exhausted after six years of struggle. How many septuagenarians would take on such memoirs without help? Yet Churchill,  of course, signed off on every word. He corrected multiple galleys, demanding fresh ones, correcting again, until beyond the last moment, to the exasperation of publishers.

The Second World War is indeed intensely personal, considering the war from Churchill’s angle not Britain’s. He even gave the work its own Moral: “In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.” The memoirs are biased; they exaggerate; they commit sins of omissions and a few counterfactuals. All personal memoirs do.

His own spin

Churchill had a right to make his case. Many times in his career he had been second-guessed or misjudged. There was Antwerp and the Dardanelles in the First World War. There was Bolshevism, Irish independence, the General Strike in the 1920s. Then came the India Act, the Abdication, the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini and Hitler. That is a formidable assortment of grist for critics.

During the war Churchill had attacked an ally’s fleet, fired generals, lost battleships, stalled on launching a second front, argued with Roosevelt and Stalin, and carpet-bombed Germany. He felt the need to defend his actions, knowing that very soon he would be second-guessed by postwar critics, former colleagues and historians eager to seize on and emphasize his mistakes. And the mistakes were there.

In fact, “revisionism” had already begun as he wrote the second of six volumes. Churchill confronted it:

In view of the many accounts which are extant and multiplying of my supposed aversion from any kind of large-scale opposed-landing, such as took place in Normandy in 1944, it may be convenient if I make it clear that from the very beginning I provided a great deal of the impulse and authority for creating the immense apparatus and armada for the landing of armour on beaches, without which it is now universally recognised that all such major operations would have been impossible.

Simply great writing

The merits of Churchill’s memoirs eclipse their evident flaws. There is, first, what Robert Pilpel calls “the warm sense of communion,” through which only a great writer can place the reader at his side in the march of events. Those events are conducted like a symphony.

Or if you will allow the risk of hyperbole, consider Manfred Weidhorn’s comparisons of Churchill’s greatest scenes with those of a first class novel:

Such is the eerie sense of déjà vu and ubi sunt upon his return in 1939, as First Lord [of the Admiralty], to Scapa Flow, exactly a quarter of a century after having, at the start of the other world war, paid the same visit during the same season in the same capacity….

The collapse of the venerable and once mighty France and Churchill’s agony are beautifully rendered by the sensuous detail of the old gentlemen industriously carrying French archives on wheelbarrows to bonfires….

Near the end of the work appears one of the greatest scenes of all. On the way to the Potsdam Conference, Churchill flies to Berlin and its “chaos of ruins.” Taken to Hitler’s Chancellery, he walks through its shattered halls for “quite a long time”…. The great duel is over; the victor stands on the site from which so much evil originated…. “We were given the best first-hand accounts available at that time of what had happened in these final scenes.”

Puck’s escape

Amid the pathos, humour bubbles incessantly to the surface, Pilpel writes, “as if Puck had escaped from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and infiltrated Paradise Lost.” Few other memoirs, let alone histories, leaven their wisdom with such merry wit.

There is Churchill’s famous desert conference with his Generals, “in a tent full of flies and important personages.” We read his courtly letter to the Japanese Ambassador, signed “your obedient servant,” announcing “with highest consideration” that a state of war exists between Britain and Japan. “When you have to kill a man,” he adds, “it costs nothing to be polite.”

All this levity “somehow sits well with the cataclysmic and lugubrious matter of the story,” Weidhorn adds, “for Churchill does not allow the humor to take the sting out of events or reduce war to a mere game. He simply refuses to overlook the light side…. Such a tone, markedly different from the histrionics of the other side, may well be a secret of survival. As Shaw said, he who laughs lasts.”

Telegrams, directives, harangues

Churchill also adds lengthy appendices of personal communications and directives to military and civilian officials. Here again he has been accused of bias, selectivity and an air of infallibility. Some of the messages were trivial—even unworthy of him. But in the main they had a powerful effect: they kept everyone’s eyes on the prize.

Eliot A. Cohen has described a vivid example of one of these, in volume 3, The Grand Alliance. It followed the invasion exercise called VICTOR, in January 1941, which presupposed that the Germans landed five divisions on the Norfolk coast and established a beachhead. Churchill wrote its commander, General Alan Brooke:

I presume the details of this remarkable feat have been worked out by the Staff concerned. Let me see them. For instance, how many ships and transports carried these five Divisions? How many Armoured vehicles did they comprise? How many motor lorries, how many guns, how much ammunition, how many men, how many tons of stores, how far did they advance in the first 48 hours, how many men and vehicles were assumed to have landed in the first 12 hours, what percentage of loss were they debited with?

