Churchill at War

A four-part Netflix documentary starring Christian McKay as Winston Churchill, premiered December 4th.

From Gaza to Ukraine, United Nations to United Europe, our legacy is the war that made us what we are. Winston Churchill had much to do with it, and Netflix now offers its version of his story. It is a one-dimensional portrait of a politician—not of  the humanitarian who thought profoundly about governance, life and liberty. Yet the warrior emerges approximately as he was.

There’s a way to derive a mostly correct picture of the man from this show: ignore Part 1. The other three parts also suffer from occasional forays into fiction. But they are far more accurate, with honest dialogue, well-chosen quotations and spectacular footage, much of it freshly colorized.

A creaky wind-up

Part 1, alas, is a palimpsest of counterfactuals. Were it not for Andrew Roberts, and several other scholars who have actually spent time studying Churchill, this introduction to him is light, frothy and tendentious. It bids fair to mislead the unwary viewer.

Sprinkling in celebrities and the odd hostile biographer doesn’t help. (The more hostile they are, the more they indulge in the familiarity “Winston.”) Among the celebrities is George W. Bush, who says Churchill grew up in a “dysfunctional family.” By Victorian standards it was more functional than the Bushes. Why Bush? Or Boris Johnson? Ask most politicians about Churchill and what you get are generalities: blood, toil, tears and sweat. But Netflix also consults more serious commentators, who commit greater errors….

• Churchill’s father’s career-ending 1886 resignation ​​comes when “his budget was rejected.” No, it was over a minor Army appropriation. Okay, no biggie.

​• In South Africa in 1899, young Churchill “takes over defense” of the famous armored train from ​Boer attackers. ​Poor Alymer Haldane, who actually defended it, spent half a century lamenting that “Winston got all the credit.” And now Netflix bites Aylmer again.

• We skid past Churchill’s climb to fame and Parliament, informed that he changed parties twice—not over principle, but as an opportunistic power​-grab. Not so. After his 1904 switch he waited two years to get power. The second time​, in 1924, he was handed power before he switched. Where do people get such stuff? Have they read anything?

Escaped scapegoat

Churchill’s vital efforts to prepare the fleet for war in 1914 are ignored as Netflix homes in on the Dardanelles operation, whose failure temporarily ruined him. Aside from confusing naval operations with the Gallipoli landings, which he had nothing to do with, the account is reasonably accurate. ​They assert incorrectly that he quit the Admiralty in 1915 in order to go fight in the trenches, but his service​ there (later) is ​accurately represented.

We witness his deep depression over Gallipoli, but Christian McKay, impersonating WSC, gets the diction wrong and looks more like his son-in-law Christopher Soames. By straining hard, we can just visualize McKay in the role. But he’s no match for Robert Hardy​ (The Wilderness Years) or Gary Oldman​ (Darkest Hour), who spent months studying their character “to find a way in.”

Part 1 ends as Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940. The accuracy improves as 1940 approaches. Despite earlier errors,  this is a fair presentation compared to popular mythology like Brian Cox in Churchill, but hardly rates a cigar, given the banal content.

Jon Meacham, who should know better, says WSC “got lots wrong, but among what he got right, WW2 ranks pretty high.” Duh! That’s as profound as we get, though to his credit, Meacham is more poignant later on. But after laboring through Part 1, I was beginning to think: “The things we do for England.”

A better pitch

The weakness of using celebrities or “historians” who are anything but Churchill specialists is still evident in the last three parts, but less disconcerting. Let’s get over the quibbles first.

• It’s true that the first bombing of London (August 1940) was accidental, prompting British retaliation on Berlin, leading to the London Blitz. But Netflix says Hitler and Churchill “egged each other on,” not acknowledging that bombing open cities had been the German practice since they leveled Warsaw in 1939.

• In July 1940 Churchill “sank the French navy.” (It wasn’t the whole navy.) In August 1941, he pleads with Roosevelt to declare war, and is instructed about the U.S. Constitution. (That never happened—he knew the Constitution as well as FDR.) U.S. entry into the war in December is dramatically portrayed, omitting that Hitler locked-in the “Germany first” strategy when he declared war four days after Pearl Harbor.

• The 1943-44 Bengal Famine is misrepresented by Kehinde Andrews. Churchill caused it—well, he refused to send Canadian grain. (Actually he sent more grain, via Australia.) Andrews claims Churchill saw his “main task” as “defending the Empire.” No, he saw his main task as defeating Hitler, and doing that helped lose the Empire. Mr. Andrews offers several other red herrings. (“I like the martial and commanding air with which the Rt. Hon. Gentleman treats facts,” Churchill once quipped. “He stands no nonsense from them.”)

• Churchill is condemned for the 1944 “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin. We are not told that he saw this as a wartime expedient, not a permanent arrangement—or that it saved Greece from communism.

Netflix gets lots right…

…about the war. It covers the quandary over bombing Auschwitz; concerns over invading Europe; D-Day (if nothing about how Churchill made D-Day possible). Here the dialogue is accurate, the war footage admirable, the commentary balanced.

They can’t help editing some great speeches, even though deleted words would use up only a second or two. They make up for this by getting many right (unlike the British Post Office on a recent commemorative stamp: “You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory.”)

Key quotations are deployed effectively, like Churchill’s warning to FDR of where the U.S. will be if Britain goes under. His classic speech at Harrow, clean and unedited, includes its often-ignored proviso: “Never give in—except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is all to the good. Every time a faux expert muddies facts, Roberts or another solid historian—Meacham, Allen Packwood, Catherine Gale Katz—makes up for it with truths. Even David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Minister, is thoughtful and doesn’t succumb to populist virtue-signaling. “The British people,” Lammy says, “saw in Churchill the image of themselves.”

After Part 1 I was expecting the worst, but on balance it’s a good show, and the finale is well done. Kudos to Lord Roberts and others for keeping it on track, and for his eloquent finale:

Physically brave, morally brave, full of insights and foresight, humorous to the point that he can still make people laugh sixty years after his death, Winston Churchill represented a resolute spirit that is very, very rarely seen in human history.

More film reviews

Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years: Forty Years On and Still Number One, 2019.

”Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour: Then Out Spake Brave Horatius,” 2018.

“Darkest Hour Myth-Making: Don’t Mess with Marcus Peters,” 2018.

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

“Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies,” 2017.

“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 perfect subject

Tim Benson, Churchill: A Life in Cartoons (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024), 224 pages, Amazon $32.99, Kindle $14.99.

Tim Benson, of London’s Political Cartoon Gallery and Café, now turns his attention to a figure cartoonists loved to praise, ridicule and lampoon. Sometimes Churchill received all those treatments at once—notably by the great David Low. In 1954 Low penned a magnificent tribute showing the eighty-year-old Prime Minister being congratulated by all his previous incarnations. The caption was sincere: “To Winston, from his old friend and castigator, Low.”

Significantly, Churchill never resented the negative attention. His daughter Mary told Mr. Benson that in her youth she was “mystified” by what she deemed cruel and callous drawings of her father hanging around Chartwell. Indeed, he often bought and framed some.

Praising Low in his essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists,” Churchill asserted that politicians feared neglect more than ridicule. They were “offended and downcast” when the cartoons stopped: “We are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days are ended.”

Churchill was irresistible to scribblers. His many characteristics and “props” were gifts to them: the stooped posture, tiny hats and balding locks of the young MP; the spotted bow tie, siren suit, cigar and V-sign of the seasoned statesman. All that, and his political prominence, made Churchill a central cartoon character for half a century.

A wartime chronicle

Given the vast Churchill cartoon universe, Tim Benson concentrated on greatest events. Thus the division into nine sections: “1914-20” covers the Great War and its aftermath; “1931-39” is entirely devoted to Appeasement and rearmament. The Second World War occupies six sections, 1940-45; and there is a brief postwar coda.

The book skips the young war correspondent and Conservative-turned-Liberal, who provided much grist for early cartoonists. Nor do we glimpse the Colonial Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer cartoonists lampooned in the 1920s. What we do get is a cartoon account of the years of Churchill’s greatest impact. Here Tim Benson is in his depth, providing many drawings few readers will have seen.

With the exception of the omitted periods, this is as comprehensive a reference as one could imagine. Early in the Great War, Churchill is pictured alongside an English bulldog. As First Lord of the Admiralty in Nelsonian garb, he hurls defiance at the Germans—who hurl it back. (Lüstige Blatter, the German humor magazine that mocked him in the Second World War, was already targeting him in the First.)

The Benson collection

The depth of this book can only be appreciated by owning a copy. Despite the cost (more on that later), no Churchillian should be without it. It is a kaleidoscope of WSC’s life and times.

For instance, I wrote of Churchill’s friend Hilaire Belloc, who toasted WSC’s departure from the government to fight in Flanders in 1915: “They drank Winston’s health and sang the French children’s song ‘Malbrouck s’en vat’en guerre’ (Marlborough goes off to war). They congratulated Churchill for “breaking loose from his official bondage to the gang of incapables….”

What fun to be reminded of Belloc’s tribute by the great cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed, on page 18! Deftly, Benson accompanies the drawing with Churchill’s remarks after his first twelve days in the trenches: “I always get on with soldiers…. Do you know I am quite young again?”

Finest hours

A Life in Cartoons devotes itself mainly to the Second World War. The uplifting spirit of British cartoonists in the black days of 1940-41 is at once evident. A glow of resolve swept Britain; there were no carping media midgets such as we hear from today. That was a time, as Churchill put it, “when it was equally good to live or die.” Benson’s coverage invokes the spirit of thorse hard, glorious times.

Enemy cartoonists feature prominently. Early in 1940, the Daily Worker trumpets Churchill leading the poor little neutrals into war. Benson balances this with Leslie Illingworth’s drawing of a Nazi crocodile sprawled across Europe. Underneath it is Churchill’s quip: “Each [neutral] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

The pace picks up as Hitler invades Russia. Now German cartoonists wonder whether Stalin or Churchill will betray the other first. But the alliance holds. The Daily Sketch pictures Roosevelt leading a sailing race in a boat marked “Lend-Lease.” Melbourne’s Herald adds a dose of Aussie humor: Tojo being fed a cigar (lit end first), and wrestler Churchill putting a toe-hold on a screaming Mussolini.

Soon after Russia is invaded, the enemy-become-ally protests the lack of a “Second Front.” Pravda’s Boris Efimov regularly ridiculed Churchill’s “stalling,” Benson notes. As D-Day approaches, the Daily Sketch shows southern England bristling with tanks, guns, Americans, and a cigar-equipped figure saying: “First of all, gentlemen, welcome to our right little, tight little island.”

Depth and erudition

The array of rarely- or never-seen cartoons shows that this book could only be assembled by someone with a vast reach for material. For instance, Benson relies on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (where else?) for Hal Coffman’s wry drawing of May 1940, when Churchill replaced Chamberlain. As Neville bails out of the government aircraft, Winston quips: “I always did wonder why you carried that umbrella.”

It is important also to note Benson’s narrative richness. He carefully explains the meaning of each cartoon, which today can be obscure. A typical example is “The Obstruction” by Jimmy Friell, in a 1944 edition of the Daily Worker: The Curzon Line being blocked by a soldier representing the exiled Warsaw government. Poland, Benson explains, objected to having its borders shifted. This high-quality research adds a vital dimension rarely found in art books.

An indispensable work

A small bone to pick has nothing to do with the author’s work. The cramped, horizontal, 8×7-inch format is disappointing in such a work. Yet the small pages contain a vast amount of white space that could have housed larger type and images. Many cartoons are too small to be fully appreciated without a magnifying glass.

Such a volume deserves a larger format and the option of a hardback, since it is not likely to gather dust. Readers will repeatedly pull it out for reference, and hardbacks hold up better.

The author’s erudition and vast resources deserved more from his publishers, who, though distinguished, do him a disservice. (I remember Heinemann, thirty years ago, refusing a minimal commitment to continue the companion volumes of the official biography. Martin Gilbert’s supporters went cap in hand to an old friend of Sir Winston for a donation that produced three more. Ultimately and thankfully, Hillsdale College took over and finished the job.)

Tim Benson (full disclosure) is an old friend who has aided this writer countless times over the years. Knowing in advance of his expertise, I expected the high quality of his work. Perusing the book is a never-ending revelation, and it quickly grows on you. A Life in Cartoons deserves a place in every serious Churchill library.

More on cartoons and cartoonists

“‘The Charlie Chaplin of Caricature’: Churchill on David Low,” 2020.

“Poy (Percy Fearon): The Classic Churchill Cartoonist,” 2022.

“Echoes and Memories: Foreword to Gary Stiles’s Churchill in Punch,” 2022.

“In Search of Winston Churchill’s First Political Cartoon,” 2021.

William John Shepherd, “Gary Stiles Offers a Brilliant Catalogue of Mr. Punch’s Churchill,” 2022.

Q: Was there a Churchill-Diesel relationship?

A Hillsdale colleague refers us to an excellent 2023 book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, by Douglas Brunt…

Diesel vanished from the steamship Dresden while crossing from Belgium to England on 29 September 1913. Theories on the cause include accident, suicide or murder. On the eve of the Great War, the German government was anxious to maintain its progress on Diesel propulsion.

Douglas Brunt speculates that Diesel was being wooed or recruited as an asset of the British government, in particular by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He offers no documentary proof, but points to a great degree of circumstantial evidence. Churchill’s incentive may have arisen from British problems developing Diesel engines for submarines. Obviously it would be a great advantage to have the inventor’s services.

