The following story was published in 2023. We wondered if Artificial Intelligence had picked it up since. Apparently not, but they have muddied the waters. Again we asked the question: “What did “Winston Churchill say about bananas?” Last time ChatGPT said “nothing.” Now it replies with a red herring:

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying: “Why a banana?” This remark was made during a discussion about the design of weapons, particularly regarding the choice of the “banana-shaped” Sten gun magazine. Churchill, known for his sharp wit and curiosity, reportedly questioned the ergonomic and practical considerations behind the design. The comment highlights his attention to detail and his interest in the functionality of military equipment, though it has since been taken humorously in various contexts.

ChatGPT (2023)

Many have heard of ChatGPT, a language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3. “It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.” Recently, users have asked ChatGPT for Churchill quotes or speeches on all manner of subjects—and even essays about Churchill—which are remarkably convincing.

Steve Forbes, who advocates a return to the Gold Standard, asked ChatGPT for a Churchill speech supporting it. (As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29, Churchill returned Britain to Gold, for which he received much criticism.)

ChatGPT provided Mr. Forbes with a convincing transcript that sounded just like Churchill, but contained nothing he ever uttered or wrote. ChatGPT is also able to cough up genuine Churchill quotes. Unfortunately they have also mistakenly scanned many things he never said, and occasionally disgorge those, too.

No bananas

My colleague John Plumpton records one case, however, where ChatGPT was stumped. A user asked the chatbot for Churchill quotes relating to bananas. Here is the reply. (John writes: “I trust you have not lost your sense of humour”…)

We’re sorry, but it doesn’t appear that Winston Churchill ever made any quotes specifically about bananas. However, we can provide some fictional quotes that use his style and references to bananas….

Their fictional quotes they supplied were hilarious, and show the range of ChatGPT’s scans of Churchill’s actual words:

Bananas are the fruit of victory.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender to a lack of bananas.

Never in the field of human consumption was so much owed by so many to so few bananas.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to eat a banana.

But yes, he had some bananas

The only problem with all this is that Churchill did say things about bananas…. Thanks to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project’s scans of his 20 million published words, we have ChatGPT right where we want them:

A man walking down the street is confronted by a costermonger’s barrow filled with bananas. (Laughter.) I think it a great achievement, reflecting the utmost honour and credit upon all who were concerned in it, that this fruit—I will say delicious fruit, although I am not myself partial to it—which contains so many valuable food and fuel constituents, which a few years ago was the curious luxury of the rich, has now become an article of frequent consumption amongst the masses of the people. (Hear, hear.)  —WSC, Adelphia Hotel, Liverpool, 5 May 1906 (Complete Speeches, 1974, 8 vols., I: 622.)

And…

Churchill also made several references to bananas in his 1908 African travelogue:

Kampala, the home of 60,000 persons, is permanently invisible. The whole town is buried under the leaves of innumerable banana plantations, which afford shade and food to its people, and amid which their huts are thickly scattered and absolutely concealed. —WSC, My African Journey (1908; Leo Cooper edition 1989, 69.)

And as Prime Minister three decades later, he hadn’t lost his regard, despite his personal distaste, for the staple fruit of the tropics:

I should be much obliged if you would let me know the reasons which have made it necessary to stop the import of bananas altogether.” —WSC to Lord Woolton (Minister of Food), 29 November 1940 (The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, Never Surrender, May-December 1940. 2011, 1159.)

“Let not the slothful chortle”

Ian Langworth, who plies the trade of software engineer in Silicon Valley, reminds us not to be too complacent about all this. ChatGPT has only been around for a few years. “Give them another half decade and they’ll probably have picked up every word Churchill wrote.” (And why not? More and more of it is falling into the public domain.)

Unfortunately, at least so far, they lack the discernment to reject all the things he never said that are attributed to him far and wide.

Before we lazily laugh at the tech boffins’ failure accurately to pinpoint the Great Man’s every word, we might stop to consider: They are just getting started.

As WSC was wont to say on occasion: “Let not the slothful chortle.”

Tune in in five days…

…as ChatGPT presents a famous Churchill encounter and riposte as a Shakespeare play. (I am not making this up.)

New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941

Somewhere east of Ottawa, a special train bore the Prime Minister of Great Britain toward Washington. He had been in Canada to address Parliament. His most memorable lines in that speech came as he spoke of the French in 1940:

When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! … Some neck.

A week earlier Churchill had won cheers from hardened American politicians in Congress, hurling defiance at the enemy:

They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking…. What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

A high sense of the moment

Few besides those alive and sentient at that time can understand the magnitude of the task as the New Year began. Hitler held Europe from the Channel almost to Moscow. Nazi U-boats prowled the Atlantic, strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing toward Suez. Stalin’s Red Army was desperately hanging on. America had received a heavy blow at Pearl Harbor. Japan ran amok in China, British and Dutch East Asia and the Pacific.

Churchill saw only opportunity. “I was lucky in the timing of these speeches in Washington and Ottawa,” he wrote….

They came at the moment when we could all rejoice at the creation of the Grand Alliance, with its overwhelming potential force, and before the cataract of ruin fell upon us from the long, marvelously prepared assault of Japan.

Even while I spoke in confident tones I could feel in anticipation the lashes which were soon to score our naked flesh. Fearful forfeits had to be paid not only by Britain and Holland but by the United States, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in all the Asiatic lands and islands they lap with their waves. An indefinite period of military disaster lay certainly before us. Many dark and weary months of defeat and loss must be endured before the light would come again.

It didn’t matter. Churchill would make fighting speeches everywhere, to audiences large and small, to listeners grand and ordinary, time and again, until the end. One of his later bodyguards was flying Hurricanes in 1942. He said to me: “After one of those speeches, it didn’t matter that we were outnumbered and outgunned. We wanted the Germans to come.”

Here’s to the New Year

The train rushed on as the last minutes of 1941 ticked away. Soon it was steaming southward on New York Central’s broad tracks along the Hudson. Appropriately close to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, the Prime Minister called staff and reporters to the dining car. He wished, in a few words, to “cast some forward light upon the dark, inscrutable mysteries of the future.”

Of course he voiced confidence in the certainty of victory. He did not minimize the challenges, nor forecast when deliverance might come. That would depend “on our exertions, upon our achievements, and on the hazardous and uncertain course of the war.”

He entered the dining car amid cheers and applause, raising his glass to the company. “It was with no illusions,” he wrote, “that I wished them all a glorious New Year”:

“Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.”

“Churchill’s Christmas” is excerpted from a two-part article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text with footnotes, please click here. To Churchillian colleagues, and those who have encouraged and supported our Churchill work at Hillsdale College so many years: thank-you for being our friends.

Washington, 24 December 1941

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter… Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world. And so, in God’s mercy, a Happy Christmas to you all.”  —WSC

“My juvenile friends…”

Churchill’s ninety Christmases saw family joy interspersed with loneliness and separation, owed to a stern sense of duty. The festival was not always a joyous time, but it always illustrated Churchill’s sensitive, caring nature.

Young Winston wrote his first letter in January 1882. He was seven, celebrating Christmas at Blenheim, minus his parents: “My dear Mamma, I hope you are quite well. I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice it was so kind of you and dear Papa I send you my love and a great many kisses.”

When he was home, he was a handful. Reports of his mother’s disinterest are exaggerated. Lady Randolph was often absorbed in the lives of her two sons, if sometimes exasperated. In 1891 his parents planned to send him to France to polish his French over the holidays. Winston erupted: “I am forced to go to people who bore me excessively…. I should like to know if Papa was asked to ‘give up his holidays’ when he was at Eton.”

His mother angrily returned his letter unread, only to reap the whirlwind: Never, he replied, would he write her a letter of any length, “as in my letter’s length I can perceive a reason for your not reading it….I expect you were too busy with your parties and arrangements for Christmas.”

“Are gentlemen all fox hunting?”

Childhood frustrations were forgotten after his father’s untimely death in 1895. Now his mother was his ardent facilitator. As she aged her feelings deepened, along with her desire to have her sons with her at Christmas. Many times this was not to be. Winston was a soldier and war correspondent now, consumed by duty and ambition.

In 1899 in South Africa, he escaped from a Boer prison camp. He spent Christmas Eve at British Commander General Buller’s headquarters in Chieveley. He awoke Christmas day in a hut a few hundred yards from where he had been captured. His thoughts were not of good will toward men.

Cabling a column to the Morning Post, he urged the dispatch of more troops to the Boer War: “More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all fox hunting? Why not an English Light Horse? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war.”

This was not received with pleasure back home. He recalled later that a London acquaintance cabled: “Best friends here hope you won’t go making further ass of yourself.”

But two years later, on an extensive lecture tour of North America, his situation had improved:  “I have promised to eat Christmas dinner with Lord Minto, Governor General of Canada, at Ottawa.”

“There’s a European in the bath”

Winston did like to move around. At Christmas 1907, now Undersecretary for the Colonies, he was in Khartoum, where he had charged with the 21st Lancers nine years earlier. Now he was making an inspection tour of African colonies. His secretary Eddie Marsh dispatched a servant to prepare him a tub. The man reported, “there’s a European in the bath.” [7] Churchill had got there first. He usually did.

He stayed home more after he married Clementine Hozier in 1908, but never at the expense of official responsibilities, which mushroomed during the First World War. From his post at the front after the Dardanelles debacle in 1915, he managed to secure leave, returning on Christmas Eve.

Christmas as Chartwell

Churchill enjoyed more conventional Christmases in the 1920s, after the war ended. The first venue was Blenheim. After his cousin “Sunny,” the 9th Duke of Marlborough had divorced, the scene shifted to Chartwell, the Churchill home from 1922.

Clementine Churchill, a marvelous hostess, was inevitably the director of events. With the births of Sarah (1918) and Mary (1922) it was a crowded household, and guests were restricted to close family: Winston’s brother Jack and Lady Gwendoline (affectionately nicknamed “Goonie”), their children Johnny and Peregrine and baby Clarissa (who would later marry Anthony Eden).