What happened to the transports and store-ships while the first 48 hours of fighting were going on? Had they completed emptying their cargoes, or were they still lying in shore off the point protected by superior enemy daylight Fighter formations? How many Fighter airplanes did the enemy have to employ, if so, to cover the landing places?… I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast at the same extreme range of our Fighter protection and assuming that the Germans have naval superiority in the Channel….

* * *

Brooke gamely replied, Churchill rebutted, and the debate went on until it finally petered out in May. What is its significance? Professor Cohen explains:

It is noteworthy, first, that the commander in charge of the exercise, Brooke, stood up to Churchill and not only did not suffer by it, but ultimately gained promotion to the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. But more important is Churchill’s observation that “It is of course quite reasonable for assumptions of this character to be made as a foundation for a military exercise. It would be indeed a darkening counsel to make them the foundation of serious military thought.”

By no means did Churchill always have it right, but he often caught his military staff when they had it wrong. Churchill exercised one of his most important functions as war leader by holding their calculations and assertions up to the standards of a massive common sense, informed by wide reading and experience at war.

“Trumpets from the steep”

Space is running out, and I haven’t told you the half of it. The memoirs remind us of Trumpets from the Steep, Diana Cooper’s deathless title (from Wordsworth). The Second World War is indeed a trumpet call—from heights the reader might not otherwise glimpse. A prose epic like The River War and Marlborough, it belongs among the first rank of Churchill’s books. Flaws and all, it is indispensable reading for anyone who seeks understanding of the war that made us what we are today. As Manfred Weidhorn concludes, “this is not just a unique revelation of the exercise of power from atop an empire in duress, but also one of the fascinating products of the human spirit, both as an expression of a personality and as a somewhat anomalous epic tale filled with the depravities, miseries and glories of man.”

Bibliography: Books on the Book

Arranged chronologically: All of these works concentrate in part or whole on Churchill memoirs, often disputing them on specific points. For notes, editions and links to reviews see my Annotated Bibliography, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2021. Look for copies on Bookfinder.com or Amazon.

Fabre-Luce, Alfred. La Fumée d’un Cigare [The Smoke of a Cigar]. Paris: L’Élan, 1949, 246 pp., softbound, text in French; an Italian edition was also published.

Kwasniewski, Tadeus. An Open Letter of a Chicago Waiter to Winston Churchill. Chicago, privately published by the author, 1950, 20 pp., softbound. On the half-title: “Let’s Face the Truth, Mr. Churchill.”

Neilson, Francis. The Churchill Legend. Appleton, Wis.: C. C. Nelson Publishing Co., 1954, 470 pp. Republished as The Churchill Legend: Churchill as Fraud, Fakir and Warmonger,  Brooklyn, N.Y.: Revisionist Press, 1979. Also listed as Churchill’s War Memoirs, 1979.

J.H. Plumb, “The Historian,” in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (London: Allen Lane, 1960); Churchill Revised. New York: Dial Press, 1969, 274 pp.

Vicuñia, Alejandro. Winston Churchill a través de sus Memorias [through His Memoirs]. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universidad Catôlica, 1961, 398 pp., text in Spanish.

Graebner, Walter. My Dear Mr. Churchill. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; London: Michael Joseph, 1965, 128 pp. Translations: German, Finnish, Norwegian.

Ashley, Maurice. Churchill as Historian. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968, 246 pp.

Weidhorn, Manfred. Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1974, 278 pp.

Weidhorn, Manfred. Sir Winston Churchill. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979, 174 pp. “Twayne’s English Author” series.

***

Alldritt, Keith. Churchill the Writer: His Life as Man of Letters. London: Hutchinson, Random Century Group, 1992, 168 pp.

Woods, Frederick. Artillery of Words: The Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. London: Leo Cooper Pen and Sword Books, 1992, 184 pp.

Gilbert, Martin. Winston Churchill and Emery Reves: Correspondence 1937-1964. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1997, 398 pp.

Valiunas, Algis. Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, 192 pp.

Reynolds, David. In Command of History: How Churchill Waged the War and Wrote His Way to Immortality. London: Allen Lane, 2004, 600 pp.

Rose, Jonathan. The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, 528 pp.

Allport, Alan. Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941. New York: Knopf, 2020, 608 pp.