A: Inconclusive

Douglas Brunt makes a good case for Diesel being murdered or thrown overboard by German agents, presumably to keep his talents from falling into British hands. We consulted our sources, including every word of Churchill’s in print or archived. There are forty hits for “Diesel.” A few testify to British anxiety that the Germans would steal a march with Diesel propulsion of military vessels or vehicles.

We found only one reference involving Churchill, by the historian R.W. Thompson in 1963. It concerns Churchill’s initial activities as First Lord of Admiralty after his appointment in October 1911. From The Yankee Marlborough (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 164:

Churchill, now with the aid of Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, laid down two keels to one in competition with the Germans. It was not only a question of ships, but of types of ships, of propulsion and fuel, of armament, of the development of submarines and a naval air arm.

Rudolf Diesel had probably revolutionised propulsion, and with that coal, and even oil, might become obsolete. The internal combustion engine might rule the world, and the old “steam” empires were in a new race which might be dominated by science and technology.

It was an unpleasant thought. A constant stream of new and unknown factors, and problems of obsolescence, were constantly hampering the planners of weapons and strategy in a manner previously unknown, and undreamt of.

“Why Coal Must Go”

Jacky Fisher, the retired Admiral whom Churchill brought back as his First Sea Lord in 1914, was the driving force behind the Royal Navy’s conversion from coal- to oil-fired warships. But Fisher was also a proponent of internal combustion engines (including Diesels) for smaller craft.

On 4 October 1912, when Churchill was actively courting Fisher to take charge of oil conversion project. the Admiral wrote a memorandum: “A New Navy: Why Coal Must Go, Why the Internal Combustion Engine is Vital.” Sent to Churchill, it is a characteristic example of Fisher’s fervent prose

The enclosed, written for some of our faltering colleagues, may amuse you. Don’t send it to the Daily Mail. It’s written currente calamo as you will observe. On Nov. 26, 1910, every newspaper in America reported at length my words that the nation which first adopted Internal Combustion Propulsion would sweep the board commercially as well as pugnaciously!….

The British Admiralty is going to see a German battle-cruiser going round the Earth without refuelling in eighteen months from now, and all our wonderful marine engineers are simply servile copyists of a damned skunk called Diesel! And we haven’t got a workman or a metallurgist who is capable to produce anything approaching the foreign article.

I am going to become a naturalized Jew and go to Palestine as I think the end of the world must be near and the last trump begins there and I want to get in first somewhere!”

Archival resources

The Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge holds several Fisher-Churchill letters on coal-oil conversion. None, however, mention Rudolf Diesel—not surprising if his help was being sought surreptitiously.

There is no doubt that British naval thinkers were concerned that Germany might be first with Diesel-propelled submarines. The engine was also ideal for Churchill’s idea of  “land caterpillars” (tanks). But we found no evidence of Churchill’s interest in Rudolf Diesel himself.

It is known that Diesel boarded the Dresden that fatal October in 1913 intending to meet with the British about licensing his invention. By then Churchill and Fisher were well along on the conversion from coal to oil for capital ships, and WSC had secured an oil supply through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. How far Diesel developments had affected designs for submarines or Churchill’s “landship” (the tank) bears further investigation.

Diesel links

Douglas Brunt interview about his book by Charles C.W. Cooke, 2023.

“‘OMG’: Churchillian Origins of the Popular Texter’s Phrase,” 2023.

“Dardanelles Straits, 1915: Success Has a Thousand Fathers,” 2024.

Marcus Frost, “Churchill’s ‘Landship’: The Tank,” 2016.

Christopher H. Sterling and Richard M. Langworth, Review of Barry Gough’s Churchill and Fisher: Titans of the Admiralty, 2018.

Please send me some book recommendations on Churchill’s life for young readers. By young, I mean a boy of seven years old. My nephew asked me about the book I was reading (Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison), and after I told him a little about it, he wanted to know more. I’d appreciate any recommendations. —R.M., Mass. (Updated from 2009.)

Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero is probably the best “brief life” in print. If your nephew was into that at seven,  he was far advanced. There are several other fairly short but excellent books of Addison’s quality, but they may be a shade advanced for readers so young. Among them, for the record:

Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Photographic Portrait
Douglas Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier
Mary Soames, A Churchill Family Album—photo documentary

Number one for young readers

Fiona Reynoldson, Leading Lives: Winston Churchill. London: Heinemann Library “Leading Lives” series, 2001, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, later reprinted in paperback (currently more expensive on Amazon). Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

Targeted at the young (ages 8-15), now a quarter century old, this is still the best “juvenile” ever published anywhere, by anybody. The “Leading Lives” series mixes Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Arafat with Roosevelt, Kennedy and Gandhi. I know nothing about the other volumes, but Reynoldson’s Churchill is a masterpiece.

So much wisdom is attractively wedged into sixty-four pages! There’s a quality laminated cover; color throughout, including excellent photographs, cartoons, and posters. Sir Winston receives twenty brief chapters, including a summary, “Churchill’s Legacy.” There is an events timeline, a list of key people, good maps, a page showing how British government works, sources for further reading, a glossary and an index.

The glossary is one of this book’s fine features. Every time a word or phrase pops up that might be unfamiliar to young eyes—Nobel Prize, Boer War, Abdication, Home Secretary, VC, Bolshevik, DSO, Gold Standard, Home Rule, etc.—it is bold faced and referenced in a three-page appendix. This is not haphazard. There are over sixty entries, and every explanation is simple and accurate. It’s a wonder why more books for the young don’t offer this.

Sidebars that teach

Another special aspect is the set of sidebars that pace the story. These are carefully placed, written in precise English, and explain exactly what Churchill did and why. And Reynoldson is never wrong. Take his speech impediment, often misrepresented as a stutter. Reynoldson writes:

Churchill came home on leave in 1897 and went to see a doctor in London about his lisp. He pronounced ‘s’ as ‘sh.’ Nothing was found to be wrong, but the lisp never went away. Despite this, he made his first political speech during his leave and later became a great orator [glossary link] in the House of Commons.”

Perfect. Other sidebars offer rare insights to Churchill’s character. Take his letter to his wife in February 1945:

[M]y heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads…before the advancing armies…. The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.

How well this dispels popular slander about how Churchill instituted and even enjoyed firebombing civilians.

The author delivers unadulterated, factual information. As with any good journalist, you have no idea how she feels personally about her subject. She deals in facts: entertainingly, even eloquently.

Writing a compact book, especially for the young, on a complicated subject is hard work. You must know what to highlight, what to jettison. To choose the right subjects, to represent them deftly, is a great achievement. Fiona Reynoldson’s young readers will develop their own perceptions of Churchill—thoroughly grounded in the education she provides. We should all buy five copies of this book and get them into the hands of schools, libraries and young people of promise.

Best for ages 12-18

John Severance, Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Clarion Books, 1996, 144 pp. hardbound, illustrated, $19.95 used from Amazon. Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

This one is even older, but bears mentioning. The first we heard of it was when Lady Soames remarked that someone had finally done her father justice in a book for young people. Soldier, Statesman, Artist was, she said, “intelligently written and beautifully printed.” Certainly the public must agree, for it was in print for more than a decade. Happily, copies are still available.

The target audience is older than Reynoldson’s. Like her book, there are no new revelations. Severance sets out to explain Churchill and his times to young people who have not heard much about them in school. Like Reynoldson, he acquaints non-British readers with how Parliament works. His tidy prose covers all the “great contemporaries”—Lloyd George, Stalin, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Hitler—and what they did.

Good writing iaccompanies elegant book design: fine type, artwork and photos that are not “old chestnuts. Admirably there is an index, a bibliography and an appendix sampling of “Winston’s Wit.”

There is a small rash of errors, not engendered by malice, ignorance, or conspiracy theories. The book is too short to give much attention to episodic excitements like the charge at Omdurman, the escape from the Boers, Armistice Day or 10 May 1940. Severance has a different tactic in mind.

Myth busting

He focuses on and demolishes numerous myths. For example, he notes that Churchill sent policemen, not troops, to pacify the strikers in Tonypandy. Facts are pounded in: Churchill inspired but did not invent the tank. The Dardanelles campaign was conceptually brilliant and ruined by incompetent execution. Churchill opposed the India Act, but sent Gandhi encouragement when it passed. WSC clung to office in the Fifties only because he thought he might be able to save the peace. Not the kind of thing young people tend to hear a lot.

On the wartime “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin, over which Churchill’s detractors consistently fulminate, Severance has a point worth considering—and not just by young people: “Perhaps Churchill thought this was the only sort of plan Stalin would understand and accept.” Got it in one.

Some day we may have a Prime Minister or a President who as a youth was inspired by one of these books. Fiona Reynoldson and John Severance have done history as well as Churchill a great favor. Everyone who appreciates the great man is in their debt.

The Eagle’s cartoon biography

Clifford Makins, The Happy Warrior: The Life Story of Sir Winston Churchill as Told Through Great Britain’s Eagle Comic of the 1950s. Delray Beach, Fla.: Levenger Press, 2008, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, with commentary by RML, $29.95 new from Amazon.

Levenger, the well-known purveyor of bookman’s accessories, was for a time in the publishing business. Their excellent editor, Mim Harrison, took an interest in Churchill, publishing The Making of the Finest Hour in 2006. This book, on how Churchill wrote his most famous speech, contained contributions by WSC’s late grandson Winston and me. Ms. Harrison then asked me to write a commentary for the Happy Warrior biography, which they were republishing.

David Freeman described this as a “graphic novel, in the argot of today’s youth.” Its origins were as a serialized Churchill biography in The Eagle, a comic magazine for boys. Published separately by Hulton Press in 1958, the story line was by Clifford Makins, with lifelike illustrations by Frank Bellamy.

The Levenger Happy Warrior  was of much finer production quality. Despite its plebeian origins as a cartoon series, it is an accurate account of Churchill’s life up to his retirement as Prime Minister in 1955. Bellamy’s illustrations of people are remarkably true to life, and the dialogue (invented, most of it) is believable. Levenger’s production assured that the quality of reproduction was far superior to the original.  The Happy Warrior is still available. It first sold for $39, but Amazon now sells new copies for $29.95.

Related reading

“A Sun That Never Sets: Churchill’s Autobiography My Early Life,” 2018.

“Myths and Heresies: Firebombing the Black Forest,” 2024.

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

“Churchill’s Escape from the Boers, 1899,” 2019.

“Winston S. Churchill 1940-2010: A Remembrance,” 2010.

• First published as “Great Contemporaries, Pamela Harriman,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale/Churchill, click here, scroll to bottom, and enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We never spam you and your identity remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Pamela: she got there on her own

In 1941 at the U.S. Congress, Winston Churchill disarmed whatever remaining critics he still had by declaring:  “Had my father been American and my mother English, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” Pamela Harriman (1920-1997) was all-English, yet rose to high American office on her own. She served as U.S. ambassador to Paris from 1993 until her death. Small-minded people, and there are plenty, belittle her lack of education, her glittery friendships with the great. All that is easy to mock, but beside the point.

Her colleague Richard Holbrooke rated her quite differently: “She spoke the language, she knew the country, she knew its leadership. She was one of the best.” President Jacques Chirac compared her to the two most notable American ambassadors, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He awarded her a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur‘s Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural award. Pretty good for a girl from the sticks who left home early, determined to succeed.

Pamela Beryl Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, daughter of the 11th Baron Digby. Her mother Constance was the daughter of 2nd Baron Aberdare. Her childhood home was her first Churchill connection. Minterne Magna in 1642 was the residence of John Churchill, father of the first Sir Winston.

A skilled horsewoman, Pamela competed at show-jumping including Olympia, where every fence was above her pony’s shoulders. In 1937 she was at a boarding school in Munich when she met Adolf Hitler—a dubious achievement her future father-in-law missed. Introduced by his admirer Unity Mitford, Pam never fell for whatever spell the Führer cast over Mitford.

“You are not still a Catholic?”

Pamela Digby’s first marriage, at age nineteen in 1939, was to Randolph Churchill, a decision taken on the fly. Randolph was off to war and, thinking he might be killed, anxious to produce an heir. Reportedly he had proposed to eight other women before Pamela.

Friends and family, she recalled, warned her that the mercurial Randolph was not a good long-term risk: Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, “took me for a long walk in the country and tried to dissuade me.” She replied: “If he is not killed and we do not get on together, I shall obtain a divorce.” In 1946, she was as good as her word.

Thomas Maier, author of The Churchills and the Kennedys, says the only Churchill concerned about the match was Winston. “Your family, the Digby family, were Catholic, but I imagine you are not still a Catholic?” he asked her. WSC had no religious prejudice, but as a politician always had to contemplate potential criticism.

Pamela assured him the Digbys had long been Church of England, and faithful Conservatives. “Yes, you had your heads chopped off in the Gunpowder Plot,” Churchill smiled. “That is right,” she answered—Sir Everard Digby.” (Mr. Maier notes that Sir Everard, a Catholic convert, was actually hung, drawn and quartered.)

“How great a man…”

Winston Churchill welcomed Pamela into the family. Becoming Prime Minister, he invited her to Downing Street. Pregnant with her son Winston, she recalled sleeping in a bunk bed in the bomb shelter, “one Churchill above me, another inside.” Pamela loved and admired the PM, and later did amusing imitations of him in her own deep voice.