Sometimes they were joined by Clementine’s sister, the widowed Nellie Romilly, with her two “tiny monsters,” Esmond and Giles. One of the few outsiders was Winston’s scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann, who would bring along fine cigars and a case of champagne, even though he himself was a teetotaler.

Those were wonderful times, Sarah Churchill remembered. Maryott Whyte, a cousin and Mary’s beloved nanny, played Father Christmas and decorated the Christmas tree: “One day in full array she leant to put one tiny thing right and was nearly burnt to death…. The smaller children, which included me, were not told and somehow Nana as Father Christmas still appeared.”

“Associate and fraternal bottles”

Jack’s son Johnny recalled how his Uncle Winston adored children and gift-giving:

Charades, with its secrecy, dressing up and acting, particularly appealed to him. He was a generous uncle, and we in return always gave him the best presents we could afford, though choosing a gift for someone who already had everything he needed was a worry. I solved it by asking the advice of his butler or his valet….

Some of the presents, such as a pair of braces or a toothbrush, struck me as most dull, but at least I felt they were needed. The wonderful part about it is that my uncle loved, and always has loved, receiving presents. No matter how small and humble the gift, he accepted it with surprise and pleasure. “For me?” he would ask, his eyes lighting up. “How very kind!”

Johnny’s brother Peregrine remembered Christmas 1932, when their uncle created his famous still life, “Bottlescape.” Churchill had received as a present “a huge bottle of brandy, and decided to paint it, accompanied by lesser bottles.

“He sent us children scurrying around Chartwell to find them: ‘Fetch me Associate and Fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container.’”

“This sad crepuscule”

For a man who underwent civilization’s greatest storms, engineering a special Christmas was no problem. One useful prop was his outdoor heated swimming pool.

Lady Diana Cooper referred to “this sad crepuscule” as “Winston’s delightful toy.” Taking her turn in a wintery pool, Lady Diana remembered Churchill summoning Inches the butler:

“Tell Allen to heave a lot more coal on. I want the thing full blast.” Inches returned to say that Allen was out for the day. “Then tell Arthur I want it full blast,” but it was Arthur’s day out as well, so the darling old schoolboy went surreptitiously and stoked it himself for half an hour, coming in on the verge of apoplexy. Again all had to bathe in the afternoon.

More separate Christmases superseded those halcyon days. In 1934, his wife was en route to the South Seas on a voyage with their friends the Moynes; the next two holidays would also be spent apart.

In 1935, Churchill repaired for painting and sunshine to Majorca, remembering to invite Lindemann: “It would be very nice if you could come out…. Clemmie and I will have everything ready for you on the 19th. I am not sure whether she is staying for Christmas or not.” Alas she was not.

Christmas apart

In 1936 Churchill faced his ever-present money problems. “There is no less than £6,000 to pay in income and super tax during 1937,” he wrote his wife. He would sail to America on December 18th for a series of lucrative lectures. “I am disappointed not to be with you all at Christmas: and I don’t know how I shall spend my poor Christmas day [but] I feel that this particular toil is a measure of prudence.”

It didn’t work out. Instead Churchill spent a bleak holiday in the wake of the Abdication of King Edward VIII and mounting European dangers. He pleaded in vain on the King’s behalf; the House hooted him down. Temporarily he lost all the credibility he had gained in the rearmament debate.

Christmas amidst war

Nineteen thirty-nine found Britain at war. The family gathered for the last Christmas of a dying era. Now that he was again First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill’s sense of duty prevailed. “In view of the danger of surprise attacks at a time when the enemy may expect to find us off our guard, there must be no break or holiday period at Christmas or the New Year,” he minuted.

The war clamped many a lid on Christmas celebrations. When Eric Seal, his principal private secretary, asked to arrange a week’s leave for the private office, Churchill replied: “Your minute about Christmas holidays surprises me. No holidays can be given at Christmas, but every endeavour should be made to allow members of the staff to attend Divine Service on Christmas Day, either in the morning or afternoon. My own plans will be to work either here (Chequers) or in London continuously.”

He set off from Downing Street wishing the staff he left behind “a happy Christmas and a frantic New Year.” Private Secretary John Martin wrote:

We had a festive family Christmas…. For lunch we had the largest turkey I have ever seen…. Afterwards we listened to the King’s speech and Vic Oliver, Sarah Churchill’s actor husband, played the piano and Sarah sang. It was the same after dinner.

“Up to the neck”

December 1941 found the United States in the war, “up to the neck and in to the death,” as Churchill put it—and found him, quite naturally, in Washington, for the memorable remarks above.

By the end of 1942 things began to improve. Christmas at Chequers found Churchill in “a grand temper,” secretary Elizabeth Nel remembered. He “left us in peace most of the time and just sat up in bed reading a book and looking like a benevolent old cherub.”

To President Roosevelt he telegraphed: “I passed a happy Christmas in your home and now I send my heartfelt wishes to you and all around you on this brighter day than we have yet seen.” Roosevelt replied, “The old team-work is grand.”

Churchill nearly died of pneumonia in North Africa following the Teheran Conference in late 1943; his wife and doctor rushed to his side in Carthage. His doctor Lord Moran spoke of his emotion when told she was coming. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “he’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.”

Sure enough, by Christmas Day he was back on whisky and cigars, enjoying an epic plum pudding, and meeting with General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. General Alexander, Air Marshal Tedder and Admiral Cunningham were also there to discuss the coming invasion of Europe.

“This brand I snatched on Christmas Day”

The following year drew him away again, without protest from the stalwart Clementine. The family had gathered at Chequers with a huge Christmas tree, the gift of President Roosevelt. Suddenly, telegrams brought news of a civil war in Greece. Churchill immediately left for Athens, to negotiate a truce between communists and royalists that saved Greece.

Nine months later he remarked that the “Bolshevisation of the Balkans” was almost complete. All “the cabinets of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are in Soviet control, excepting only Athens. This brand I snatched from the burning on Christmas Day.”

At Chartwell on Christmas 1946, Churchill’s presents included honey from Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Service throughout his premiership. Two bottles of port arrived from Duncan and Diana Sandys. Sir Stafford Cripps, perhaps in jest, sent a bottle of turpentine.

Despite political opposition the Churchills remained good friends with the Clement Attlees. Replying to their Christmas greeting, he mentioned struggling with his war memoirs. “It is a colossal undertaking…. However, it is a good thing to get a certain amount of material together which, if not history, will still at least be a contribution thereto.”

“Whirl me round the floor once, Mule”

An aging Churchill was now less able to cope with England’s damp, cold winters. Christmas 1947 found him in Marrakesh, where he came to paint and write. At the Mamounia Hotel he hosted a party for staffers who had given up their holiday to accompany him. “There was a 25-foot Christmas tree, windows hung with orange branches, and daubs of white paint on the window panes made it seem that a blizzard was blowing outside,” wrote his daughter Sarah. “Everyone was ‘dolled up’….When midnight struck they raised their classes and clapped—and ‘Vive Churchill’ and ‘Bravo’ echoed round the room.”

The band played It’s a Long Way to Tipperary as a Christmas pudding was brought in. Much moved, Churchill bowed to them all.

Suddenly he stood. Sarah thought it was time to go. Instead he turned to her. “Whirl me round the floor once, Mule—I think I can manage it.” They took the floor for a waltz amidst a roar of applause. Then Churchill danced with all his secretaries.

“You are the Christmas Fairy”

Suddenly he noticed “a good-looking fair lady” seated by herself. Sarah remembered him asking, “Why is she alone? Dance me around the floor.” They stopped before this proud but forlorn looking woman. Churchill said: “You are the Christmas Fairy. May I have a dance?”

Sarah had no idea what they said, but “he never liked to see a beautiful woman alone. When their turn at dancing was done, he left her at her place. Meanwhile, the detectives were wondering if she had been imported as a spy.” A telegram arrived later:

YOU WILL NEVER KNOW MY NAME BUT I AM PROUD TO HAVE DANCED WITH WINSTON CHURCHILL.

“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.

The Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011 and is back in the news. The hitherto unsuccessful rebels have now taken over. (Whether they offer any better prospects for Syrians than the Assad regime is unclear.) So it is not entirely irrelevant to update this note about Syria from 2013.

In September that year, the political satirist Will Durst, “Pied Piper of the Potomac,” wrote in Summit Daily:

Everyone pretends not to be knee-deep in the icky, tricky, sticky Syria situation. You might say Washington is in a Semi-Syrious mode right now. And a Semi-Not-So-Syrious mode. Simultaneously. Because this whole affair is riddled with enigmas and mysteries enough to make Winston Churchill spin his conundrums right off. And rumor has it, he harbored huge conundrums.

I don’t know if Mr. Durst is a Churchillian, but he certainly has Churchill’s knack for coining words. “Syrious” ranks with Churchill’s “purblind worldlings”—the kind of people he often wished to “destrigulate.”* A lot of them are in Washington.

Forget the WW2 comparisons

The late, great  Churchillian Charles Krauthammer joined the Syria debate around the same time as Durst. The commentator Hugh Hewitt had asked CK whether  the present-day United States is the same one Churchill described in 1943 at Harvard: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

Was America still up to that? Hewitt asked. Attitudes about America’s role in the world are far different today than in Churchill’s time.

Of course they are. And Charles Krauthammer, sage as ever, cautioned against comparing modern situations like Syria (we might now add Ukraine or Gaza) to the Second World War, or modern political leaders to Churchill.

There is a difference of scale…. The Second World War was an existential struggle where the future of civilization was in the balance. It could be that Syria, or these other trouble spots, will develop into a World War-like conflict. But that is fairly unlikely right now. It is not a conflict in which the existence of ways of life is at stake. [Remember, this was in 2013.]

Syria and Assad are (or were) supported by Russia—at least ostensibly. That makes what happens there more important than it might otherwise be. There is no shortage of opinions as to what the U.S. or the West or free peoples should do about Syria and its leading ally. That is a ft subject for debate. But as to what Winston Churchill would do….please.

Strength and weakness

We may, however, learn from a piece of Churchillian advice from 1946, which may still be applicable. He was talking about the Russians, but it applies very broadly as a guide for general policy:

Q: What was it?

The Atlantic Charter was issued by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in August 1941. “We had the idea,” Churchill later told Parliament, “to give all peoples, and especially the oppressed and conquered peoples, a simple, rough and ready wartime statement of the goal towards which the British Commonwealth and the United States mean to make their way, and thus make a way for others to march with them….”

A reader asks if the Charter had a second iteration:

In your review of Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network, you link Martin Gilbert’s 2005 lecture on Churchill and America. In it, Sir Martin said: “One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced…was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House.” Was this, as he hinted, a second Atlantic Charter?

A: “Perhaps—perhaps not”

Sir Martin was quoting, actually paraphrasing, Churchill’s description of the charter he signed with Eisenhower in 1954. He correctly said it was never published. Finding it proved a challenge.

Sir Martin’s book Churchill and America references the Eisenhower Papers at Johns Hopkins University. The university library could not find it. They referred me to the Eisenhower Library, which did not reply. (Some libraries seem to have difficulties even answering queries about materials in their care.)

Repeated online searches eventually produced the text. Back in 2005, Sir Martin wished that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair publish the “Second Charter” as a gesture of solidarity during the Iraq war.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project met Sir Martin’s wish that the “charter” be published, albeit on its seventieth anniversary. The wording certainly bears the imprint of Sir Winston.

Washington, 29 June 1954

As we terminate our conversations on subjects of mutual and world interest, we again declare that: 

(1) In intimate comradeship, we will continue our united efforts to secure world peace based upon the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which we reaffirm. 

(2) We, together and individually, continue to hold out the hand of friendship to any and all nations, which by solemn pledge and confirming deeds show themselves desirous of participating in a just and fair peace.

(3) We uphold the principle of self-government and will earnestly strive by every peaceful means to secure the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence. We welcome the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal. As regards formerly sovereign states now in bondage, we will not be a party to any arrangement or treaty which would confirm or prolong their unwilling subordination. In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure they are conducted fairly.

*

(4) We believe that the cause of world peace would be advanced by general and drastic reduction under effective safeguards of world armaments of all classes and kinds. It will be our persevering resolve to promote conditions in which the prodigious nuclear forces now in human hands can be used to enrich and not to destroy mankind. 

(5) We will continue our support of the United Nations and of existing international organizations that have been established in the spirit of the Charter for common protection and security. We urge the establishment and maintenance of such associations of appropriate nations as will best, in their respective regions, preserve the peace and the independence of the peoples living there. When desired by the peoples of the affected countries, we are ready to render appropriate and feasible assistance to such associations.           

(6) We shall, with our friends, develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue these purposes effectively. In pursuit of this purpose we will seek every means of promoting the fuller and freer interchange among us of goods and services which will benefit all participants.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston S. Churchill 

Self-government, self-determination

In the original Atlantic Charter, Churchill had been careful to distinguish self-government from self-determination. Britain and the U.S. agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

Churchill’s hand was again evident in the 1954 declaration, with its closely similar wording: “We uphold the principle of self-government…the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence.” They welcomed “the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal.” (Italics mine.)

The British Empire was much diminished by 1954. But this wording preserved a certain flexibility for Britain over the colonies that remained. In the years which followed, under Churchill’s successors, colony after British colony became independent. Most evolved peaceably, and with far less strife than colonies of other empires. Today many are members of the useful, if sadly underutilized, Commonwealth of Nations.

“Rough-and-ready”

Churchill glossed over minor semantics in his report to Parliament. The statement, he said, was only “a declaration of our basic unity.” Angl0-American unity, he continued, was “the strongest hope that all mankind may survive in freedom and justice.

This was virtually the same meaning Churchill had attached to the 1941 Atlantic Charter: “A simple, rough-and-ready” statement by which Britain and America “mean to make their way.”

In retrospect

Was the 1954 Washington declaration a second Atlantic Charter? Probably not, writes Roosevelt-Churchill scholar Warren Kimball: “I’m a bit dubious about ordaining that statement, since it apparently attracted little attention and had no effect on history.”

Indeed, Churchill’s bright hopes for a “new charter” were quickly dashed. The Prime Minister was at sea, returning to England. There he dashed off a telegram to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, suggesting a high-level meeting with the Russians—absent Eisenhower.

Churchill informed Eisenhower, furious that he had not been consulted. ‘‘You did not let any grass grow under your feet,” he fired back. Back in London, the Cabinet was “even more indignant.” The Prime Minister had not consulted them, either.

Though the President later insisted he was “not vexed,” he wanted no Soviet summit. Privately, later, Eisenhower voiced the concern that “Winston would give away the store.”

Churchill’s initiative came to nothing. “I cherish hopes not illusions,” he replied. “And after all I am ‘an expendable’ and very ready to be one in so great a cause.”

In April 1955, convinced at last that he could not foster “a meeting at the summit,” Churchill resigned.

Three months later his successor and Eisenhower met with the Russians in Geneva.

Related reading

“Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing, After All Other Possibilities are Exhausted,” 2021.

“Researching the Atlantic Charter Conference, Argentia, Newfoundland, August 1941,” 2019.

“Bull in a China Shop (Dulles): Not Churchill’s Line,” 2022.

“Churchillian Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,’” 2019.

“Cita Stelzer on the Angl0-American Special Relationship,” 2024.

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.

In preparation for Sir Winston’s 150th birthday is my 800-page book, Churchill: Master of Language: The Encyclopedia of His Greatest Words. The publisher is Hillsdale College Press, with an e-book by Rosetta and a leatherbound limited edition by Easton Press.

The fifth and final edition of Churchill by Himself, aka Churchill in His Own Words, adds 1500 new quotations for a total over 5000. Its thirty-four chapters and seven appendices contain half a million words—the most memorable or amusing Churchill said. Included is an exhaustive index to key phrases, people, places and events. Watch this site for further news.

Updated from 2012, here is a quartet of frequently asked questions about what Churchill said (or didn’t say). Two are genuine and in the book. Two are in my “Red Herrings” appendix of words Churchill never uttered.

“If God wearied of mankind”

From Churchill’s last major speech in Parliament comes a quotation devoid of his usual optimism. For some reason I can’t possibly imagine, this often comes up with regard to current global affairs:

Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people; they are going soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind. —House of Commons, 1 March 1955

“Not being scuppered”

If we could avoid getting scuppered by God, Churchill hoped we might also avoid it in politics.

A reader writes: “Can you confirm that Churchill said this? He became prime minister again in October 1951. A month later he supposedly announced three priorities to his private secretary, Jock Colville. Allegedly he said: ‘houses, red meat and not getting scuppered.’ But I can’t find it in Colville’s Fringes of Power.”

It was quoted as you state it by the late Paul Addison in his outstanding book Churchill on the Home Front (1992) 412, footnoted to Fringes of Power, the Colville diary, 22-23 March 1952. But Paul had the verb wrong.

What Churchill said was “not being scuppered.”  As such it appears in Fringes of Power (Hodder & Stoughton first U.S. edition. 1985), 644. Martin Gilbert also has it in Never Despair, volume 8 of the Official Biography (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 717.

The past: condemned to repeat it

A librarian asked about the famous quote by George Santayana (in The Life of Reason, 1905): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” She knew the quote was originally Santayana’s, but wished to know if Churchill said it. And if so, when?

I searched the Hillsdale College Churchill Project database: 80 million published words by and about WSC. This includes his own 20 million (books, articles, speeches, letters, private papers). Alas I could find no occurrence of Santayana in anything Churchill said.  I could not even find key phrases (“remember the past”…”condemned to repeat it”). So Churchill never repeated Santayana’s phrase in so many words, though he certainly shared the sentiment.

Churchill worried also that knowledge of the past would mean “the most thoughtless of ages. Every day headlines and short views” (House of Commons, 16 November 1948). But perhaps his best remark on the subject was this:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. —House of Commons, 2 May 1935, after the Stresa Conference, in which Britain, France and Italy agreed—futilely—to maintain the independence of Austria.

Shooting his son-in-law

A reader asks if Churchill ever admired Mussolini. This doesn’t refer to the bouquets he threw Il Duce in 1927, when he persuaded Musso to repay the Italian war debt. It supposedly occurred in a conversation involving Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, who married his daughter Diana.

The story goes that toward the end of the Second World War, Sandys told Churchill that “Hitler and Mussolini have an even greater burden to bear, because everything is going wrong for them.” Supposedly Churchill replied: Ah, but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law!

I will not dignify that with quotation marks because it is nothing Churchill said. It refers to the execution by firing squad of Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944). The non-quote originated in newspaper proprietor Cecil King’s war memoir, With Malice Toward None (1970)—a diary note for 20 July 1944. But King added that it was “obviously concocted by some wag.” No other source states that Churchill made any such statement.

In fact Churchill quite liked Duncan Sandys and appointed him to important government ministries. More believable is that Churchill said this about a son-in-law he thoroughly disliked: Vic Oliver, née von Samek, an Austrian-born music hall comedian who married Sarah Churchill in 1936. Supposedly Oliver asked WSC if he admired any enemies, and Churchill named Mussolini for being able to shoot his son-in-law. It is all rubbish.

What Churchill said

Winston Churchill’s first worry was for his daughter. If war came, he told Sarah, “you will be married to the enemy.” —Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (1965), 52.

To his wife, WSC declared Oliver “as common as dirt. An Austrian citizen, a resident in U.S., and here on license and an American passport: twice divorced: thirty-six so he says. A horrible mouth: a foul Austro-Yankee drawl. I did not offer to shake hands.” —Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 10 (2008), 53.