Once during dinner amidst the Blitz, Churchill gazed around the table. “If the Germans come,” he told them, “you can always take one with you.” Pamela, all of twenty, was shocked at this. “But Papa,” she protested, “what would I fight with?”

WSC peered at her with a benignant smile: “You, my dear, may use a carving knife.” Her son Winston said she recited that vignette often, captivated by her father-in-law’s indomitable spirit. He added: “It was through her that it first dawned on me how great a man my grandfather was.”

Randolph to Averell

As friends had warned her, marriage with Randolph was not destined to be smooth. Neither were celibate in each other’s absence, and her affair with Roosevelt’s envoy, Averell Harriman, was an open secret. Winston nor Clementine never spoke of it.

Contrary to what you may hear from other sources, she fell for Averell the moment she laid eyes on him, one Blitz night at the Dorchester. There was no plot by Winston to use her. Inevitably, when he learned of it, Randolph Churchill exploded. Years later it still strained relations between father and son. But Randolph was hardly guiltless of indiscretions.

After her divorce, with little in her pocket except determination, Pamela and her young son Winston moved to Paris. She enjoyed a lavish life and romances. In 1960 she married Broadway producer Leland Hayward (renowned for South Pacific and The Sound of Music.) The marriage lasted until Hayward’s death in 1971. Six months later she married Harriman, then almost 80, caring for him devotedly. The old flame had never died, her son told this writer. “She often called Averell ‘the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’”

“Never give in”

Through Harriman and with Churchillian determination, Pamela became immersed in American politics. In 1980 and 1984, the Democrats were in disarray following twin sweeps by Ronald Reagan. Pamela quoted Sir Winston: “In war you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.” How often he’d been counted out in politics and recovered?

At her home on N Street in Washington she hosted glamorous parties and fundraisers. “She had an ability to attract people around her, and a willingness to try to be a catalyst for the party,” said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “Almost anybody who was asked was going to come to one of the gatherings at her spectacular house.” Her son Winston told me that politics aside, she was “one of the most conservative people I know. She would have brought the same zest had she married Ronald Reagan.”

As those two comments suggest, Pamela Harriman was admired from both sides of the aisle. She supported Clinton in 1992, and was rewarded with the Paris Ambassadorship. Yet at her confirmation hearings she was praised to the skies by the most conservative member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms.

“Darling, this is Pamela…”

She represented it seems the politics of a bygone age, a more Churchillian age. Like her first father-in-law, she saw it as a noble profession, where mutual respect was de rigueur. Years ago I published a piece on Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. As one might expect, it stressed the Fulton theme of peace through strength. Pamela Harriman wrote a rebuttal emphasizing Churchill’s Fulton title, “the Sinews of Peace.”

Paul Robinson, formerly Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Canada, read it, disagreed, and confessed that he remained among her greatest admirers. Earlier he had named Harriman and Weinberger co-vice-presidents during his chairmanship of the English-Speaking Union. “They were both superb,” he said. “And very good together—despite everything!”

Shortly before President Clinton arrived in office he proclaimed an admiration for Winston Churchill. I remember sending him, through Pamela Harriman, a blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the Churchill five-cent U.S. commemorative stamp. Delighted, she delivered it herself, and so we made her a pink version.

She telephoned to express her thanks, with the husky opening line that must have thrilled a thousand Washington insiders: “Darling, this is Pamela.” It would have been, and always was, superfluous to ask, “Pamela who?”

“Elegance itself”

Pamela lived life her way—a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far with a formal education that ended at age sixteen.

How did she manage it? She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. During her term as ambassador, Paris and Washington collided over alleged U.S. espionage, the “Europeanization” of NATO, leadership of the United Nations, peace initiatives in the Middle East, power rivalries in Africa. She handled it all with consummate skill, retaining the respect of her hosts despite those tests.

President Chirac lamented her loss: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the United States in France does not do justice to her achievement. She lent to our longstanding alliance the radiant strength of her personality. She was elegance itself…a peerless diplomat.”

That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

*****

Cita Stelzer. Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. New York: Pegasus Books, 2024. 236 pages, $29.95, Amazon $26, Kindle $19.99.

Cita Stelzer…

…offers a lively and readable account of Winston Churchill’s hold on important Americans—and theirs on him. Her book nicely complements Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and America (2005). Add Brad Tolppanen’s Churchill in North America 1929 (2014), and you have an excellent triptych on the Anglo-American Special Relationship.

Gilbert’s book was chronological and complete; Tolpannen concentrated on a single year. Stelzer splits the difference. She begins with Churchill’s first U.S. visit in 1895 and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War. Churchill’s long skein of American contacts served him well, and she could easily write a sequel covering the war years and beyond.

Nearly two-thirds of Churchill’s American Network is devoted to his nationwide tours of 1929 and 1931. Churchill’s American Network shows how WSC honed his U.S. contacts, begun in the First World War, that proved so indispensable in the Second.

Early on

On his first U.S. lecture tour in 1900-01, Stelzer observes, young Winston was viewed with some diffidence. Americans tended to sympathize with the Boers, Britain’s enemy in South Africa. Churchill disarmed them by paying tribute to Boer valor—and, in places like Boston, that of his Irish compatriots. Stelzer quotes Manfred Weidhorn on how Churchill, like U.S. Grant, successfully relied on “personal observation” in his war reporting (71).

As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, Churchill met steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, whose Bethlehem Steel was supplying guns to the Allies and “c.k.d.” (crated knocked down) submarines to the Royal Navy. Thus, the First Lord became aware of the “awesome productive capacity” of American industry. They remained close, and Schwab would supply the “Churchill Troupe’s” private railcar for their North American tour in 1929.

Return to “dry” America

By the late Twenties, Churchill’s chief American contact was Bernard Baruch, like Schwab another Great War acquaintance. Stelzer is our guide as the towering financier eases into the heart of the story, 1929-32. From Baruch, WSC learns “the relationship of finance and government and how private sector determined deployment of the nation’s resources” (119).

Two years later, back now for a lecture tour, Churchill assured audiences that “America is not going to crash.” But he couldn’t get over Prohibition, and denounced it in Collier’s. Cita Stelzer ferrets out a poignant quote from that article about the evils of excessive government regulation. Prohibition then, the dominant Administrative State now—Churchill’s view is still worth our attention:

[It is] the most amazing exhibition alike of the arrogance and of the impotence of a majority that the history of representative institutions can show. The extreme self-assertion which leads an individual to impose his likes and dislikes upon others…on a gigantic scale a spectacle at once comic and pathetic…. No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism (81).

Forging “special relationships”

If Churchill coined the term “Special Relationship” for Anglo-American association, he derived it from the contacts he himself forged. Yet not even he, Stelzer observes, “realized how important” the people he met would become.

There were, for example, future War Secretary Henry Stimson, Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon, and Navy Secretary Charles Francis Adams III (110).  There were certain key publishers, who didn’t always agree with him, but liked him. From William Randolph Hearst he learned “the variety and popularity of U.S. magazines accessing public opinion” (101).

Another vital publisher was Chicago’s Robert McCormick, who agreed with him even less than Hearst, but liked him equally. When the war began, Anglophobe Senator Tom Connolly questioned whether Churchill would keep his promise never to surrender the Royal Navy. McCormick told him: “Senator, I have known Winston Churchill for twenty-five years. A more thoroughly honorable man never lived. He would not have made that promise if he had not intended to keep it” (204).

American grandees were impressed by Churchill’s collegial attitude toward political opposites like McCormick. After his triumphant address to Congress following Pearl Harbor, he warmly shook hands with Democrat isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Later Churchill said, “I liked him. He is a fighting man…. I respect and admire fighting men even if they are against me” (209).

“Volume diplomacy”

To nurture his U.S. contacts Churchill employed a kind of “volume diplomacy.” He inscribed and sent successive volumes of his life of Marlborough to America’s haute noblesse. Baruch, Schwab, McCormick Hearst, Senator Joe Robinson, and B&O Railroad head Daniel Willard all received copies. Another recipient was insurance tycoon Donald McLennan, who in 1942 extended war damage insurance to endangered companies other insurers wouldn’t touch.

On Churchill’s gift list was Democrat powerhouse and former presidential candidate William McAdoo. In 1929, Baruch had told McAdoo of WSC’s forthcoming visit. McAdoo wrote Churchill: “[G]ive me…some indication of what you would like to do while here….Do you care for any form of public entertainment?” WSC replied, “Do not desire public entertainment but hope to dine with you privately” (62).

Marlborough also went to banker William Henry Crocker, whose Burlingame, California mansion included “a splendid swimming pool.” Crocker had introduced Churchill to several West Coast titans (83). Among these were Cal Tech President and physicist Robert A. Millikan, USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  All of them, Stelzer writes, would later support American entry into the Second World War (100). A dose of Winston Churchill hadn’t hurt.

A positive vice

To the consistent horror of his wife, Churchill was an incessant (mostly losing) gambler—casinos and the stock market. His habit, Cita Stelzer writes, “did nothing to improve his reputation among the straitlaced…including Schwab’s associate, “the puritanical Andrew Carnegie” (57). She quotes financial historian David Lough: “I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale during my career of advising people about their finances” (125).

But Stelzer sees a saving grace, in that WSC’s addiction was a net gain for him and his readers. “It forced him to rely on his pen, producing forty-three book-length works in seventy-two volumes” Actually it was fifty-one books in eighty volumes—but as Stelzer writes, this was “a gift to the world.” (126)

To that she adds some 400 periodical articles between the World Wars, a dramatic output. Indeed Churchill never stopped writing—and earning. Confined to a New York hospital after being knocked down and nearly killed by a car in 1932, he dictated the story of his accident at a dollar a word.

At the same time, the author continues, he was “in treaty” for twelve Collier’s articles and six for The Strand. Meanwhile, he was telegraphing publisher George Harrap that he had “no serious work between me and [Marlborough] at the present time.” (138)

With Americans, Churchill seemed more cautious about risk-taking. He met Averell Harriman between casino visits in 1927, warning him against investing in Soviet manganese mines. Later he claimed he had saved Harriman millions. Whether Harriman took his advice is unclear, Stelzer writes, but here was another link to “his American chain of relationships that would stand him in good stead for decades” (64). In an adjacent sidebar—one of many on people and events—the author details Harriman’s wartime diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin.

Churchill on Americans

On his very first visit to the U.S., Churchill had written his mother: “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.” To his brother he simply remarked: “This is a very great country, my dear Jack.”

Cita Stelzer shows that he never found reason to alter that impression. Thirty-five years later he wrote of “gusts of friendliness…expansive gestures…hospitality and every form of kindness… [Americans] are less indurated by disappointment; they have more hopes and more illusions.” This, he observed, meshed well with British “traditional reserve and frigidity….chary of allowing the feeling of friendliness to take root quickly…. It is in the combination of these complementary virtues and resources that the brightest promise of the future dwells” (119).

Again Manfred Weidhorn, “a keen student of Churchill’s attitudes toward America,” is quoted: The United States in Churchill’s view was “a great experiment, a trail blazer, in so many ways the leading nation of the world and the carrier of the hopes of mankind” (193).

Americans on Churchill

A few minor errors of fact do not detract from a good read, full of insight tempered by honesty. For instance, Cita Stelzer doesn’t hide Churchill’s willingness to take advantage of good-natured American hospitality, sometimes with unabashed pushiness. In 1929 she has him writing Hearst to find out whether banker William Crocker or aircraft and oil baron George Armsby “would like to take care of me in San Francisco” (76).

Yet she notes that Churchill’s outgoing character, his fraternal love of his mother’s land, soon disabused his hosts of base impressions. The Anglophile journalist Frederick Wile was not the first American to go out on a limb (albeit with a nickname WSC detested): “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership” (110).

It would—but not quite in the way Wile expected.

In 1941, a few months after the whole world had seen what his indomitable character had made him, even Americans who had been dismissive were giving Churchill another look. That was when one of his U.S. acquaintances, Henry Luce, named him Time’s “Man of the Year.”

“Churchill cannot reasonably claim to have recruited Henry Luce to his network,” Stelzer writes. “But he can reasonably claim to have attracted Luce to his side…. Luce needed Churchill to make the case for intervention, Churchill needed Luce to make his arguments available to millions, Roosevelt needed both” (209). Mutual need featured hugely in the “Special Relationship.” It still should today.

On America and Americans 

From Sir Martin Gilbert’s remarks on Churchill and America, Chartwell Booksellers, New York, 11 October 2005.

In the beginning….

He came here first in 1895, and he was quite amazed by New York, which was the one city he visited—he was on his way to Cuba to watch the Spaniards grappling with the Cuban insurrectionists. He wrote to his young brother:

Picture to yourself the American people as a great lusty youth who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners, whom neither age not just tradition inspire with reverence, but who moves about his affairs with a good-hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth.

Toward the end….

One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced in any history book or collection of documents was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House on 27 June 1954. He summarized it in a speech to Parliament:

Britain and the United States assert their sympathy for and loyalty to all those still in bondage, proclaim their desire to reduce armaments, and to turn nuclear power into peaceful channels, confirm their support of the United Nations, and all organizations designed to promote peace in the world; and proclaim their destination, to develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue their purposes effectively based on their mutual comradeship.

In 1955 he summoned his cabinet together for a final chat. And he said to them, “there are two things which matter. One is to remember that man is spirit. And the other thing is: Never be separated from the Americans.”

Related reading

“Origins of Churchill Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,'” 2019.

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

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

“Dewey, Hoover, Churchill, and Grand Strategy, 1950-53,” 2018.

“Churchill’s Ersatz Meeting with Lincoln’s Ghost,” 2018.

Hillsdale Dialogues: The World Crisis

The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and commentator Hugh Hewitt. In 2023-24 they discuss Churchill’s The World Crisis, his classic memoir of the First World War. This essay addresses the operations on the Gallipoli Peninsula. To search for all World Crisis essays published to date, click here. For the accompanying audio discussion, refer to World Crisis World Crisis Dialogue 17, Failure at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli —RML

Approaching the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, we may reflect on an earlier seaborne expedition. The attempts to force the Dardanelles, and the opposed landing on Gallipoli, were abject failures. But many lessons were learned, not least by Winston Churchill. Continued from “Dardanelles Straits, 1915.”

Auspicious beginnings

Churchill’s hopes for Greek or Russian troop support had not materialized. Given Asquith’s declaration to “take” the Peninsula, Churchill logically asked whether there should army as well as navy action.

Again the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, insisted that no British land forces be used. Churchill asked for his dissent to be recorded. The Cabinet agreed to a purely naval attack. There was to be a “feint” at the Peninsula, but no actual landings.

The Anglo-French naval force began bombarding the outer forts of the Dardanelles on 19 February 1915. As Churchill expected, those forts were silenced and the entrance cleared of mines in less than a week. Marines landed to destroy the guns at Kum Kale (Asiatic north coast) and Sedd el Bahr (Gallipoli Peninsula), while ships’ guns trained further in toward Kephez.

Some Turkish batteries were mobile. They evaded the fleet’s guns and fired at a motley assortment of minesweepers manned by civilians (a bad mistake by the Admiralty). Still, as late as 4 March Admiral Sackville Carden, commanding, said his fleet would arrive off Constantinople in as little as two weeks.

“Admiral de Row-back” 

Shortly after Carden’s optimistic forecast he fell ill, and resigned on March 15th. He was replaced by Admiral John de Robeck, who sailed into the straits on the 18 March. For awhile it was looking good. Eighteen battleships, with cruiser and destroyer support and minesweepers in the van, advanced to midway through the narrowest part of the straits, barely a mile wide. By 2 pm, according to the Turkish General Staff, “artillery fire of the defence had slackened considerably.”

Then misfortune struck. Mines sank the French battleship Bouvet and damaged three older British battleships. Some 650 sailors perished.

Other vessels were damaged, and the civilian minesweeper crews were terrified. Admiral de Robeck, believing he could not sustain further losses, issued a general recall.

Churchill was furious. In his original query to Carden he had emphasized: “Importance of results would justify severe loss.” Angrily he denounced the commander as “Admiral de Row-back.” But First Sea Lord Admiral Lord Fisher supported de Robeck and the fleet was withdrawn. It was never to return.

Peninsula landings

Churchill never gave up his belief that the Dardanelles could have been forced by a renewed attack. But Asquith and the cabinet blinked. Those fervent desk-warriors, once so sanguine about the Dardanelles, were suddenly timid. The naval attack, they decided, must not be renewed without a landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula—which Asquith had targeted without committing troops.

Churchill could not overrule his naval advisors or admirals—let alone Asquith and the Cabinet. Their attention was now on a plan for which Churchill was not responsible: an army assault on the Peninsula.

Landings began at the end of April, ultimately gaining little more than a foothold. In view of the disproportionate numbers often bandied about, the nationality of those brave soldiers needs enumeration. There were over 450,000 British (including Indians and Newfoundlanders) 80,000 French. Added to these were 50,000 Australians and about 15,000 New Zealanders. The Turks mustered 315,000. Casualties and losses were horrific: 250,000 among the Allies, a larger number of Turks.

“Mortal folly done and said”…

General Sir Ian Hamilton, commanding the Peninsula assault, pleaded in vain for Kitchener to send more artillery and better trained, regular army troops.

So many died unnecessarily that Churchill has come in for grave blame, especially in Australia and New Zealand. It is hard to understand this, since did not plan or direct the landing. Almost from the start of the war, he had cast around for ways to avoid using British and Empire ground forces in the Peninsula assault.

Nor was Churchill the sole author and advocate of the naval attack. It had a long genesis, dating back almost to the opening of the war, and was approved by high-level authorities up to Asquith and Kitchener.

Lord Fisher, at first all for the expedition, became increasingly hostile, and finally resigned in mid-May 1915. That cost Churchill his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, as Asquith was now pursuing a coalition government with the Conservatives.

Churchill’s anguished, handwritten letters to Asquith “poured out his inner feelings with intensity, holding back nothing, and risking the derision of the Prime Minister.” But the opposition Tories were adamant. The price of coalition was the First Lord’s head.. This became obvious when Asquith callously asked Churchill: “And what are we to do for you?”

The scapegoat

In his political interests Churchill should have resigned after the Cabinet refused to renew the naval attack. A lesser man would have, but resignation wasn’t in his makeup. It is valid to fault Churchill for failing to carry his First Sea Lord with him in advocating a renewed naval effort. But that raises the question of whether bringing back old Admiral Fisher was a good idea in the first place.

From the end of May to 12 November 1915, Churchill held a meaningless sinecure, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. His only task was the appointment of rural judges. Frustrated over the ongoing fiasco, he resigned in November to join his regiment on the Western Front.

“Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted,” he wrote, “my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.… I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.”

His wife Clementine had a more poignant remembrance: “When he left the Admiralty he thought he was finished.…I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.”

Retrospectives and what-ifs

Clement Attlee, who fought on the Peninsula and later headed the 1945 Labour government, said the Dardanelles-Gallipoli operation was “the only imaginative concept of the war.”

Historians have long debated Attlee’s view. Jeffery Wallin, one of the few early authors to take Churchill’s side, argued that the concept was strategically sound and would have worked. When de Robeck broke off his attack, Wallin wrote, the Turkish forts were almost out ammunition.

Critics countered that the Turkish mobile batteries made up for the loss of fixed cannon, citing their efficiency against the minesweepers. But still others question how much ammunition even the mobile batteries had left. The minesweepers assigned were insufficient, and should not have been crewed by civilians. That detail mistake was the Admiralty’s, thus ultimately Churchill’s.

A further question which has never been answered is: What would have been the effect of the Allied fleet appearing, with guns trained, off Constantinople? Would Turkey have surrendered, as the British thought?

Christopher Harmon wrote that “few analysts, then or now, with the benefit of long hindsight, commit themselves to that assurance. Lord Kitchener, in charge of the War Office, and Churchill, in charge of the Royal Navy, both said at various times that ships alone could suffice. But at other times, each thought otherwise.”

Failures of high command

The record suggests that the immediate failures of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli were owed to gross errors by the commanders. De Robeck was wrong to break off the attack with fourteen of his eighteen battleships intact and some about to pass through the narrows. Hamilton was faulted for landing troops on the Peninsula with uncertain objectives. Professor Harmon summarizes:

Churchill correctly understood the futility of further offensives in the West until some new approach or technology could be ready. He was also correct to want to devote the somewhat inactive Royal Navy to this operation; and with or without troops, he suppoted the naval campaign.

But Kitchener, who offered, then withheld, then provided too late, the 29th Division from Egypt, made a shambles of Admiralty plans to transport the unit, and eliminated any chance of sufficient manpower to sweep away the Turks…. He should have seen that nothing was more important than that this new expedition not fail, not embarrass the Allies, and not waste precious lives of trained men.

Inquiry and conclusions

In 1917 a Commission of Inquiry into the Dardanelles and Gallipoli operations issued its preliminary report. Churchill, it concluded, was “carried away by his sanguine temperament and his firm belief in the success of the operation.” But its main criticism was of Asquith. The Prime Minister had held no War Council meetings from 19 March to 14 May. He fostered an “atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision.

Kitchener “did not sufficiently avail himself of the services of his General Staff, with the result that more work was undertaken by him than was possible for one man to do, and confusion and want of efficiency resulted.” Perhaps Kitchener might not have escaped so lightly, but he had become a martyr, drowning on his way to Russia in June 1916.

What a story! A prime minister unwilling to be prime; a war minister reluctant to make war; backbiting among colleagues; idle babble to outsiders and the press; daily changes of tune; dreaming about unrealistic spoils of war; unwillingness to hear those who understood the real needs.

It doesn’t sound so far removed from the criticism now thrown at Western governments who have inherited the mistakes of a generation, and are expected to mend them overnight.

More on Gallipoli

“Dardanelles Straits, 1915: Success Has a Thousand Fathers,” 2024.

“Get Ready for Churchill’s Anti-Sesquicentennial,” 2024.

“Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary,” 2015.

“Churchill’s Potent Political Nicknames: Admiral De Row-Back to Wuthering Height,” 2020.

Keara Gentry, “Lessons of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli,” Hillsdale College, 2024.

Hillsdale Dialogues: The World Crisis

The Hillsdale Dialogues are weekly broadcasts of discussions between Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn and commentator Hugh Hewitt. In 2023-24 they discuss Churchill’s The World Crisis, his classic memoir of the First World War. This essay addresses the question of who conceived and supported the attack on the Dardanelles. The answers still surprise some people. To search for all World Crisis essays published to date, click here. For the accompanying audio discussion, refer to World Crisis Dialogue 16, Turkey and the War  —RML

Churchill and the Straits

Approaching the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, we may reflect on an earlier seaborne expedition. The attempts to force the Dardanelles, and the opposed landing on Gallipoli, were abject failures. But many lessons were learned, not least by Winston Churchill.

The Allied attempt to force the Straits, and subsequently to land on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, was a tale of military and political failure at the highest level. It offers timeless examples of hypocrisy, skewed logic, wishful thinking and disloyalty. Winston Churchill observed that such problems often assail countries at war. Yet many historical accounts fix most of the blame on him.

Asquith, Fisher and Kitchener

Over a century later, we may wonder why Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wasn’t pushed aside sooner. Britain, then the superpower among nations, was fighting for survival. At crucial cabinet meetings, Asquith rarely opened his mouth. For almost two months he didn’t hold a war council. Privately he exchanged gossip with his lady friend Venetia Stanley. Most of what we know about his opinions at that time we know through their letters.

In cabinet, Asquith encouraged Churchill; behind his back he doubted and disparaged him. Nor was Lloyd George above criticizing the friend he had mentored. One of Churchill’s civil commissioners, Sir Francis Hopwood, carried slander to the King’s private secretary.

Churchill’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, military head of the navy, owed his prominence to Churchill. He threatened to resign every time he failed to get his way, and ultimately did so, abandoning his post.

Above all stood Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, enthusiastic for action but unwilling for a time to commit troops when they were first asked for. Vain and unyielding, Kitchener held a veto even over decisions of the Prime Minister. Yet all these people initially backed the Dardanelles naval operation—without reservation.

Getting around the slaughter

It is widely believed that Churchill proposed the Straits expedition to bypass the static slaughter in Europe’s trenches. While this is true in the abstract, the original plan was not his, nor was it hatched overnight.

Churchill and others first contemplated assaulting Germany and Austria-Hungary from the south. Churchill also proposed attacking Germany from the north, even as the Dardanelles operation was being approved by the War Cabinet.

By autumn 1914, Turkey seemed likely to join Central Powers, making Greece a potential British ally. Foreseeing this, Churchill offered the Royal Navy to support a Greek offensive against the Turks. On 4 September he cabled Captain Mark Kerr, on loan to the Greeks to command their navy, authorizing him to raise this possibility with the Athens government.

“The right and obvious method of attacking Turkey,” Churchill wrote Kerr, “is to strike immediately at the heart.” Churchill thought the Greeks could occupy the Gallipoli Peninsula by land, while an Anglo-Greek fleet forced the Dardanelles. This would link up with the Russians via the Bosphorus and Black Sea.

If the Greek plan didn’t work, Churchill offered an alternative: an invasion by Russian troops of European Turkey. Russian casualties might be heavy, but such an enterprise would mean “no more war with Turkey.” At this point he made no mention of British troops.

Hesitation and naïveté

No action was taken on Churchill’s ideas. Then, at the end of September, the Turks mined the Dardanelles, cutting off the Russians from their ice-free link to the Mediterranean. This focused fresh attention on the strategic waterway.

“British military supplies could no longer reach Russia except by the hazardous northern route to Archangel,” Martin Gilbert wrote. “Russian wheat, on which the Tsarist Exchequer depended for so much of its overseas income—and arms purchases—could no longer be exported to its world markets.”

On October 28th, Turkey formally joined the Central Powers. Two days later, Turkish warships began shelling Russian Black Sea ports. The British cabinet fretted over the effect on Russia, and whether the Turks might also attack Egypt.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley: “Few things would give me greater pleasure than to see the Turkish Empire finally disappear from Europe…. Constantinople [might] become Russian (which I think is its proper destiny) or if that is impossible neutralised and become a free port.” These are certainly examples of vapid imaginings.

Admiral Carden eyes the Dardanelles

With the approval of First Sea Lord Fisher, Churchill ordered the Mediterranean commander Admiral Sackville Carden, “without risking any ships,” to bombard the forts at the Dardanelles entrance, at a safe distance from Turkish guns. Carden was instructed to retire “before fire from the forts becomes effective. Ships’ guns should outrange older guns mounted in the forts.”