True, Churchill called Mussolini every name in his book: ”whipped jackal”…”organ grinder’s monkey”…”absurd imposter.” But while Churchill mentioned Ciano’s execution, he did not say say he approved:

[T]he successful campaign in Sicily brought about the fall of Mussolini and the heartfelt repudiation by the Italian people of the Fascist creed. Mussolini indeed escaped, to eat the bread of affliction at Hitler’s table, to shoot his son-in-law, and help the Germans wreak vengeance upon the Italian masses whom he had professed to love. and over whom he had ruled for more than twenty years. —Broadcast, London, 26 March 1944

Italian partisans caught up with Mussolini in 1945, the same year Sarah and Vic divorced. Churchill had warmed slightly toward Oliver by then, though Vic had the infuriating habit of calling him “Popsie.” Churchill was upset over the breakup, mainly thinking about Sarah.

Desert Island Discs

For trivia fans, Vic Oliver was the very first guest on the long-running BBC programme, “Desert Island Discs” in 1942. See Alex Hudson, “The Castaway Who Annoyed Churchill,” BBC News Magazine, 26 January 2012.

Related reading

“All the Quotes Winston Churchill Never Said,” Part 1 of 4 parts, 2018.

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

“‘Greatest Law-Giver’: The Truth Behind Churchill’s Mussollini Bouquets,” 2022

“Myths of Dear Benito: Churchill’s Alleged Mussolini Complex,” 2024.

“Fascists of the Future Will Call Themselves Anti-Fascissts,” 2020.

To Rat and Re-Rat

This Re-Rat post first appeared in 2009. In updating it, very few politicians have qualified since Senator Judd Gregg and the late Senator Arlen Specter (both of whom I admired).

In 2009, I proudly presented the Churchill Re-Rat Award (issued infrequently) to Senator Judd Gregg (R.-NH). Judd had accepted nomination as President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce. Then he withdrew, saying he could not balance “being in the Cabinet versus myself as an individual doing my job.”

Gregg’s nomination had sewn fear among conservatives. If he left the Senate, NH’s then-Democrat Governor, John Lynch, would appoint a Democrat or liberal Republican in his place.

Art of the Re-Rat

“To rat” is a once-common Parliamentary practice. Once, told that a Conservative MP was ratting to join the Liberal Party, Churchill exclaimed: “That’s the only instance of a rat swimming toward a sinking ship.”

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

But not completely! Just a few weeks after Gregg, Senator Arlen Specter (D.-Pa.) re-ratted when he switched from the Republicans to the Democrats. A registered Democrat, Specter had been Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney under District Attorney James Crumlish, but in 1965 he ran and beat Crumlish. Specter subsequently ratted by changing his registration to Republican. In 2009 he re-ratted to the Democrats.

Flying Fickle Finger of Fate

I must now commission two copies of the Churchill Re-Rat Award, whose design I am pondering. It might well take the shape of the “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate,” formerly dispensed by the Rowan and Martin TV show “Laugh-In.”

One hopes that the fine art of the Re-Rat will witness a revival. Every politician who is thinking that he or she no longer agrees with the party should rat, or re-rat. Tulsi Gabbard has recently half-ratted, but has not so far completed the process. To do that she would have needed to be nominated for Vice-President. (Regrettably IMHO.) But she does not seem likely to re-rat.

Re-rat now!

This Churchill practice might produce a historic realignment of the parties. Perhaps even new Liberal and Conservative parties, which will better define the two very opposite philosophies and approaches on issues. Then we can get down to the business of arguing both sides of the debate instead of obfuscating, dodging and virtue-signaling, in order to toe some imagined party line.

As Churchill, who always put principle before party, remarked early on: “The alternation of parties in power, like the rotation of crops, has beneficial results.” (House of Commons, 25 June 1907.)

Q: “How many jibes were aimed at Churchill?”

Charles Legge, the Daily Mail Q&A editor, was asked by a reader: “Entire books celebrate Winston Churchill’s insults, but what jibes were directed at him?” Mr. Legge offered a classic, delivered by Lord Haldane, a portly colleague given to witty rejoinders (below). Daily Mail readers added two more. Surely Churchill picked up many more jibes than this. Is there a list? —N.D., Camp Hill, Penna.

A: Incoming! 

No, but you prompt us to create one. Churchill, of course, received as good as he gave. For the most part, he took jibes sent his way good-naturedly, sometimes repeating them himself.

In compiling this list, we were struck by the good humor of many critics. Relatively few expressed real malice—Samuel Hoare and Aneurin Bevan being exceptions. (Rab Butler’s nasty aside when Churchill became prime minister quickly subsided when he saw opportunities and was given a Cabinet ministry.) Some were delivered with, or for, laughs. A few evidenced affection. It was another world, when decorum was expected— and prevailed.

Readers are welcome to add to this list in the comments box. Please provide the source (Hansard or book, author and page) and the most exact date available. Thanks for many of the following jibes to Richard Cohen, Andrew Roberts, Dave Turrell, William John Shepherd, Charles Legge  and Daily Mail correspondents Peter Gilbert and Dave Taylor.

Archie MacLaren

1888: “He’s quite useless and a snotty little b****r.”

Leopold Maxse

June 1904: “Churchill’s attitude cannot surprise since he is himself half-alien and wholly undesirable.”

F.E. Smith Lord Birkenhead

1918: “When Winston is right, he is unique. When he’s wrong—Oh My God.”

1920: “I finally come to the Dundee Advertiser. I mean the paper, not the politician.”

Arthur Balfour

1923: “I am immersed in Winston’s magnificent autobiography [The World Crisis], disguised as a history of the universe.”

Samuel Hoare

1923: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.”

1 June 1934:  “I do not know which is the more offensive or more mischievous, Winston or his son. Rumour, however, goes that they fight like cats with each other and chiefly agree in the prodigious amount of champagne that each of them drinks each night.”

Richard Haldane

1920s: [WSC, prodding Haldane’s ample belly: “What’s in there?”] Haldane: “If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston.”

Philip Snowden

Ca. 1928: “I understand that Winston has taken up a new pastime—fiddling, and very appropriate, too.”

Herbert Samuel

May 1935: “[T]he House always crowds in to hear him. It listens and admires. It laughs when he would have it laugh, and it trembles when he would have it tremble—which is very frequently in these days; but it remains unconvinced, and in the end, it votes against him.”

Leopold Amery

June 1935: “Here endeth the last chapter of the Book of Jeremiah.”

Adolf Hitler

6 November 1935: “If Mr. Churchill had less to do with traitors and more with Germans, he would see how mad his talk is, for I can assure this man, who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Germany opposed to the regime.”

Stanley Baldwin

22 May 1936: “When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle bearing gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice.”

Neville Chamberlain

4 April 1939: “It doesn’t make things easier to be badgered for a meeting of Parliament by the two Oppositions and Winston who is the worst of the lot, telephoning almost every hour of the day. I suppose he has prepared a terrific oration which he wants to let off.”

Rab Butler

10 May 1940: “This is a black day in England’s history. We have been given into the hands of a drunken adventurer with all the worst characteristics of Charles James Fox…. A half-breed American whose main support is that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

James Maxton

10 May 1940: “I am getting more and more fatalist—it was written in the book of fate, say, perhaps on the battlefield of Blenheim or someplace, that he would one day be prime minister…. But frankly, I cannot see the wonderful motive power that has been produced by the transference of the relative positions of the two Rt. Hon. Gentlemen opposite [Churchill and Chamberlain].”

Franklin Roosevelt

1940s: “Winston has a hundred ideas a day and four of them are good.”

Aneurin Bevan

2 July 1942: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.”

9 September 1942: “[His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…. The Prime Minister was dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.”

13 July 1945: “[For Churchill], democracy is a state in which the people acquiesce in the rule of property. Democracy is an admirable institution so long as the poor continue to carry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democracy falls into disrepute. That is why, whenever you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist.”

Ezra Pound

1945: “Winston believes in the maximum of injustice enforced with the maximum of brutality.”

Joseph Stalin

14 March 1946: “Mr. Churchill is now in the position of a war-monger…strikingly reminiscent of Hitler… also with a racial theory…. [He says:] ’Recognize our supremacy over you, voluntarily, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable.’ [We will not] change the rule of the Hitlers for the rule of the Churchills.”

Clementine Churchill

No date: “Winston is a sporting man; he always likes to give the train a chance to get away.”

Related articles

“‘Drunk and Ugly’: The Perennial Quotation Chase,” 2022.

“Gotcher in the Nye: Churchill, Bevan and the National Health Service,” 2024.

“Churchill, Roosevelt and the 1941 Washington Press Conference,” 2021.

“No Cards, No Flowers: Churchill on the Death of Stalin,” 2021.

“Bring a Friend—If You Have One: Shaw and Churchill,” 2020.

Puddings (not all desserts) that lacked a theme

A columnist and former presidential advisor asks us to confirm Churchill’s rejection of a tasteless pudding (generic word for dessert in Britain). “It has no theme.”

While not actually published under his byline, Churchill sometimes used the expression when dining. Along with puddings, he applied it to soups. I asked the late Lord Soames: What gave a pudding a theme? “I think,” he replied , “Sir Winston referred to a distinctive flavour or ingredient.”

What I didn’t expect, researching the phrase in the Hillsdale College database of WSC’s published words, was that Churchill used the theme line politically. And more than once. I found five occurrences, each illustrating what he thought about the flaws of legislation or leaders.

1935: the India Bill

A concentrated dose of Churchillian vocabulary poured forth on the Government of India Act. Some analogies were a bit strained, but his word-pictures were vivid. The Act granted more autonomy to the provinces. It also provided for a federation with the “princely states,” and increased the franchise sevenfold.