Carden did so on November 3rd, reporting that the forts were vulnerable to naval bombardment. No allied ships were damaged. One shell hit the magazine of a fort at Sedd-el-Bahr (Gallipoli side of the Straits) which blew up with the loss of almost all its artillery. It was never repaired—nor did the Turks improve other Dardanelles defenses. They remained short of guns, mines and ammunition.

Genesis of the naval attack

The successful shelling of November 3rd caused many to consider Turkey vulnerable. “Like most other people,” Churchill wrote, “I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over.” Carden had demonstrated otherwise. The Admiralty War Group concurred.

Results nearby confirmed these views. In December the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta (now Iskerenderun) surrendered under the guns of a single British cruiser, HMS Doris. The Turks actually assisted in demolishing its defenses.

It seemed, Churchill testified, that “we were not dealing with a thoroughly efficient military power, and that it was quite possible that we could get into parley with them.” Characteristically, Churchill was looking for a chance to talk.

“By ships alone”

On 3 January 1915 Churchill, with Fisher’s approval, asked Carden if he thought the Dardanelles Straits could be forced “by the use of ships alone.” Churchill conceived of using a fleet of older British warships, superfluous to the Grand Fleet in home waters.

WSC added: “Importance of results would justify severe loss.” (Emphasis added.)

Carden replied that while he did not think the Straits could be “rushed,” they might be “forced by extended operations with a large number of ships.”

Critics later said Carden was “a second-rate officer who found himself unexpectedly in a sea command instead of in charge of Malta dockyard.” But Carden was the on-scene commander. One only wishes Churchill was blessed with such clear contemporary vision as his hindsight critics.

Churchill telegraphed again to Carden: “Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.”

The enthusiastic Admiral Fisher

It is important to note that Churchill’s top Admiralty commander was then still strongly behind the enterprise. Fisher even proposed to supplement Churchill’s older naval vessels with the new battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth. For practice!

The navy’s latest dreadnought, Queen Elizabeth was the first to mount 15-inch guns. She was about to leave for the Mediterranean for test firings. Why not, Fisher suggested, “use her practice shots on the Dardanelles etc. and the possibilities flowing from it.”

Carden said he would need twelve battleships, three battlecruisers, three light cruisers, a flotilla leader, sixteen destroyers, six submarines, eight seaplanes, twelve minesweepers and twenty other craft. Excepting Queen Elizabeth, all could be older, surplus vessels. All were still fit to fight because Churchill had devoted some of his prewar budget to maintaining them.

Carden proposed to start by bombarding the Turkish forts from a safe distance. Then, preceded by minesweepers, he would sail into the Straits, demolishing shore batteries as he found them. He proposed a feint at Gallipoli (Churchill had suggested this in November)—a bombardment but no landings.

Emerging into the Marmara, Carden would keep the Straits open by patrols in his wake. Weather and morale of the enemy were variables, he added, but he “might do it all in a month about.”

Almost total euphoria

The British War Council met on 13 January 1915. Every member was enthusiastic, Maurice Hankey wrote. They “turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front…. The Navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence, and whose opportunities so far had been few and far between, was to come into the front line.”

Asquith himself drew up the fateful minute. The War Council agreed to a man. Nobody seemed to notice one curious addition. The Admiralty, Asquith wrote, should “prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.”

Unanswered questions

How do you “take” a peninsula without troops? Did Asquith mean for sailors to land and march on Constantinople? In the general ardor, no one asked. All eyes were on sailing through the Straits. A fleet this size, appearing off Constantinople, would surely cow the Turks into surrender.

Churchill alone held out for an alternate: attacking the north German coast. Kitchener said there were no troops for that. (He was always short of troops, except to be slaughtered in Flanders.) Of the strictly naval enterprise he was fully supportive. Fisher did not demur.

The War Council waxed euphoric about the possibilities. Next, what about a naval attack up the Danube, landing at Salonika, and sending a fleet up the Adriatic? Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt wrote a paper entitled “The Spoils.” He envisioned the end of the Ottoman Empire and expansion of the British Empire as far as Palestine.

None of these naively optimistic visions were voiced by Winston Churchill.

Next: the Gallipoli landings.

More on the Dardanelles

“Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary,” 2015.

“Dardanelles Then, Afghanistan Now: Apples and Oranges,” 2009.

“Churchill’s Potent Political Nicknames: Admiral De Row-Back to Wuthering Height,” 2020.

Excerpted from “What’s Not Trite is Not True,” a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original article with endnotes and addenda, click here. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale-Churchill, click here, scroll to bottom, enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We never disclose or sell your email address which remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Oh no, not again!

Churchill was dragged protesting into D-Day (Operation Overlord) by his U.S. and Russian allies, says Scottish writer Graeme Bowman. Right to the last, Churchill preferred the “soft underbelly” route to Germany through Italy. This is not a new charge. What is rather new is the argument that he was motivated by ignoble interests: securing the Mediterranean, Suez and Britain’s eastern empire.  

In the words of Arthur Balfour, Empire First offers “some things that are trite and some things that are true, but what is true is trite and what is not trite is not true.”

Of course Churchill’s instincts were to cross to Italy after the Allies had taken North Africa. He also saw the strategic need to “shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.” That does not mean he doggedly opposed Overlord. In fact, without Churchill, the invasion would have been harder.

Here’s the windup

Chapter 1, “Jolly Little Wars Against Barbarous Peoples” starts with the race card. It’s a Churchill quote from 1952: “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings, it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking. When I was a subaltern, the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man.”

Churchill said that fifty years after he’d been a subaltern! Worse, his words are trimmed to distort their meaning. His preceding words were: “When I was in Lloyd George’s Government I wanted to bring in radical reforms in Egypt, to tax the Pashas and make life worthwhile for the fellaheen. When you think….” etc. Clearly, “you” refers to opponents of reform, not himself. 

And don’t expect to find Churchill’s 1944 remark to War Cabinet colleague Sir Ramaswamy Mudaliar: “The old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must disappear…. We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” That wouldn’t fit the narrative of this breathless condemnation. 

In the Army young Winston lives a life of “indolence and indulgence punctuated by intense bursts of soldiering.” Amidst all that indolence he managed to serve in four wars on three continents, publish five books before age twenty-five, and earn a small fortune lecturing. 

Now for the pitch 

If you have had enough of this, and believe me I have, consider the main thrust of Empire First: That Churchill opposed D-Day almost up to the Normandy landings. “We are often only shown one side of Churchill, his good qualities,” Dr. Bowman told the Greenock Telegraph. “He did do the right thing in 1940, but his mistakes such as his opposition to D-Day have been completely ignored.”

The only thing wrong with this is that it’s completely untrue. Churchill’s hesitations over D-Day are documented since the issue arose in 1942—and with far greater effect than this book. Consider please the Churchill Bibliography.  

In The Second Front and Mr. Churchill (1942) the Communist MP Willie Gallacher echoed Stalin’s demand for an immediate invasion of France. Next, Mr. Churchill’s Anden [Other] Front (1947), by another Communist, Kai Moltke, argued that Churchill never wanted Overlord. In Ruzvel’t, Cherchill: Vtorol Front (1965) Soviet author Iskander Undasynov made the argument again. Yet this book is represented as a wholly new critique. 

Complaints were not only from Bolsheviks. In Winston Churchill and the Second Front (1957) the distinguished military historian Trumbull Higgins argued that Churchill’s concentration on the Mediterranean was the result of “colonial” thinking. In Keith Sainsbury’s Churchill and Roosevelt at War (1994), a scholarly “reinterpretation” of the two leaders explained how Churchill through D-Day assured the end of British greatness. (Rather the opposite of the author’s thesis). 

Heart of the argument 

“Churchill wanted to put the British Empire first,” Bowman told the Greenock Telegraph. WSC “had to be pressured into D-Day by the Soviets and the Germans. [He] wanted to pursue a west allied operation [sic; he must mean Western allies] in the Mediterranean, Italy and the Balkans, and controlling the Eastern Mediterranean and Suez. Churchill was pursuing a Brexit military strategy, putting the British Empire before the liberation of Europe. He had a parochial view of the world…. You could say that Churchill was the first Brexiteer.”

How Brexit compares here is obscure. Brexit was about regaining sovereignty from a federal Europe, not regaining the British Empire.  

Non-smoking gun 

One example will suffice of this book’s many misinterpretations. Bowman quotes Churchill on 19 April 1944, to Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan. (The brackets are his): “[Overlord] has been forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States military authorities.” The quote is truncated and out of context; and, by “forced upon us,” Churchill was likely not even referring to Overlord.  

Four days earlier, Cadogan had asked Churchill to clarify publicly what was meant by “Unconditional Surrender.” President Roosevelt had announced this policy to the press at the 1943 Casablanca Conference. Loyally, Churchill “backed him up,” as he wrote Cadogan on April 19th. But “this matter is on the President.” 

In replying to Cadogan, Churchill spends four paragraphs on “Unconditional Surrender,” not D-Day. In the fifth paragraph Churchill thinks it “wrong for the Generals to start shivering before the battle.” 

What battle? Bowman inserts “Overlord” in brackets. It is more likely that Churchill referred the upcoming campaign across France. Especially when he adds (in words not quoted by Bowman): “We have gone in [to the invasion] wholeheartedly.” In a final paragraph, Churchill returns to “Unconditional Surrender.” There is nothing here to suggest any opposition to Overlord. 

(For more of this, see addenda correspondence between WSC and Cadogan in the Hillsdale review.)

Churchill on D-Day, 1941 

The record is full of evidence proving that Churchill had wanted a “lodgment on the continent” since 1941. His reluctance to invade prematurely was based on his recollection of the Gallipoli disaster in 1915. “War was war but not folly,” he told Stalin, “and it would be folly to invite a disaster which would help nobody.” That did not mean Churchill opposed invading France. Here is some of the evidence:

[Floating harbours, later called Mulberries] must float up and down with the tide. The ships must have a side-flap cut in them, and a drawbridge long enough to overreach the moorings of the piers. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.

You [Mountbatten] will take charge of the commandos. You will continue the commando raids to keep the Germans on their toes—but above all so you may learn the technique of getting a lodgment back on the continent. And you will devise the appliances, the appurtenances and the techniques necessary to get back onto the continent…. All our headquarters are thinking defensively, except yours. Yours will think only offensively. You will go ahead and plan the invasion of Germany and you will let me know as soon as may be convenient when you will be ready to invade.

1942-43 

It seems to me that it would be a most grievous decision to abandon Round-up [original code name for Overlord]. Torch [the invasion of North Africa] is no substitute for Round-up…. 

There is of course no question of abandoning ‘Overlord’ which will remain our principal operation for 1944…. retention of landing-craft in the Mediterranean in order not to lose the battle of Rome may cause a slight delay…. The delay would however mean that the blow when struck would be with somewhat heavier forces.

“Impulse and authority” 

A more valid conclusion about his attitude toward D-Day is evident from such documents. In his war memoirs, Churchill summarized his case: 

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

Dr. Bowman is from Greenock, which played a noble part in Britain’s war effort. Perhaps its historians might now busy themselves with a travelogue. They could tell of an old man’s courageous journeys from Greenock into U-boat-infested seas in pursuit of victory in a global war. Or they could describe the ships and munitions built in Greenock to support the “lodgment on the continent” the old man had supported since 1941. They might even mention the Mulberry Harbours, the old man’s conception that made possible a successful D-Day. 

More on Churchill and D-Day

“D-Day: Rough Men Stand Ready, A Shared Sentiment,” 2023

“Lectures at Sea (1): Churchill and the Myths of D-Day,” 2019.

“Netflix on Operation Mincemeat: Did They Get It Right,” 2022.

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

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

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

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

Beyond his brief

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

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

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

Manchester and Reid

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

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

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

A great work

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

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

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

Bill Manchester would like that.

A Churchillian Classic

Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey. London: HarperCollins; New York: Wiley, 1994), new paperback edition, $19.95, Kindle $11.39.

In Search of Churchill is one of Sir Martin Gilbert’s most captivating single volumes—as generous and humorous as its subject. For the dedicated student of Churchill, it is a panorama of rare experience. It is now available as a paperback and e-book. No dedicated Churchillian will put it down.

Sir Martin began his journey in 1962 at Stour, East Bergholt, the home of then-official biographer Randolph Churchill. Lady Diana Cooper had written a letter of introduction: “’Darling Randy, here is Martin Gilbert, an interesting researching historian young man who loves Duff and hates the Coroner. He is full of zeal to set history right. Do see him.” (“The Coroner” was Brendan Bracken‘s nickname for Neville Chamberlain. Lady Diana was referring to Randolph’s pet villain, but neither Martin nor Churchill hated political opponents.)

Gilbert became one of Randolph’s “Young Gentlemen,” helping to research and draft the “great work.” When Randolph died in 1968, Martin succeeded him. Today, Hillsdale College proudly houses the Gilbert Papers: 40 tons of material on Churchill, 20th Century and Jewish history. We lost Martin in 2015, but his work never dies. In 2019 Hillsdale completed The Churchill Documents from material he had compiled.

Personal testament

More than any of his nearly ninety works, In Search of Churchill is deeply personal. It is Martin’s answer to all those critics over the years (they are, in his polite way, never mentioned by name) who accused him of being uncritical. It is a self-defense manual for friends of Churchill: a smorgasbord of historical karate-chops.