The historian Zareer Masani said it might have let to a united independent India, but Hindu-Muslim rivalries made that politically impossible. Aware of this problem, Churchill argued against the legislation:

[W]hat is this India Home Rule Bill? I will tell you. It is a gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work. There is no theme; there is no pattern; there is no agreement; there is no conviction; there is no simplicity; there is no courage. It is a monstrous monument of shams built by the pygmies….

The faithful, trustworthy Indian police, the mainstay of peace and order, are to be disturbed and harassed by divided allegiances arising from unsure, irrational compromise. The supreme government of India is to be racked by Dyarchy—rival authorities clutching at the levers of power.

Churchill’s efforts were ultimately in vain, but his magnanimity was evident after the Act passed. Through a mutual friend, he advised Gandhi “to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.”

1939: Napoleon versus Hitler

Churchill always deprecated comparisons between the great French emperor and “a squalid caucus boss and butcher.” In 1939 he wrote:

There is no question of comparing the present ruler of Germany with Napoleon…. Hitler can traverse in his aeroplane, in a few hours, distances which Napoleon’s coach, with all its special relays, could scarcely cover in twice as many days. One of Hitler’s mechanized divisions could certainly disperse all the armies Napoleon ever led. Hitler can add a nought or two to most of the figures with which Napoleon dealt.

1940: Third Reich

Churchill was one of the first to identify Hitler for what he was. And, unlike Napoleon, in WSC’s 1940 language, Hitler’s Reich had no theme:

It is the rule of the Herrenvolk—the master-race—who are to put an end to democracy, to parliaments, to the fundamental freedoms and decencies of ordinary men and women, to the historic rights of nations; and give them in exchange the iron rule of Prussia, the universal goose-step, and a strict, efficient discipline enforced upon the working-classes by the political police, with the German concentration camps and firing parties, now so busy in a dozen lands, always handy in the background. There is the New Order.

Napoleon in his glory and his genius spread his Empire far and wide. There was a time when only the snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover with their guardian fleets stood between him and the dominion of the world. Napoleon’s armies had a theme: they carried with them the surges of the French Revolution.

But Hitler—Hitler has no theme, naught but mania, appetite and exploitation. He has, however, weapons and machinery for grinding down and for holding down conquered countries which are the product, the sadly perverted product, of modern science.

1946: “Vague palimpsest of officialese”

Albert Victor Alexander had served as First Lord of the Admiralty in Churchill’s wartime coalition. Alexander was a socialist, but there was affection between them. In 1945, Alexander became Minister of Defense in the new Labour government. Even so, Churchill insisted, he could not have written a document (the Defence White Paper) without a theme:

I must again remind the House that the Rt. Hon. Gentleman used very hard language about the arguments of his political opponents the other night, and about their style. No more barren, dismal, flatulent, platitudinous documents than his White Paper—if you can call it “his” White Paper—has ever been laid before the House of Commons.

His friends—and I am certainly a wartime friend—hope that it is to his credit that he had nothing to do with writing it. 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.

1949: Nature of a new threat

Speaking at a dinner given by Henry Luce, Churchill revived his belief that Nazism had no theme save racial supremacy. Communism, by contrast, did. And that made it an even more formidable challenge than Hitler:

We are now confronted with something which is quite as wicked but much more formidable than Hitler, because Hitler had only the Herrenvolk stuff and anti-Semitism. Well, somebody [WSC was referring to himself] said about that—a good starter, but a bad stayer. That’s all he had. He had no theme.

But these fourteen men in the Kremlin have their hierarchy and a church of Communist adepts whose missionaries are in every country as a fifth column, and not only a fifth column, in your country, ours, everywhere, and so on, with a feeling that they may be running a risk but if their gamble comes off they will be the masters of the whole land in which they are a minority at the present time. They will be the Quislings with power to rule and dominate all the rest of their fellow countrymen. Therefore they have a good prospective advantage.

In a way, the late conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr. shared this concept: “My thought has always been that Nazism had absolutely no eschatology,” he told me years ago. “It would wither on the vine. Only the life of Hitler kept it going, and I can’t imagine he’d have lasted very long. The Communists hung in there [after the war] for forty-six years.” (In the context of the 1930s, I respectfully disagreed.)

Words for our time?

It is interesting how Churchill consistently relied on a favored phrase in his oratory. But the remarks above involved issues long past.

Now comes what he said about the lack of “theme” in the 1930 Socialist government. It is remarkable how close this seems to certain situations today:

[T]his island and this Empire are passing through a period of eclipse which may well be converted into a period of decline. There is anxiety abroad, and can we wonder at it! Why should the Government complain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for….

They have no theme [and] have deluded the masses of their supporters in the country into believing they are about to bring into being some vast, splendid, new world. They have climbed and ensconced themselves upon the structures of Capitalism, and they are shouting to the mob below that they are going to pull them down….

Can they wonder there is confusion and anxiety abroad in the nation; and can they wonder that the electors are showing an increasing reluctance to entrust the task of restoring confidence to a bankrupt Government…?

The British electors spoke last on July 4th. Of course, history doesn’t repeat.

Related reading

“William F. Buckley , Jr.: A True Churchillian in the End,”  2020.

“Zionism, Bolshevism, Enemies of Civilization: What Churchill Said,” 2021.

“Coming: New Churchill Phrase Index in My Next Quotebook,” 2024.

“All the Quotes Winston Churchill Never Said,” Part 1 of four parts, 2018.

A new Phrase Index of Churchill quotes is part of a expanded new fifth edition of my quotations book, Churchill by Himself: In His Own Words.

Published by Hillsdale College Press, the new edition will carry a brand new title in keeping with its far greater content. Earlier editions contained 3500 entries; they now total over 5000. Many new ones derive from The Churchill Documents from 1942 to 1965, also published by Hillsdale. The preliminary proofs total 736 pages, without the indexes. We expect about 800 pages, some 150 more than before. More comprehensive than ever, the indexes are the work of award-winning indexer Do Mi Stauber.

The popular Phrase Index was introduced with the third edition, Churchill in His Own Words, in 2011. The idea was to assist readers in locating famous (and not so famous) quips and quotes that are not indexed by their best-known words. For example, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” is in Chapter I, “Immortal Words,” but the Phrase Index speeds the reader to its page by indexing it under the “Bs.”

Previous Phrase Index still available

The 2011 Phrase Index was a great asset in quickly finding the quotation readers require. Aside from obvious lines from the great war speeches, it contains some 500 famous and obscure Churchill phrases. They range alphabetically from “Abdullah is in Transjordania where I put him” to “Zionism, my heart is full of sympathy for….”

The pagination of the third edition did not change. (We found only one quote which had to be removed as fictitious.) So the current, Third Edition Phrase Index can also be used with earlier editions entitled Churchill By Himself. For a copy please contact me.

The index also doubles as a handy quick exposure to Churchill’s humor and wisdom. Browse through the entries and you’re sure to find some that are either familiar enough, or intriguing enough, that you’ll want to look up the exact words, date and place.

If, even with this tool, you still can’t find what you are looking for, please contact me.

“Red Herrings”

The most popular appendix, famous quotations Churchill never said, is likewise expanded in the new volume. However, I keep it up to date in four parts on this website. There are over 200 now. You will find Part 1 here.

“The Biblical Churchill”

Adding the fifteen-page Phrase Index to Churchill By Himself in 2011 meant deleting something, since we wanted to retain the pagination. So we deleted a previous Appendix, “The Biblical Churchill.”

“The Biblical Churchill” will return as an appendix in the new expanded edition, along with several other new appendices. Meanwhile, the complete text is available in three parts:

1: “His Largest Single Source of Quotations.”

2: “A House of Many Mansions.”

3: “Be Ye Men of Valour.”

Another new appendix is “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Extremely Rare.” As in its appearance in the Hillsdale publication Grand Alliance, this essay will be fully footnoted.

“What men they were. How can we not, reading of their actions that extraordinary day, hold our manhoods cheap when we contemplate what they attempted and achieved? It makes us wonder how we would have fared had it been our generation that had to liberate Europe….”  Of the many national remembrances of D-Day, we found this the most compelling. Read it here.

One, two, many National Churchill Days

Why did the United States designate April 9th as National Churchill Day? Why not, for example, June 6th? That day marked, as Andrew Roberts writes, “the greatest single service that the English-Speaking Peoples rendered civilization.” WSC had a lot to do with it.

April 9th has a certain national significance for Americans. That was the day, in 1963, when President Kennedy proclaimed Sir Winston an honorary citizen of the United States.

He was too infirm to attend in person. But it is always worth recalling what he thought about it all. Here is his letter to the President, read by his son Randolph:

In this century of storm and tragedy, I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands.

Nor has our partnership any exclusive nature: the Atlantic community is a dream that can well be fulfilled to the detriment of none and to the enduring benefit and honour of the great democracies.

1940

Of course, 10 May, the date he became Prime Minister, was another Churchill Day. He himself believed that “nothing surpasses 1940…

By the end of that year this small and ancient Island, with its devoted Commonwealth, Dominions, and attachments under every sky, had proved itself capable of bearing the whole impact and weight of world destiny. We had not flinched or wavered. We had not failed. The soul of the British people and race had proved invincible. The citadel of the Commonwealth and Empire could not be stormed. Alone, but upborne by every generous heart-beat of mankind, we had defied the tyrant in the height of his triumph.

Few would gainsay him. In 1940 Churchill gave a country, outnumbered and outgunned, alone except for the Empire-Commonwealth, the courage to stand the “faithful guardians of truth and justice”—until “those who were hitherto half blind were half ready.”

That year proved that one person can make a difference. Just one—as Charles Krauthammer observed: “Only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.”

1944

And so four years later we launched the “Great Crusade,” as Eisenhower put it (today perhaps politically incorrectly). Western civilization was saved. Yet it was not, William F. Buckley Jr. argued, “the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster….It is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name….

It is simply mistaken that battles are necessarily more important than the words that summon men to arms, or who remember the call to arms. The battle of Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of those who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln…. The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy.