Why was Gilbert so positive? Because time and again, In Search  explains, he was prepared to find Churchill’s tragic flaw. And then he would come away more impressed with his wisdom, generosity and humanity. “I might find him adopting views with which I disagreed. But there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”

“Beast of Bergholt”

Gilbert’s friends warned him he probably wouldn’t last long at East Bergholt. But Sir William Deakin, who had worked for Sir Winston, urged him to take the job anyway: “Working with Randolph, for however short a period, will provide a lifetime of anecdotes.”

Martin did survive, and Randolph anecdotes are served up wholesale. One glittering example involves the night a London newspaper editor was entertained at Stour. Randolph served him a fine repast, hoping to get the biography serialized in his newspaper.

The conversation turned to the truncated 1930s news reports from Berlin on the Nazi military buildup. The poor editor made the mistake of saying he had been responsible for cutting them. Randolph turned from the carving table, knife in hand, declaring: “You should have been shot by my father in 1940!” The editor, Martin recalls, left the next morning. (He felt able to spend the night!?)

Yet there are many vignettes attesting to Randolph’s kindliness toward his aides, his fascination with the fruit of their research, which he always referred to as “lovely grub.”

In search personally

Martin Gilbert found himself the official biographer, starting with the third volume. In Search devotes a chapter to the Dardanelles, the first great controversy he faced. Here we see his method of study: photocopy every relevant document, explore every source. If necessary, ring everyone named “X” in the London telephone book. Thus, he learned that initially it was Churchill who was wary about the Dardanelles campaign. Admiral Fisher, who later rebelled, was its backer. Churchill overextended himself defending an action he could not control. Then Fisher resigned, and Prime Minister Asquith formed a coalition with the Tories, whose price was Churchill’s departure.

Why did Asquith give in? Martin Gilbert could not comprehend it—until he found Judy Montagu, with whose mother, Venetia Stanley, Asquith was besotted at the time. Montagu brought him the priceless letters in which Asquith poured out his despondency after Venetia became engaged. Here was the “lovely grub” which structured Volume III’s account of Churchill’s worst political defeat.

In Search describes Churchill’s fearlessness in battle, combined with his detestation of war. Biographers who claim the opposite should read this: “Ah, horrible war,” says Churchill the warmonger: “If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.” He called the Second World War unnecessary and avoidable. He was rarely vindictive, but he never forgave the Prime Minister he held responsible: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” Sir Martin writes: “In my long search for Churchill, few letters have struck a clearer note than this one.”

“The factory”

In Search introduces us to the vast writing factory of Chartwell, with glimpses of it in action. Three chapters are devoted to literary assistants and secretaries. Some critics dwell on how much of their work Churchill passed off as his own. In fact, he signed off on every word, and his assistants loved him for the respect and appreciation he paid them.

Winston’s “secretaries” began with a Harrow school chum, John Milbanke, who took dictation while Churchill bathed. Milbanke later won the Victoria Cross, and was killed in action at Gallipoli. A succession of young people followed, and many told Sir Martin their experiences.

“One lady who worked with Churchill for just under three months in 1931, while he was in the United States, did not like him,” notes Martin. “She made her objections plain when, nearly 60 years later, she was interviewed at length by the BBC. It was curious, and for me distressing, that the other secretaries, who were with him for so much longer, and saw him at his daily work, were given far less time to say their piece.”

“Sagacious Cat”

A subject of much modern hindsight is Churchill’s marriage—which one well-publicized biography called a “loveless farce.” Sir Martin explored every paper, diary and memory touching on Churchill’s marriage and family: “I became aware of how close he had been to his wife and children—a closeness shown both by the time spent together, and intimate correspondence; an uninhibited and open relationship.”

In Search offers scores of examples of the love Clementine and Winston bore each other. One illustrates what Sir Martin calls “the unending fascination of the search.” He had written that Clementine, Winston’s “Sagacious Cat,” prevailed upon him to wear civilian dress in Paris to receive the Médaille Militaire in 1947. Later he learned, through a mutual friend of this writer’s, that WSC had for once rejected her advice, choosing the uniform of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. My friend Bill Beatty’s photo of the occasion appears in the book.

Even as he profited from these personal recollections, Gilbert admits that he is probably dealing with just a fraction of the record: “How often must Churchill have spoken on similar occasions, with no mechanical or human Boswell present, only a small group of listeners caught up in the force of his convictions, and realizing that they had listened to something rare, profound and extraordinary.”

“Golden inkwells”

In “Diaries and Diarists,” In Search describes the “golden inkwells” that mean so much to a biographer. Here we chop away at the vines of apocryphal stories choking the true image of Churchill. Gilbert himself admits falling for some: “I felt ashamed to have been caught telling them, being always so scornful myself of unauthenticated stories.”

“Dear Mr. Gilbert” is a grand finale chapter of spiraling fireworks and shooting stars. Amidst queries of every kind, Gilbert explodes ridiculous myths with which the public, and certain writers, seem besotted.

How did Churchill get by on so little sleep? (Actually he averaged seven to eight hours a day.) Did actor Norman Shelley deliver a Churchill speech over the BBC? (Never, though a cigar sometimes cluttered WSC’s delivery.) Is this signature or that painting a fake? (A surprising number are.) Did Churchill have royal blood? (undetermined) or illegitimate offspring? (No.) Was he unfaithful? (Never.) Did he rant against Jews? (Only Jews working with Lenin.) Did he lose the 1945 election with his “Gestapo Speech?” (“The Gestapo speech is always quoted, the social reform pledge hardly ever.”)

Prime Minister Edward Heath asked: How did Churchill work with his speechwriters? (“He didn’t use them,” said Martin, incurring the wrath of Heath’s speechwriter, later Britain’s foreign secretary.) Why are the Churchill papers on Dieppe open only to Martin Gilbert? (“This caused me to blow my top in Canada during a speech…. I said they were at the Public Record Office at Kew…. [The speaker] went on at a bright puce, and I have felt sorry for him ever since.”)

Eternal Chartwell

In Search of Churchill winds up at Chartwell, “where every vista, every artifact and every room has a story behind it.” Martin Gilbert recalls his many visits there over the years. Old hands pointed him both to obscure details and explained the central role Chartwell played in the saga.

Here, in Gilbert’s discrete way, are polite but firm rebuttals of silly stories spun by less fastidious biographers. Churchill’s alleged ego, lack of friends, heavy drinking, or his cavalier treatment of guests, are methodically debunked. Again, one quote will suffice, by Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, later Lord Hailes:

Winston was a meticulous host. He’d watch everyone all the time to see whether they wanted anything [and] was a tremendous gent in his own house. He was very quick to see anything that might hurt someone. He got very upset if someone told a story that might be embarrassing to somebody else in the room. Winston had a delicacy about other people’s feelings. In his house and to his guests he was the perfection of thoughtfulness.

More broadly, Buchan-Hepburn dismissed the vision of Churchill as a man who didn’t relate to ordinary people: “He had no class consciousness at all. He was the furthest a person could be from a snob. He admired brains and character; most of his friends were people who had made their own way.”

The real Churchill, the real Gilbert

I am well over my allotted space I haven’t told you the half of it. In Search of Churchill is pure gold—a book you simply must have. You may find yourself dog-earing or sticky-noting it for reference in confrontations with scoffers. It might well form part of the Official Biography itself. It is that warm, personal side of Martin Gilbert which he set out not to show in his biographic volumes.

Honest critics may argue over the merits of Martin’s approach, and the conclusions he draws. Martin himself admitted that he had barely scratched the surface. But fair-minded readers will come away from In Search of Churchill realizing that Sir Winston was lucky to have had such a biographer. Sir Martin has left a monument as stable and lasting as Chartwell itself.

The Queen and WSC

Oliver Williams, Winston Churchill & The Queen. Self-published, 2022, 128 pages, paperback $8.99, Kindle $5.99.

A beautiful tribute to Her Majesty The Queen and Winston Churchill—only a click away—is by David Dilks. This book reminded me of it. Not because it is related to what Dr. Dilks wrote, but because it should have been. A good, short appreciation of their relationship, now that the last page has been turned for both, is needed. This paperback leaves us waiting. 

Their closest relationship—during Churchill’s postwar premiership—lasted scarcely three years. Those were years of sad decline for the nation that had held the fort for liberty. We may well agree with the author that it took two sterling characters, Head of State and Head of Government, to cope as well as they did. 

Mr. Williams appreciates that—as should everyone. Oddly, a back cover blurb declares that “theirs was not an unlikely friendship at all,” contradicting the subtitle. Of course it was not “unlikely.” This is the first of many detours, false trails, red herrings and off-the-wall pronouncements that will mislead the unwary. It is perfectly fine to produce “a light-hearted book…that talks to the reader[s] instead of lecturing them.” But parts of this one sounds like a sparsely researched lecture. 

“A great deal of life from afar” 

Churchill quoted a line about Arthur Balfour: “He saw a great deal of life from afar.” For her first 25 years, that also applied to the young Princess Elizabeth. Destiny called in 1936, when her uncle abdicated, placing her father on the throne and herself next in line. Elizabeth was but 12 when Munich guaranteed another war. She was 14 when Churchill became prime minister and vowed to fight to the finish. 

From then on, devotedly serving her country, Elizabeth Windsor saw life close-up. When she died in 2022, her Rolodex must have included more royalty, heads of state and government, and prominent international figures than any in the world. Broadly mourned, she was the best-known woman on the planet.  

As far as we know, Churchill said only one thing about the youthful Elizabeth. That was a note to his wife, from Balmoral, in 1926, when she was two: “This last is a character…. She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” His view was remarkably prescient. Yet years later, when she ascended to the throne, Churchill confessed he knew nothing of her and that she was “only a child.”

None of this is in the book. Churchill’s actual words about The Queen are few. Instead we get a hodgepodge of paraphrase, opinion, strange assertions and misconstrued deductions which sidetrack the story and obfuscate reality.  

Cacophony of errors 

Here are a few. Churchill sacrificed a soldier’s career to become a politician (2). He missed meeting Hitler in 1932 because he “fell ill and had to move to a sanitorium in Austria” (35). In the 1930s the Royal Family was divided by “those who supported Hitler and those who most certainly did not” (87). George VI was “displeased” when “Atlee [Attlee] skipped into Buckingham Palace” to say he’d won the 1945 election (39). (The King regretted losing Churchill, but he also knew that the people had chosen overwhelmingly. And Clement Attlee didn’t skip.) 

It is true that Churchill objected to televising the 1953 Coronation, Mr. Williams writes: “Dare we say it that the three words The Queen and Prince Phillip whispered to one another after the decision was made were ‘interring’ [‘interfering’?], and ‘old’ and ‘busybody’?” (99) Elizabeth II practiced “no smoking” (107). Churchill stuttered (60). Such assertions (unfootnoted) are supported by no evidence whatsoever.

Almost a fourth of the book is spent on preliminaries: Churchill’s view of and relations with British sovereigns, personal and historical. We go back to Queen Anne and his great ancestor Marlborough. Winston himself meets King George V in 1887—Mr. Williams means Prince George, then third in line behind his father and elder brother Albert Victor, who died in 1892. How this meeting matters to Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill is not apparent.  

George VI had doubts about his new Prime Minister in May 1940—that much is inarguable. The King remembered the debacle of the Dardanelles “in the dying days of the Great War.” No, it was in the opening days of the Great War. Which Churchill hoped the Dardanelles would help end sooner.  

Williams provides…

a number of quotations, but most don’t apply to the subject and are unattributed. The Queen’s quip that she wore bright colors because “I have to be seen to be believed” sounds in character. Her remark to a writer in need of a title, “I can’t think of a reason to give you one,” sounds more doubtful—she was always so nice! The Churchill quotations are a mixed bag. Of the first six (81-82), two are accurate, two are bowdlerized, and two are fiction.  

More curious is the assortment of “Churchillisms” (83-84) which “Mr. Langworth has been so kind as to provide us.” I provided none, unless he means my books. They are nicknames, applied in public and private to people WSC encountered: From “Admiral de Row-Back” at the Dardanelles to John Foster “Dull-Duller-Dulles.” Aside from “Wuthering Height” (meant for the BBC’s John Reith, not John Walsham), they’re accurate. But they have nothing to do The Queen and Winston Churchill. 

“Monarchical Number One” 

Much is made of an unfootnoted statement by Clementine that her husband was “Monarchical Number One.” It may be genuine: she liked to twig him about his monarchical attachment. But this is belabored over several pages, extending to the ravens in the Tower of London. Churchill didn’t care about symbolism, Mr. Williams concludes. He was not “duty bound to slavishly adore the Monarch, flaws and all.”  

Particularly misunderstood is Churchill’s long-postponed retirement. Churchill’s “dog in manger” attitude, says Williams, “must have put a strain on the Queen’s tolerant attitude.” Leaving more graciously might have saved her “many sleepless nights” (97). “It wouldn’t be lying to say that Churchill…might have encouraged his wife, Clementine, to whisper into the Queen’s ear about how retirement would break his heart” (101). What?

In fact, The Queen sympathized with Sir Winston’s predicament as advancing age weighed upon him. Why not simply quote her true feelings? No one, she wrote to him, would ever “be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister, to whom both my husband and I owe so much.” And Churchill’s reply: “I regard it as the most direct mark of God’s favour we have ever received in my long life that the whole structure of our new-formed Commonwealth has been linked and illuminated by a sparkling presence at its summit.”

This illustrated, as David Dilks wrote, what Churchill truly believed: “The monarchy signified for him something of infinite value, at once numinous and luminous. And if you will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of our public life who can think and write at that level?”