A Churchillian resource

Hillsdale College seeks to refract that energy with two unique teaching tools: Winston S. Churchill and The Churchill Documents, comprising the official biography and the Churchill Papers of Sir Martin Gilbert, his biographer for forty years.

In each of the twenty-three volumes of The Churchill Documents, we are struck by the sheer volume and variety of the subjects Churchill grappled with. There were enemies and allies, allocation of national resources, urgent pleading from statesmen and generals. Often they demanded the impossible. Often cabinet dialogue was intense.

Nowhere is there so thorough a record of one statesman’s decisionmaking; nowhere were the decisions so consequential. Even now, in the digital age, Churchill’s workload would tax several capable people. His output was extraordinary, his reasoning understandable, communications thoughtful, his scope global. And there was this rare quality: It was simply impossible for Winston Churchill to write a boring sentence.

Today, as in 1963, we study Churchill because he stood for something—the principle that “the people own the government, and not the government the people.” He exemplified certain critical human possibilities that are always worth bringing to the attention of thoughtful persons. In 1943 he spoke at Harvard of our heritage:

Law, language, literature—these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law”—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.

***

This post is updated  from my article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project on National Winston Churchill Day, 9 April 2016 

Related reading

“Empire First: The War on Churchill’s D-Day,” 2023.

“D-Day +79: ‘Rough Men Stand Ready,'” 2023.

“Churchill Today: A Life Worth Contemplting in the Digital Age,” 2022.

“How Churchill Saw the Future,” 2018.

(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.

William Manchester was a lyrical writer who brought more fans to Churchill than anyone save Martin Gilbert (and, nowadays, Andrew Roberts). It was my privilege to know him and even to work with him, vetting his manuscript for the second volume of his trilogy, The Last Lion. (The third and final volume was completed by Paul Reid.)

Bill made many detail mistakes, but nobody could top him for magisterial prose. Except possibly Sir Winston himself. We also have him to thank for confirming with a reliable witness a famous quotation long considered apocryphal. (And, for perpetuating another one, which Churchill didn’t originate, but definitely used with relish.)

Clem and Winston in the Gents

The late great columnist Charles Krauthammer liked to cite the amusing encounter between Churchill and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the Gentleman’s Convenience in the House of Commons, circa 1951. Attlee is standing over the trough as Churchill enters on the same mission. Observing Attlee, Churchill shuffles as far away as possible.

Attlee: “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?”

WSC: “Every time you socialists see something big you want to nationalise it.”

I labeled this a misquote, consigning it to the “Red Herrings” appendix in my quotations book, Churchill by Himself.  But Christian Schneider of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel led me to a reliable attribution. Mr. Schneider advised that he had the quote from William Manchester’s The Last Lion, vol. 1, Visions of Glory 1874-1932, page 35.

The reference is to a 21 October 1980 interview Manchester conducted with Sir David Pitblado (1913-1997). A civil servant, Pitblado was principal private secretary to both Attlee and Churchill. Moreover, he was a reliable source. So, with great delight, we may restore this one to the ranks of the genuine.

Huns at your throat or feet

Bill Manchester had an eye for the stellar quotation, and many famous Churchill lines bedizen his biography. One of these—only six pages into his first volume, was about the Germans. “The Hun,” exclaimed WSC, “is always either at your feet or at your throat.”

That has been around a long time. Some time ago the National Memo’s Joe Conason criticized Joe Scarborough’s ambivalent attitude toward a certain politician by misquoting Churchill: “It’s what he said about the Hun, which is: They’re either at your feet or at your throat.”

“You’ve compared me to a Nazi,” Scarborough retorted. “No, I didn’t,” said Conason. “Churchill wasn’t talking about the Nazis, he was talking about The First World War. [Those Huns] were not Nazis.”

Now it’s true that all Huns were not Nazis. (The original Huns go back to the Fourth Century.) But Churchill often referred to Nazis as Huns. What a joyful combination of Red Herrings this is!

Scarborough and Conason were both wrong. Churchill first quoted the line during the Second, not the First World War. It occurred in his second speech to Congress, 19 May 1943. But by identifying it as a “saying,” it was clear he was crediting it to somebody else:

The proud German Army has once again proved the truth of the saying, “The Hun is always either at your throat or your feet….”

A great line, but no cigar for originality. So this one remains among the “Red Herrings” in the upcoming expanded edition of Churchill in His Own Words, working subtsitle, An Encyclopedia of His Greatest Expressions. It is coming in 2024 from Hillsdale College Press.

Further reading

“All the Quotes Winston Churchill Never Said”: An up-to-date list, 2024.

“An Empty Taxi Arrived and Clement Attlee Got Out,” 2012.

“Clement Attlee’s Noble Tribute to Winston Churchill,” 2018.

“Manchester and Reid: The Last Lion, Defender of the Realm,” 2023.

“McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee: A Vanished Age of Political Respect,” 2019.

Lawgiver to Jackal, 1927-1940 

The art of the out-of-context quote is practiced frequently over Churchill’s supposed views of Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini. (“Why do you spell out all his names? He doesn’t deserve them,” a pedantic proofreader once asked me. I don’t know. In view of how he ended up, hanging upside down, it’s an irony.)

Did Winston Churchill admire the fascist dictator? With careful editing, one can try to sell this argument. Churchill once praised Italy’s “renowned Chief, with his “Roman genius…the greatest lawgiver among living men.” Little more than a decade later, Il Duce had become a “jackal” in Churchill’s vernacular. What a hypocrite! Perhaps, perhaps not.  

Churchill’s early words sound damning, given what we know of Dear Benito in retrospect. And the critics pounced. “Before the war, Churchill offered Il Duce a deal,” wrote Clive Irving in the Daily Beast. “After the war, British intelligence tried to destroy their correspondence…. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he tried, in a series of letters, to dissuade Mussolini from joining the Axis powers. He was ignored.”

This mixes much that is true with much that is trite, as Arthur Balfour once quipped: “The problem is that what’s true is trite, and what’s not trite is not true.” 

Caro Benito  

One of Churchill’s responsibilities as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1925-29) was recouping foreign war debts. Italy owed £600 million (£30 billion today). Churchill agreed to defer payments until 1930. Il Duce Benito sent “the warmest expressions of gratitude” and offered Churchill a decoration. Thanks but no, said WSC.  (Imagine if that was among Churchill’s medals.) 

In Rome in January 1927, Churchill had two brief meetings with Mussolini. At a press conference afterward, Churchill told Italian journalists:    

I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by his gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens. If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.

That remark was in part standard diplomatic boilerplate. But—cropped after “finish”—it has been used to damn Churchill as pro-fascist. In context, he clearly referred to the Italians, not the British.

Also, you tend to say polite things about a foreign leader when he has promised to pay back a lot of money. What Churchill wanted for Italy was to stand up to Bolshevism—which in 1927 he feared more than anything. 

Rome versus Berlin? 

Churchill always thought in terms of coalitions, so the coming of Hitler made him ponder Benito Mussolini as a potential ally. Hitler’s plans for Austria, and perhaps Trieste, did not seem in Italy’s interest. The diplomatic situation became trickier in 1935 when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia). On 26 September, Churchill said Britain would support League of Nations sanctions and an arms embargo.

But Churchill remained ambivalent about challenging the Italian dictator. “I would never have encouraged Britain to make a breach with him about Abyssinia,” he wrote, “or roused the League of Nations against him unless we were prepared to go to war in the last extreme.”

In May 1937 he proposed a Mediterranean pact against “further aggression” by Hitler, hoping Mussolini might join. By then, however, the breach was far advanced. Caro Benito would not forgive Britain’s support of sanctions.  

Trying to hold Italy  

Was Churchill’s attitude toward Mussolini inconsistent or realistic? Italy’s aggression was directed far from pivotal Europe. On that continent, Churchill considered Germany a greater menace than Russia. Accordingly, he courted both Rome and Moscow, often at the same time.  It didn’t help that neither liked the other.

In early 1939, Churchill offered Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky proposals for collective security against Hitler. Russia, Maisky declared, would “not come in to any coalition which includes Italy…. [Russia would have] no confidence in France or ourselves if [you] start flirting with Italy.”

Churchill shot back: “[T]he main enemy is Germany.” It was always a mistake, he added, “to allow one’s enemies to acquire even unreliable allies.”

As Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill wrote his first and only letter to Benito Mussolini. A “river of blood” threatened to engulf Britain and Italy, he wrote. “I have never been the enemy of Italian greatness.” He was not writing in a “spirit of weakness,” although of course he was. Mussolini’s answer was abrupt:  

Without going back very far in time, I remind you of the initiative taken in 1935 by your Government to organise at Geneva sanctions against Italy, engaged in securing for herself a small space in the African sun without causing the slightest injury to your interests and territories or those of others. I remind you also of the real and actual state of servitude in which Italy finds herself in her own sea…. the same sense of honor and of respect for engagements assumed in the Italian-German Treaty guides Italian policy today and tomorrow in the face of any event whatsoever.”

Fake “peace feelers”  

On 10 June 1940, Italy declared war on France and Britain. Ironically, Benito Mussolini was the first major wartime figure to fall. Three years later the Fascist Grand Council repudiated their leader of two decades. “The keystone of the Fascist arch has crumbled,” Churchill told the House of Commons. Long before then, Mussolini had long gone from “renowned chief” to “hyena” in the Churchill lexicon.

Was Churchill impressed by the Mussolini of the 1920s and 1930s? Many people were, although a realist might conclude that Churchill said what he did in British interests. Churchill redacted little from his archives; researchers can pore over a million documents searching for smoking guns. One quest involves the so-called Churchill-Mussolini “peace correspondence,” which has long been rumored to exist—somewhere. 

Three supposed letters from Churchill to Mussolini, with offers of support provided Italy left the Axis, are mentioned at least since 1954, when Giovannino Guareschi published the purported texts in his magazine Candido. Guareschi was later prosecuted and imprisoned for publishing forged letters by Alcide De Gasperi, Italy’s 1945-53 prime minister. The Churchill letters were also alluded to by Renzo De Felice, official historian of fascism and biographer of Mussolini. De Felice died in 1996, his evidence unpublished.   

In 1985 the most celebrated conspiracist, Arrigo Petacco, reproduced copies of the three letters (two dated 1940, one 1945). Ignoring their typos and stilted English, even the casual would find it difficult to believe they are genuine. The Italian researcher Patrizio Giangreco reviewed them in 2010, proving them obvious fakes. (See “Further reading” below.) 

“La pista inglese” 

The Churchill Archives hold only one Churchill letter to Mussolini—that of 16 May 1940—and Mussolini’s negative reply two days later. But the conspiracists persist. “Although there would have been copies in London of the Churchill-Mussolini exchanges,” wrote Clive Irving, “none has ever turned up and in April 1945, somebody in London was very anxious that Mussolini’s copies should never see the light of day.” Italian historians dubbed this scenario La pista inglese (The English trail).

In September 1945, the myth continues, Churchill himself joined the search. He traveled to Lake Como, an area that had been controlled by Il Duce’s rump Republic of Salò, staying at the “Villa Aprexin.” A photograph was taken and published in R.G. Grant’s Churchill: An Illustrated Biography. Ostensibly on a painting holiday, Churchill’s real purpose was to retrieve his Mussolini letters. (With so many people out to steal the correspondence, it’s amazing that none ever came up with it.)  

The problem with all this, as Giangreco noted, is that Churchill’s villa, where he stayed from 2 to 19 September, was “La Rosa.” The photograph of him painting nearby is the one in Grant’s book. From La Rosa, Churchill went to Villa Pirelli near Genoa, and from there to Monte Carlo and the French Riviera.

Conspiracies upon conspiracies  

Still the beat continued, Clive Irving fanning it in 2015: En route to Lake Como, Irving wrote, Churchill stopped in Milan to stand bareheaded at Mussolini’s unmarked grave! No evidence is offered, nor is there any. Churchill flew from London September 2nd and arrived in Como the same day.

Irving claimed Churchill flew to Milan under the cover name “Colonel Warden,” which he says was the pilot’s name. Actually that was Churchill’s code name throughout the war, derived from his title, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

Churchill’s villa at Como, Irving continued, was “owned by none other than Guido Donegani…an industrialist and Fascist collaborator,” who was “interrogated by British Intelligence and later released.” Donegani supposedly handed him the incriminating letters, papers or diaries—they are variously described.

Irving claimed that official biographer Martin Gilbert “concluded that the correspondence had been retrieved and handed over to Churchill, but it never turned up in the Churchill archives and was never seen again.”   

Martin Gilbert dismissed the whole idea of secret Mussolini correspondence. His account does not mention Donegani, who died in 1947. If Donegani did own Villa La Rosa, there is no evidence Churchill ever met him. The day after he arrived, Churchill wrote his wife that the villa belonged to “one of Mussolini’s rich commerçants who had fled, whither is not known.”

“You haven’t looked hard enough”  

Churchill admitted in his memoirs that he had once expressed admiration for Mussolini as a bulwark against Bolshevism. He distinguished between different types of fascism. Unequivocally opposed to Nazism, he was also anti-fascist in British affairs. He was uncritical of fascism in Italy—until Mussolini fell in with Hitler and declared war in June 1940. The Prime Minister who would have “no truce or parley” with Hitler and his “grizzly gang” would never have supported the Italian “frisking up at the side of the German tiger.”

Possibly the best rejoinder to all this is by the historian Andrew Roberts:  

Leaving aside the fact that Churchill would not at that stage [1940-43] have wanted or needed peace with Mussolini, one charge goes that the relevant documents are in a waterproof bag at the bottom of Lake Como. So, when one takes issue with them, the conspiracy theorists say “go and look.” Of course, if you don’t find anything, they just say, “you haven’t looked hard enough.”

Further reading

Patrizio Romano Giangreco, “Review: Mistero Churchill by Roberto Festorazzi,” 2016.

“The Churchill-Mussolini Non-Letters,” 2015 

“Mussolini’s Consolation” (Churchill Quotes),” 2012

“Cole Porter and a Vanished Culture: Brewster and Mussolini,” 2020

Did Churchill ever make a three word speech, “Never Give Up,” and then just sit down? —A.S., Riga, Latvia

That story is all over the web, constantly repeated. But it is entirely wrong. I think it springs from the many inaccurate “wit and wisdom” quote books.

A: “In” not “up,” and more than three words

The three words (“in” not “up”) were part of Churchill’s 20-minute speech to the boys at Harrow, his old school, when he attended their annual songfest (“Songs”) on 29 October 1941. The full speech is in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches (New York: Bowker, 1974) and in Churchill’s speech volume The Unrelenting Struggle (London: Cassell, Boston: Little Brown, 1942).

The salient portion, from Churchill by Himself, is as follows:

This is the lesson: never give in, never give in…in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy…. Do  not  let  us speak of darker days; let us rather speak of sterner days. These  are  not  dark  days:  these  are  great days—the greatest days our country  has  ever  lived; and  we  must  all  thank God that we have been allowed,  each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

(And, for the umpteenth time, when he said “race” he meant “people.”)

Misreported at Columbia

In 2017 it was incorrectly reported that a three-word speech “never give in” was made at Columbia University, New York in 1946, a fortnight after his famous “Iron Curtain” address at Fulton, Missouri. His speech at Columbia was brief but poignant. It began with words we might well direct at Columbia today:

In my heart there is no abiding hatred for any great race on the surface of the globe. I earnestly hope that there will be no pariah nations after the guilty are fully punished. We have to look forward to a broader, fairer world….

Thus walking forward together, with no aim of subjugation or material profit or sordid interest, marching forward together we may render at this juncture a service to humanity which no countries before have ever had the honour to do.

Q: Did WSC define a “fanatic”?

Can you verify whether or not Churchill said: “A fanatic is someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”?  —T.M., Ontario, Canada

A: Not Churchill

The maxim may well be true (and often applicable), but it is not Churchill’s. From Churchill by Himself, the “Red Herrings” appendix (unattributed quotes):

“Often attributed to Churchill or President Truman. Ralph Keyes, editor, The Quote Verifier, writes: ‘It’s a quotation I see often, but without a source. I doubt that it’s Truman, or, if he ever said it, that the quotation originated with him.’”

More on false Churchill quotes

“All the Quotes Churchill Never Said,” in four parts beginning here, 2018.

“Fake Churchill Calumny: Subsidiary Emissions from the Odd Crater,” 2020.

“Churchillian (Or Yogi Berra) Drift: How Quotations are Invented,” 2013.

“Fake Quotes: Lady Astor and Other Women Nemeses,” 2021.

“A-Z Quotes: A Cornucopia of Things Churchill Never Said,” 2018.

Carlos Marin, “‘Surely Churchill Said That?’ The Expanding Lexicon of the False Quote,” 2021.

The Hitler Essays:

“The Truth About Hitler,” The Strand Magazine, November 1935, Cohen C481.
“Hitler and His Choice,” Great Contemporaries (London and New York, 1937), Cohen A105.
“This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” News of the World, 10 October 1937, Cohen C535.7.

“Did Churchill ever admire Hitler?”

The question, perplexing on its face, is nevertheless sometimes asked. Critics have long quoted selectively from Churchill to show he was “for Hitler before he was against him.”

For Bavarian politician Franz Joseph Strauss, the proof was Churchill’s writing: “We may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

Historian Robert Rhodes James said Churchill “sympathetically” described Hitler’s “long, wearying battle for the German heart.” In fact Churchill’s word was “wearing” not “wearying,” which was rather less sympathetic.

The subject of those essays didn’t think Churchill was sympathetic at all. After reading “The Truth About Hitler” in 1935, an infuriated Führer instructed his ambassador in London “to lodge a strong protest against ‘the personal attack on the head of the German state.’”

Hitler as “Great Contemporary”

“The Truth About Hitler,” first of the Hitler essays, appeared in late 1935. Deciding to republish it in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, Churchill courteously submitted his text to Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office. This was a careful choice, since Vansittart had been somewhat supportive of Churchill’s demands for rearmament.

But Vansittart was on holiday, so Churchill’s draft was read by Clifford Norton, who recommended it not appear at all:

[I]t is hardly to be thought that this article would be at all palatable to the powers that be in Germany. In the present rather delicate state of our relations with that country, when one does not know which way the cat will jump, it might therefore be questioned whether republication just now was advisable.

Churchill agreed to certain deletions which would “take the sting out of the article,” but said he “would cut out nothing” that he wouldn’t say “on public platforms.” This did not prevent him from restoring some of his deletions in another newspaper article. (Read on.)

It has been questioned why Churchill made room in his book for Hitler. Was he more optimistic than he should have been about the Führer?  Perhaps—or as Martin Gilbert often quipped, “perhaps not.” Hitler was a popular subject for writers in the mid-1930s. Germany’s rearmament and intentions were mounting concerns. Yet, like all three of his Hitler essays, Churchill had little to say that was positive.

Churchill’s textual changes

What part of his 1935 article did Churchill alter in Great Contemporaries? What did the Foreign Office persuade him to “soften”? Bibliogarapher Ronald Cohen came to my aid with a line-by-line digital comparison of the “The Truth About Hitler” and the Great Contemporaries chapter. A Word document containing the 1935 text, showing 1937 deletions in strike-throughs and highlights, is available to readers via email.

This exercise was worth the trouble because it answered many questions. It shows that Churchill barely changed his sentiments between 1935 and 1937. His deletions mainly involve events well known in 1935 that were old news in 1937. His view of the Führer remained consistent.