Indeed we do. 

“I am a longtime Gone With the Wind collector and researcher, and give presentations at GWtW events. I’ve also been the GWtW Answer Lady on several websites. Some asked: Did Churchill and Roosevelt read Gone With the Wind? It seems that FDR read quite a bit of the novel, but I couldn’t come up with anything about Churchill.

“I hope you don’t mind me tossing you this question. I assume that Churchill did see the film, as FDR did, on 26 December 1939, after it opened in Washington. Gone With the Wind opened in London on 18 April 1940.”  —K.M., Royal Oak, Michigan

A: Yes; with several side stories….

On the contrary, your question sent me on an interesting dive through the archives to learn about a compelling story and one of Churchill’s favorite novels.

Leslie Howard’s misfortune:  To start with a side note: Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, had a business manager, Alfred Chenhalls, who closely resembled Churchill, affecting similar clothing and a homburg hat.

Legend has it that German spies in Lisbon, observing Chenhalls and Howard boarding a flight to London, mistook them for Churchill and his bodyguard. They informed the Luftwaffe, who shot down the plane. Poor Ashley Wilkes, ever the loser.

The story is not verified, but Churchill heard the tale of mistaken identity. He found it ridiculous and telling. “The brutality of the Germans was only matched by the stupidity of their agents,” he wrote in his war memoirs.

Gone With the Wind

In the late 1930s everybody was reading Gone With the Wind, from my mother (I have her copy) to Neville Chamberlain. (His biographer, Keith Feiling, wrote that Chamberlain was “taking delight in it” during the Czech crisis in 1938.)

Winston Churchill was reading it as he wrote the American Civil War chapters of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (not published until after the war). Thanks to Martin Gilbert’s biography we know quite a lot…

Winston S. Churchill to Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds, a Civil War authority (Churchill Papers: 8/626), 24 March 1939:

When one comes to look at it en bloc, the Confederates never had any chance at all. It was only a question of the North getting under way and the amount of time required to destroy, if necessary, every living soul in the Confederate states.

The dramatic point is the wonderful resistance which they made…. Have you read Gone With the Wind? It is a terrific book.

It is interesting to re-read Churchill’s Civil War chapters in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the knowledge that he was reading Gone With the Wind as he wrote. Norman Rose stated:

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples is generally acknowledged to be the least satisfactory of [Churchill’s] books. It reads as a kind of pastiche that proclaims his “secular [Whig] faith,” its finest section (written as he read Gone With the Wind) telling the story of the American Civil War….

[But] the fact that Churchill was not a trained historian had its merits. As every scholar knows, in research it is necessary to be dogged in pursuit of sources, but also ruthless in sensing when to stop and to start writing. —Norman Rose, Churchill: An Unruly Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 211

The Film

The 1939 film version also impressed Churchill. From the John Colville diary, 15 December 1940, Ditchley Park, Oxford:

We saw Gone With the Wind which lasted till 2.00 a.m. I thought the photography superb. The PM said he was “pulverised by the strength of their feelings and emotions.” —Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Vol. 15, Never Surrender, May 1940-December 1940 (Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 1241.

Sir Martin Gilbert adds:

On Sunday December 15, at Chequers, after watching the film Gone With The Wind, he had sat from two until three in the morning discussing the campaign in North Africa with Eden. As they talked, the total number of Italian prisoners of war captured by Wavell’s army reached 35,000. —Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 6, Finest Hour 1939-1941 (Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 946.

The first time Churchill met Vivien Leigh he was rendered speechless by her beauty. This stemmed not only from her role as Scarlett O’Hara, but as Nelson’s “Lady Hamilton” (“That Hamilton Woman”)—beyond doubt his favorite film.

Following that film she married Laurence Olivier, whom Churchill had known since the 1920s. The Oliviers and Churchills were guests of each other. Alas we can only imagine their dinner table conversation.

Gone With the Wind in Churchill’s Pre-Munich speech…

Margaret Mitchell’s wonderful title inspired Churchill to use it twice. The march toward Munich in 1938 saw his first, highly effective application:

For five years I have talked to the House on these matters—not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet….

If mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation and the British Empire, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory —gone with the wind! —Winston S. Churchill, Arms and the Covenant (London: Harrap, 1938), 465: “The Danube Basin,” House of Commons, 4 March 1938.

In his memoirs…

…he summed up the results of Appeasement:

Look back and see what we had successively accepted or thrown away: a Germany disarmed by solemn treaty; a Germany rearmed in violation of a solemn treaty; air superiority or even air parity cast away; the Rhineland forcibly occupied and the Siegfried Line built or building; the Berlin-Rome Axis established; Austria devoured and digested by the Reich; Czechoslovakia deserted and ruined by the Munich Pact, its fortress line in German hands, its mighty arsenal of Skoda henceforward making munitions for the German armies…

…President Roosevelt’s effort to stabilise or bring to a head the European situation by the intervention of the United States waved aside with one hand, and Soviet Russia’s undoubted willingness to join the Western Powers and go all lengths to save Czechoslovakia ignored on the other; the services of thirty-five Czech divisions against the still unripened Germany Army cast away, when Great Britain could herself supply only two to strengthen the front in France; all gone with the wind. —Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 271

Postscript

Minnie Churchill, Sir Winston’s grand-daughter-in-law, having read the above, offers another Churchill connection to Gone With the Wind, or at least Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). Here is Gable on bended knee with the then-Minnie d’Erlanger, on a date in Jamaica. “He was a complete gentleman.”

(Update from 2013.) Michael Shelden, author of Young Titan, set London media buzzing with speculation that young Violet Asquith attempted suicide after Churchill decided to marry Clementine Hozier.  (An upcoming Q&A to be discussed by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.)

Not only that, reported the Daily Mail, “He caroused with West End call girls and proposed to THREE society beauties—who turned him down.” (Some girlfriends! Capitalization theirs.)

The society girlfriends were Pamela Plowden, Muriel Wilson and the actress Ethel Barrymore. But the most raffish thing Mr. Shelden reported Churchill doing is showering Miss Barrymore with “armfuls of flowers.” He also showed up at Claridge’s each night after her West End play ended, where he would “insist she have dinner with him.”

The rest of the Mail‘s lurid headline—“He caroused with West End call girls”—concerns a story Churchill himself first told. As a Sandhurst cadet, he stood up for London showgirls at the Empire Theatre when “prudes on the prowl” attempted to erect barriers sheltering their promenades from more upright society. Churchill reported this in My Early Life (1930). As the barriers fell, he made what was apparently his first speech ever: “Ladies of the Empire! I stand for Liberty!”

Stretching the sources

The “carousing story” was apparently caused by Mr. Shelden’s note that Churchill and Lord Rosebery once dated a pair of “Gaiety Girls.” Each of them took one home. Alas, Winston’s date later told Rosebery he’d “done nothing but talk into the small hours on the subject of himself.” This sounds familiar from reports by his actual girlfriends. (Clementine Hozier said the same.) It jibes with many descriptions of young Winston’s encounters with women.

Mr. Shelden’s very well done book reports, “Everywhere he went he wore a glossy top hat, starched wing collar and frock coat. His accessories included a walking stick and watch chain.” He even wore silk underwear. This was the standard dress of most Edwardian Members of Parliament. I’m not sure if they all wore silk underwear…. But as Winston explained to his young wife, who complained about the cost: “I have a very sensitive cuticle.”

Read the book, but take the media—as always—with a grain of salt.

Excerpted from “The Sordid History of the Collected Works,”  my essay for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read the original article with more photos and an appendix on the various texts, click here. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale, click here, scroll to bottom, and fill in your email in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” Your email address is never given out and remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Fanfare

In 1973, on the eve of the Churchill Centenary, word broke of the first collected edition of Sir Winston’s published works. Edited by Frederick Woods, The Collected Works of Sir Winston Churchill was “limited to 3000 copies.” The price was £945, then about $2500. The publisher was the “Library of Imperial History,” a company apparently founded to market the books.

Aesthetically, the set seemed magnificent, bound in calfskin vellum with the titling in 22 ct. gold, printed on “500-year archival paper,” page edges gilt, silk page markers, marbled endpapers. (They proved to be color separations, not marbled paper, a minor disappointment.) Each volume was housed in a dark green slipcase stamped with the Churchill Arms.

The specifications were titanic: five million words, 19,000 pages, 90 pounds, requiring 4 1/2 feet of shelf space. The Collected Works were promoted with impressive testimonials. Lady Churchill, who wrote the Foreword to Volume I, said the books would have given Sir Winston “enormous pleasure.”

Brickbats

Public opinion was less uniform. Dalton Newfield, editor of the International Churchill Society journal Finest Hour, editorialized: “Triumph? No—Tragedy.” Most people, he wrote, “will never own this wonderful work…. Few libraries will find $2500 for an edition so expensive. Clearly the Works are canted toward the speculator.”

He also questioned the claim that “a substantial part of the proceeds…will be used to further the work of the Churchill Centenary Trust, Churchill College and the U.S. Churchill Foundation.” His doubts proved valid, for there is no record that those charities ever benefitted. The price also rankled. By contrast, Newfield noted, the Encyclopedia Britannica had three editions from $998 to $5000. But “all who want to use this valuable reference will be able to buy it for just under $500, and EB will knock another $100 off if you trade in any old edition. What a contrast!”

Scholarship

Newfield also raised problems of scholarship. Most of the works were being reset and reedited. Some texts were taken from later editions, which differed radically from the originals. The worst offender was The River War, which appears in the Works only as an abridgment, a far cry from the original text. The World Crisis, with its valuable shoulder notes, looks at a glance like an offprint of the First Edition. In fact it was reset, reedited and its maps redrawn.

In all, only eight volumes and half of a ninth contained the original text and pagination. Seven volumes were offprinted from later editions. The other 18 1/2 volumes, though improved with uniform type and better maps, bear no resemblance to the originals. They are of limited value for footnotes or references, since the Collected Works are so rare that few can access them.

The reset works were also significantly edited. While in this may have improved or modernized the text, it created enormous differences from the original. If editor Woods could change “Currachee” to “Karachi,” was he not also tempted to change whole passages? “I concede that WSC’s works can stand a lot of editing, particularly his maps and quotations,” wrote Newfield. “But such editing, of course, makes the issue useless for student and scholar.”

Omissions

The title Collected Works was itself misleading, since only Churchill’s books and some of his speeches were included. Forewords and contributions to other books, contributions to press and periodicals, and most speeches were omitted. The Library of Imperial History reacted to this criticism when it issued, in 1976, the Collected Essays of Winston Churchill, a four-volume compilation of most major articles, forewords and contributions not in the Works. Purchasers of the Works were allowed to add the four-volumes of Essays, and a less expensive binding of the Essays was offered. The Essays, still not reprinted a half century later, are a true contribution to the Churchill canon. They will be described in a separate article.

Disappointments

Shortly after publication the price rose to £1060 in Britain and $3000 in America. This did nothing to encourage sales. By early 1976, all signs pointed to somewhat less than the sell-out the publishers had promised. In a much plainer prospectus issued that year, it was admitted that only 1750 of the authorized 3000 sets were sold. Sets were being bound only as orders were received.

By the late 1970s the company declared bankruptcy. The receivers relocated their offices from London to Royal Tunbridge Wells, and fitful efforts were made to dispose of further sets, without much success.

By 1982, when I attempted to locate the Tunbridge people, both they and the stock of the Works and Essays had vanished. It was rumored that the stock had been bought and moved to New York. But when a New York bookseller colleague went personally to the location, he found an “accommodation address.”

Search

For years, as a Churchill bookseller, I tried to rediscover the thread of the “great venture.” Finally I found a firm of London solicitors who had been involved in the liquidation. They had no clue as to the whereabouts of stock, but referred me to the bindery, Robert Hartnoll Ltd. in Bodmin, Cornwall.

Success! For the past few years Hartnolls had been warehousing enough leftover sheets to make up several hundred sets. The unknown New York entrepreneur had apparently bought the sheets and persuaded the bindery to make up 20 sets of Collected Works in red morocco. The bindings differed in detail with the original, and lacked the original publisher’s spine logo. But there were enough unbound sheets left to satisfy my clients who wanted them.

Alas, the process of making the Works available was a test of will, time and patience. UK law moves slowly, and Hartnolls were told that seven years must pass before they could consider the books theirs to sell. Otherwise, the owner might resurface and accuse them of dealing in stolen property!

I kept at them: “Isn’t there some way you can meet the law and still sell the stock?” In 1987, three years after I had located the trove, they thought of one: Sell books, but keep the proceeds in an escrow account for the prescribed number of years. In this way Hartnolls would meet the letter of the law while the Churchill world would get the books many wished to own.

Recovery

A renowned bindery specializing in Bibles, Hartnolls was founded in 1960 and closed in 2019. Its work was spectacular, and it happily bound books to order. Many collectors opted for morocco-bound Works, instead of vellum, which tends to discolor and swell with age. To this day my own set, bound in cream morocco, “falls open like angel’s wings” (as Churchill said of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples), and smells like the inside of a Bentley. These and other later morocco bindings, with cloth endpapers and gilt dentelles on the inside cover edges, are even more elaborate than the originals. They are wonders of the binder’s art.

Over the years my friend and bookseller colleague Mark Weber and I sold the remaining available sets. We sold about 20 sets bound in full cream morocco, using the original dark green slipcases. Several more sets were bound in vellum or red morocco. (The latter carried the original spine markings, LIH logo, and red bookcloth endpapers.) Counting early and later bindings, about 50 sets exist in red morocco.