Minor alterations

There was only one significant deletion in the early part of the Great Contemporaries chapter. That was Churchill’s 1935 assertion that history would “determine whether [Hitler] will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.”

It is not clear what if anything the Foreign Office saw wrong with that. Churchill may have pulled it as a gesture of compliance. Or maybe, by 1937, he had decided that Hitler wouldn’t rank with Washington….

Nor were those words gone for long. On 10 October 1937, six days after publishing Great Contemporaries, they reappeared. This was in Churchill’s third Hitler article, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” for News of the World. For good measure, he wrote of Hitler’s “guilt of blood” and “wicked” methods.

Was this third essay a defiance of the Foreign Office? ​Or was it simply written because Churchill was too good a writer to omit a memorable line? Whatever the reason, it does not materially change ​his opinion of Hitler.

Other early changes to the 1935 text were almost all for readability or currency. A minor deletion was his reference to Heinrich Brüning, the anti-Hitler Chancellor of Weimer Germany in 1930-32. In his original Strand article, Churchill wrote that the Nazis “even drove the patriotic Brüning, under threat of murder, from German soil.”

Safe in America, Brüning became a professor of government at Harvard, where he continued to warn of German and Soviet expansionism. In 1937 Churchill asked him to proofread his Great Contemporaries Hitler chapter. Brüning’s only comment was, “I admire very much your description of the feelings of the German people in these fourteen years after the War and the characteristics of the British policy at that time.”

The major deletion

Not apparent until Ronald Cohen’s textual comparison was a long passage at the end of the 1935 Strand article removed from Great Contemporaries. It described the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Hitler purged Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA). This appears in no edition of the book, nor the Churchill Collected Essays. 

This passage did not appear in Churchill’s third article, “Government of Great Dictators.”  It may well have been considered provocative by the Foreign Office, albeit dated. Readers must judge for themselves. Since it is otherwise inaccessible, we reproduced it in full on the Churchill Project website. Here are excerpts.

From “Government of Great Dictators”

[On 30 June 1934] many hundreds of men and some women were put to death in Germany without law, without accusation, without trial. These persons represented many varieties of life and thought of Germany. There were Nazis and anti-Nazis. There were Generals and Communists; there were Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Some were rich and some were poor; some were young and some were old; some were famous and some were humble. But all had one thing in common, namely, that they were deemed to be obnoxious or obstructive to the Hitler regime. Therefore, they were blotted out.

The history of the world is full of gruesome, squalid episodes of this kind, from the butcheries of ancient Rome and the numberless massacres which have stained the history of Asia down to the “smellings out” of the Zulu and Hottentot witch doctors. But in all its ups and downs mankind has always recoiled in horror from such events…

Adolf Hitler took upon himself the full responsibility…. But the astounding thing is that the great German people, educated, scientific, philosophical, romantic, the people of the Christmas tree, the people of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Beethoven, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant and a hundred other great names, have not only not resented this horrible blood-bath, but have endorsed it and acclaimed its author with the honours not only of a sovereign but almost of a god….

Can we really believe that a hierarchy and society built upon such deeds can be entrusted with the possession of the most prodigious military machinery yet planned among men? Can we believe that by such powers the world may regain “the joy, the peace and glory of mankind”? The answer, if answer there be, other than the most appalling negative, is contained in that mystery called HITLER.

The Hitler essays in retrospect

Churchill’s views plainly underwent no significant change during the two years spanning his three Hitler essays. If his original description of the Röhm purge disappeared, it did not affect the tenor of what he left in.

There is something about those excised passages that arrests the eye today. Because on 7 October 2023, much the same thing happened in Israel.

“All manner of people” were killed by murderers who “caught them in the streets, shot them in their beds, shot the wife who threw herself before her husband…. Sinister volleys succeeded each other through a long morning, afternoon and night.”

And again mankind recoiled in horror. The only difference seems to be that in 1934 Germany, “relations who ventured to inquire for the missing father, brother or son received, after a considerable interval, a small urn containing cremated ashes.” In 2023, the barbarians didn’t bother to do that.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Did Hitler Authorize the Flight of Rudolf Hess?” 2023.

“Hitler’s Sputtering Austrian Anschluss: Opportunity Missed?” 2020.

“The Myth that Churchill Admired Hitler,” 2017.

Routinely since the 1990s, hostile tyrants and others dismiss overtures from American administrations, saying they see no change in policy under the latest U.S. administration. “They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice,” was a typical line.

The last thing we want is a fight, the U.S. often replies. Often we add that we want to engage and improve decades of strained relations.

This reminded me of Harold Nicolson’s letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, 1 March 1938 (Nicolson Diaries, I, 328). Nicolson was not yet a backer of Churchill in the debate over policy toward Germany. He hoped reason and compromise would prevail:

I went to such an odd luncheon yesterday. It is called “The Focus Group,” and is one of Winston’s things. It consists of Winston, Norman Angell, Wickham Steed, Walter Layton, Robert Cecil, Violet Bonham-Carter, Clynes and some other of the Labour people.

I was made to make a speech without any notice and was a trifle embarrassed. But one gets a thick skin and an easy habit about these things and my speech was rather a hit.

Winston was enormously witty. He spoke of “this great country nosing from door to door like a cow that has lost its calf, mooing dolefully, now in Berlin and now in Rome—when all the time the tiger and the alligator wait for its undoing.”

Don’t be worried, my darling. I am not going to become one of the Winston brigade. My leaders are Anthony [Eden] and Malcolm [MacDonald].

Harold Nicolson came round soon enough. After Churchill’s broadcast, “The War of the Unknown Warriors,” on 14 July 1940, he wrote Vita:

I clapped when it was over. But really he has got guts, that man. Imagine the effect of his speech in the Empire and the USA.

I felt a great army of men and women of resolution watching for the fight. And I felt that all the silly people were but black-beetles scurrying into holes.

When to fight?

Along those lines a reader writes: “I remember a quip: ‘When will we fight? When we have no hope.’ Can you help me identify the source?”

That line doesn’t track among Churchill’s 20 million  published words. He did voice similar thooughts. You may be thinking of this one:

[If] you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. (The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, 272.)

Churchill was writing about the belated British guarantee to Poland in early 1939. He held this far too late: “decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment….”

The time to act had been a year earlier,  when Hitler at Munich had demanded the Czech Sudetenland. Poland was guaranteed only after Hitler had invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, which he had promised to respect.

Further reading

“Crocodiles: Churchill’s Animal Analogies,” 2022.

Review of “Munich: The Edge of War,” with Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain, 2023.

“Munich Reflections: Peace for ‘A’ Time and the Case for Resistance,” 2022.

* * * * *

(Updated from 2022.) Seasoned Churchillians had mixed reactions to the last celebration: the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death. While gratified that press and public still remembered, we were shocked at some of the ill-considered, long-disproven assertions. That was in 2015. This year marks the Sesquicentennial of his birth—and if you think 2015 was shocking, load up on Prozac.

Fortunately, Sesquicentennial attacks will be blunted by vast recent pushback from serious historians who’ve rebutted the worst slanders. So hopefully, the parrots will not squall down the eagles.

Call this a preemptive strike: with links to places where you can find the truth….

Sesquicentennial chestnuts

“The Ten Greatest Controversies of Winston Churchill’s Career,” (BBC) 

This has always been a popular performance. The tactic is well-worn. First, you tee-up Churchill as the savior of 1940. Then you tear him down with the familiar litany of charges. I do wish they’d come up with some new ones; the old chestnuts are getting shopworn.

One doesn’t mind the Britain Bashing Corporation floating harmless urban legends (“poison” gas, strikebusting, payola). But to offer Churchill’s supposed racist views, the rude things he said about Gandhi (but not the nice things–or what Gandhi said about him), or the Sidney Street episode as examples of the “top ten” is intellectually vacant.

The real controversies of Churchill’s career include the Dardanelles (but not Gallipoli), intervention in Russia, reorganizing the Middle East, the Gold Standard, Disarmament, the Rhineland, the Abdication of Edward VIII, Munich. Singapore, strategic bombing, the atomic bomb, and postwar summits with the Russians, among others.

On these there is much legitimately to say in criticism as well as in praise. (Click on the links above for reliable information.)

Perhaps the BBC was catering to its perceived audience, which dotes on popular canards. They’ll probably try some of these again on his Sesquicentennial.

Eagles reply

“We shall fight them on the BBC”  

This was a mock interview of Churchill, striving to answer some of the detractors. It is more amusing than the usual defenses. Sadly, though, author Richard Littlejohn was careless with his quotations.

Churchill never said he could only deal with one s*** at a time. And “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war” was said by Harold Macmillan, not WSC.

Still, it was entertaining to read that his words, “an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent”—applied to the European Union. Whoops!

True words of wisdom

One misses the company of eagles. Sir Martin Gilbert and Lady Soames regularly confronted these stories. But no one has the energy to tackle them all.

I was always encouraged by a wise and balanced historian, the late and much missed Professor Paul Addison, whose books on Churchill remain standard works:

Don’t worry about attacks on Churchill.  He is alive and kicking and haunts the British imagination like no other 20th century politician.

He will always be caricatured, as he was in his lifetime. But freedom of speech and expression was one of the things he fought for, and in his time he gave as good as he got.

The more provocative comments about him are a backhanded tribute, as they work on the assumption that most people admire him.

My own personal view is that he was even greater as a human being than he was as a politician—a role in which he did make mistakes, as we all do.

Further reading

“Current Contentions: Surrender Nothing, Defend the Whole,” 2021. Part 1 and Part 2.

“Hearsay Doesn’t Count: Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare,” 2020.

“The Myth of Dresden and ‘Revenge Firebombing,'” 2023.

“Bucknell University’s Panel on ‘Churchill: Hero or Colonialist,'” 2022.

“Brian Cox as Churchill: An Interview on Charlie Rose,” 2017.

Paul Rahe, “Review of Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality,” 2017.