One-offs 

Original advertisements showed the Collected Works in a bespoke bookcase topped by a pediment bearing the Churchill Arms. Surprisingly, the bookcase was never offered to the public and apparently only one was built for advertising purposes. Mark Weber discovered it years later—originally owned by Sir Iain Maxwell Stewart, a Scottish shipbuilder. Sir Iain, who served on many boards, was a director of the Churchill Centenary Trust, which presented him with this uniquely housed example. An important clue to final quantity produced is the attached brass plaque, which mentions an edition of 2000, not 3000 as originally advertised.

As sheets were running out, Mark Weber commissioned one grand finale set of Collected Works. Just  before his untimely death in 2016, Mark bound this last set in dark green pebble-grained goatskin. It features leather inner hinges, silk endpaper inserts and premium cloth slipcases with leather tops and bottoms. As a final touch, Volume I bears the signatures of Hartnolls craftsmen, some of whom had worked on these sets since the mid-1970s.

Appraisal

The Collected Works are less important than their spectacular appearance suggests. However incomplete, they do constitute the first collected edition. But lacking the original texts, they are not bibliographically compelling: “expensive reprints,” as one cynic put it. Collectors prefer to hold a book in the form Sir Winston first gave it to the world—errors and all. The Collected Works will never replace first editions.

Dalton Newfield was certainly right to think the Collected Works were “canted toward the speculator.” In the late 1980s sets sold for about $2000 (38 volumes including the four Collected Essays). That is roughly $5000 in today’s money, but clean sets today sell now for $8000 or more, and mint sets for double that, when you can find them. The later morocco bindings are higher—$20,000 currently for a red “New York” set. The highest price we know of (a bespoke binding) is $27,500. Still, a $3000 annuity taken out in 1974 would probably produce better returns.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Barry Singer of Chartwell Booksellers and Marc Kuritz, of the Churchill Book Collector, for kind assistance in researching values and binding variations, and for permission to reprint some of the above images.

Was there any pushback to the Pat Buchanan book, Churchill, Hitler and the “Unnecessary War” (2009)? It questioned Churchill’s judgment over his whole life, but particularly his decision to fight on in 1940. I’m sure there has been, but could you give me a citation? —W.M.

A: Here’s one….

On publication of the book in 2009 I wrote an editorial, which I reprise below.

Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. New York, Crown, 518 pp.

No animus toward the author: I have respect for Pat and even voted for him in a New Hampshire Primary. I helped him with a few items during his research (while lampooning his beliefs in friendly banter). “I like a man who grins when he fights,” as Churchill said.

But a problem with Pat Buchanan’s book is the rampant use of selective quotes. Partial quotations edited to distort reality, or to fit a predetermined conclusion, are out of bounds.

Lusting after Armageddon

To establish Churchill’s “lust” for the First World War, for example, Buchanan quotes him on 28 July 1914: “Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?…” (28)

But he omits the rest of that passage: “…The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I w[oul]d do my best for peace, and nothing w[oul]d induce me wrongfully to strike the blow.” (from Martin Gilbert, editor,  The Churchill Documents, vol. 3, 1989.

As the war continues on 10 January 1915, Buchanan has Churchill exclaiming: “My God! This, this is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me (eyes glowing but with a slight anxiety lest the word ‘delicious’ should jar on me).” (66)

The latter is pure hearsay from the notoriously waspish Margot Asquith—but let’s assume he said it. To suit his thesis, Pat trims the rest of what Margot reported: “…I say, don’t repeat that I said the word ‘delicious’—you know what I mean…..” (The Churchill Documents, vol. 6, 400.

Possessed of the words Buchanan deleted, one might ask what Churchill meant by “you know what I mean”? Did he assume Margot knew he realized what barbarity war was—that he had been warning of the apocalyptic nature of a European war since 1903?

“Vile & wicked folly & barbarism”

I searched in vain among Pat’s collection of lusty war quotes for contrary expressions by Churchill—and there are many. Take his 1909 remark after watching German Army maneuvers: “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations—I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” (The Churchill Documents, vol. 4, 912.)

Buchanan does include an early 1900s remark about the dangers of a European war, but only to imply that Churchill had changed his tune by 1914. Nowhere do we read exculpatory evidence. Nothing is here on Churchill’s 1911 proposal for an Anglo-German “naval holiday,” for example. Or his plea, at the eleventh hour, for a peace conference attended by all the Heads of State of Europe.

Hitler red herrings

Then there is Hitler, on whom Pat is industrious. Under Hitler’s photo we read: “‘If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ —Churchill on Hitler, 1937.”

This sentence has often been culled out of context to be misunderstood by the foolish or the unwary. Here is the full passage (Churchill, Step by Step, 1947 edition, 158). Draw your own conclusions:

To feel deep concern about the armed power of Germany is in no way derogatory to Germany. On the contrary, it is a tribute to the wonderful and terrible strength which Germany exerted in the Great War, when almost single-handed she fought nearly all the world and nearly beat them. Naturally, when a people who have shown such magnificent military qualities are arming night and day, its neighbours, who bear the scars of previous conflicts, must be anxious and ought to be vigilant. One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations. I have on more than one occasion made my appeal in public that the Führer of Germany should now become the Hitler of peace.

A different light falls on Churchill’s attitude when that was first written (in 1935, as he footnotes in Great Contemporaries). There was still hope then, he thought. All of which shows yet again that you can use Churchill’s words, vacuumed like a gigantic Hoover and offered unabridged by the faithful Martin Gilbert, to prove anything. You only have to pre-select and edit the ones that make your point, however misinformed.

My in-laws gave me the four-book series of Winston Churchill novels by Michael Dobbs. They are set against the backdrop of the Second World War. I enjoyed them immensely. They are very satisfying reads. Dobbs offers informative, insightful, subjective views of the major players of the era. —T.D.

I certainly agree, and enthusiastically reviewed these novels when published. Years later they still resonate: Winston’s War (2002), Never Surrender (2003), Churchill’s Hour (2004) and Churchill’s Triumph (2006).

Michael Dobbs (Lord Dobbs of Wylye) is most famous as the author of House of Cards, the long-running British and American series of political skullduggery in high places. His Churchill novels are however of another genre. They are fiction with a sense of place and and character. They do not strain historical credulity. Dobbs gives us an honest picture of Churchill without slapping him with perceived foibles. (Churchill’s real foibles are plain enough in the Dobbs lexicon.) Here is an excerpt from my review of the first title in the series.

Winston’s War (2009)

In April 1938, facing a mountain of debt, Churchill put Chartwell, his beloved country home, on the market. A few days later he withdrew it. Brendan Bracken, his political disciple, had saved the place with a canny intervention. Bracken convinced the financier Sir Henry Strakosch to manage Churchill’s investments, being responsible for all debts and losses. Strakosch thus spared Churchill financial distractions during his campaign for British resistance to Adolf Hitler.

For purposes of this novel you are required to believe that the Strakosch rescue never occurred—that Churchill’s finances were still precarious when Neville Chamberlain went to Munich in September 1938; and that Churchill was incensed by Munich because his investments, made in anticipation of war, might not now pay off.

You must also believe that two civil servants, Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph Ball, were, respectively, Chamberlain’s eminence grise and political assassin. The first dictated the PM’s every move between Munich and the invasion of Poland. The latter went after Chamberlain’s enemies with the tactics of a Mafia chieftain. This is not too radical a description of Wilson, but the real Ball was a milder character.

What war was…

If you are willing however temporarily to believe all that—and if you will further accept that Chamberlain hated Churchill till the day he died (he didn’t)—Michael Dobbs will spin you a good yarn about the parliamentary machinations, treachery and betrayal by which Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940.

He will also tell you, better perhaps than any history book, what the war was like for ordinary people, trying to preserve their families amidst the chaos brought by incompetent leadership.

These little stories, intertwined with the main plot, tell a story endlessly repeated in Britain, whose citizens knew better than anyone the sheer horror of the Second World War.

True to life

Many of the character sketches—Alfred Duff Cooper, Samuel Hoare, Lord Halifax, the King—are powerfully believable. Two fictitious Chamberlainite MPs are quoted throughout—I was convinced I was hearing Walter Runciman and Rab Butler. The omnipresent shade of Lord Randolph Churchill remains in Winston’s mind, Lord Dobbs wrote me: “I have always compared and contrasted Churchill’s relationship with his father to that of—wait for it—Adolf Hitler. Hitler loathed his father. I suspect that relationship might have been a cause of the son’s brutal and depersonalized character. Churchill, by contrast, embraced his father’s neglect and gained character, strength and compassion from it. A huge plus for Winston.”

Dobbs novels are well crafted. I couldn’t put Winston’s War down. A gripping tale, told with the famous skill that gave us Francis Urquhart MP, the evil schemer of House of Cards—what more could you want?

Dobbs on Dobbs

Here are in the views of Lord Dobbs himself on the role of the novelist:

A novelist’s eye looks to the inner man: not simply what he achieves but who he is, how true and how strong his heart beats. In my eye, Winston Churchill had one of the most extraordinary hearts of all time. It beat as resolutely as a drum, and to its timbre the world marched from the jaws of Hell. Yet that same huge heart also overcame obstacles in his private affairs that would have crippled most ordinary mortals. He was great not because he got everything right (hah!) or because he was always pleasant and polite (he wasn’t), but because he managed to save our world even while battling with his own private demons.

Is he relevant in today’s world? Of course he is. Open your newspaper and you will be bombarded with messages about a World Crisis, a Gathering Storm, nations torn between the appeals of meeting jaw to jaw as an alternate to war. Some of the issues have changed, of course. But the fundamental inspiration of Churchill’s life was that we make our own world. The tide of history isn’t driven by irresistible Marxist-Fascist tides and irreversible social trends but by the passions of men and women. What we do, you and I, and those we elect, makes a difference. In the end, it’s up to us, and how big we find our hearts to be.

Identifying with the Old Man…

Yet it’s the nature of the man that appeals to me most. When I talk to school children about that strange beast Winston Churchill, I show him not just as an overly-round sixty-something with little hair and a fat cigar who did extraordinary things, but also as a tormented and at times frightened child who was subjected to abuse at school and—let’s be frank—a fair dose of parental neglect at home. Yet still he made it through. If Winston were in a classroom today he would be sitting in the back row, a child with few friends, with a troubled home life, with learning difficulties, with school reports that summed him up as all but worthless, who couldn’t even make it to university. And yet….

To watch the fascination of young eyes suddenly alert, identifying with our Old Man, realising that perhaps they, too, might find some way to overcome their own personal challenges, never fails to be a transcending moment.

What would his message be today? I suspect it would not be framed in terms of Mission Accomplished, but neither would it be Mission Impossible. Wherever he is remembered, the memory brings hope and a reminder that nothing in the course of human affairs is beyond our reach. He remains an inspiration to schoolchildren and statesmen, and to the rest of us who fall somewhere in between.

“‘Plumpy’ still loves Love Actually…”

Many American friends of Britain (and I trust vice-versa) think the “Special Relationship,” invented by Winston Churchill, tends nowadays to work in only one direction. Love Actually suggests this. Hugh Grant as Prime Minister delivers an unexpected message to a U.S. President.

Seriously stellar cast

Love Actually is a rom-com about ten different romances going on simultaneously in London at Christmas. The cast is remarkable: Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”), Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, the mute comic), Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman (Sybil Trelawney and Severus Snape from Harry Potter). And Liam Neeson, who for once isn’t slaying the Ungodly but trying to be a good step-dad to his ten- year-old son. (The boy is in love with an American of the same age.)

Quite a cast—not the least Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, who meet as body doubles for movie sex scenes. John says (while naked and simulating sex): “it is nice to have someone I can just chat to.” They fall for each other and she takes him home and invites him in. He says, “Are you sure this is all right? I’ve never done this before.”

PM and President

In the midst of all this the Prime Minister receives a visit from the President of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton). The Prez is a really snarky piece of work. On the side, he tries to seduce Natalie (Martine), of Downing Street staff. During their plenary meeting, he tells Hugh he has an agenda he plans to follow, whatever Britain thinks. take it or leave it.

At the press conference the President mouths the usual platitudes about the Special Relationship and Hugh tells him off in public. Naturally, Churchill gets a mention. This is a terrific scene for those who think the “special relationship” tends sometimes to be a one-way street. You can watch it on YouTube.

Also, the PM gets the girl. When she sends him a Christmas card professing her love, he calls for his chauffeur and heads for her street in Wandsworth (“the dodgy end”). There he goes door to door asking if Natalie lives there. The reactions of the residents are priceless. A woman says, “Are you who I think you are?” Hugh replies: “Yes I am. Sorry for all the cock-ups, not my fault, my cabinets are absolute crap. We’ll try to do better next year.”

He finds Natalie going out to a kids’ Christmas play. He takes her whole family to it in his Jaguar with its police escort, then hides with Natalie backstage. Unfortunately the curtain pulls back at the end and they’re caught. “Too late, just smile and wave.”

By the way, a tip of the hat to former Prime Minister David Cameron, who said similar things, though not with Hugh Grant’s panache. (Some Britons who watch the film, perhaps not so jokingly, like to propose Grant for PM. His character displays none of the gratuitous pomposity and virtue signaling of the current crop of politicians. And not just the British ones.)