Category: Research Topics

Life
“A day away from Chartwell is a day wasted.” Proving his point, this is what one sees from his Dining Room window, looking across the garden out over the Weald of Kent. (Photo by Gareth Williams, Creative Commons)
Q&A: Churchill’s Philosophy of Life and Living

Q&A: Churchill’s Philosophy of Life and Living

“What was Churchill’s Phi­los­o­phy of Life and Liv­ing?” was first pub­lished by the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project. For the orig­i­nal arti­cle with end­notes, click here. To sub­scribe to free week­ly arti­cles from Hills­dale-Churchill, click here and scroll to bot­tom. Enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” No adver­tis­ing: Your iden­ti­ty remains a rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enigma.

Q: On life and living

If I want to under­stand Sir Win­ston Churchill’s phi­los­o­phy of life and liv­ing, what books would you rec­om­mend? —B.A., via email

A: Lengthy sources

At first your ques­tion remind­ed us of the old fra­ter­ni­ty ini­ti­a­tion tech­nique: ask­ing pledges an unan­swer­able ques­tion.…

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Lalique
The large Lalique cockerel (circled behind the sofa) has enjoyed pride of place at Chartwell since de Gaulle presented it to Clementine Churchill during the Second World War. (Photo by Ciaran McKrickard, National Trust Collections with thanks to Katherine Carter)
French Magnanimity: De Gaulle’s Gift of a Lalique Cockerel

French Magnanimity: De Gaulle’s Gift of a Lalique Cockerel

“The conversation turned to the French Fleet, and Clementine said she hoped that its ships and crews would carry on the fight with us. De Gaulle curtly replied that what would really give the French Fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns ‘On you!’ (meaning the British). Winston tried to mediate but Clementine interrupted him, and said in French: ‘No, Winston, it is because there are certain things that a woman can say to a man which a man cannot say, and I am saying them to you—General de Gaulle!’” After this verbal fracas, the General was much upset, and apologised profusely, and later presented her with the Lalique.

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1942
Munro in the Civil & Military Gazette, Lahore, 1 January 1942
Happy New Year: “May we all come through safe and with honour”

Happy New Year: “May we all come through safe and with honour”

As the last minutes of 1941 ticked away, Churchill’s special train was steaming south on New York Central's broad tracks along the Hudson. Appropriately close to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, the Prime Minister called staff and reporters to the dining car. He entered the carriage amid cheers and applause, raising his glass to the company. “It was with no illusions,” he wrote, “that I wished them all a glorious New Year.... 'Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.'"

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Lenin
Lenin haranguing Muscovites, May 1920. (Photo by Grigory Petrovich Goldstein, public domain)
Lenin as Typhoid Culture. Or: To Russia With Love

Lenin as Typhoid Culture. Or: To Russia With Love

The German plan, Churchill wrote, “worked with amazing accuracy. No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow, in Bern, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief. With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.”

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Greeks
“Was there no ancestral spirit to conjure up before this unfortunate Prince, the downfall of his House, the ruin of his people—the bloody cellar of Ekaterinburg?” L-R: Olga, Maria, Nicholas II, Alexandra, Anastasia, Alexei, Tatiana at Livadia, Crimea, 1913. (Photo by the Levitsky Studio, public domain)
Russians and Greeks: “Falling Below the Level of Events”

Russians and Greeks: “Falling Below the Level of Events”

Churchill to Grey: "I beseech you at this crisis not to make a mistake in falling below the level of events. Half-hearted measures will ruin all, and a million men will die through the prolongation of the war. You must be bold and violent. You have a right to be. Our fleet is forcing the Dardanelles. No armies can reach Constantinople but those which we invite, yet we seek nothing here but the victory of the common cause." Grey and the Foreign Office "felt as we did. They did all in their power. It registers a terrible moment in the long struggle to save Russia from her foes and from herself.”

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Iroquois
“Sh— I think I can hear a little war coming in the East.” Sidney Strube in the Daily Express, 23 January 1920. Poland and Russia were at war and War Minister Churchill was beating tom-toms, according to the Express. The paper’s owner, Lord Beaverbrook, was often amused when his cartoonists lampooned his friend Winston. (Public domain)
Chief Great Leader: The Myth of Churchill’s Iroquois Ancestors

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

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

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motorist
Churchill at the wheel of his Wolseley 10, 1925; the bulb horn was used frequently in assorted mad rushes. (Author’s collection)
Winston Churchill as Motorist: Always in a Hurry

Winston Churchill as Motorist: Always in a Hurry

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

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Zinoviev
Bolshevik leaders write a letter of defiance to then-British Foreign Secretary George Curzon, 1923. L-R: Semyon Budyonny, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Kalinin, Sergey Kamenev (mustachios), Leonid Krasin (fedora), Karl Radek (smoking pipe), Nikolai Bukharin, Georgy Chicherin( writing); Lev Kamenev (gesturing), Christian Rakovsky (arm raised) Leon Trotsky (goatee) , Demyan Bedny (facing the others), Maxim Litvinov (glasses), Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev. (Krasnyi Perets, public domain)
Churchill and the Red Scare: The Zinoviev Letter

Churchill and the Red Scare: The Zinoviev Letter

The conspiracy theorists have not got round to accusing Churchill of actually writing the Zinoviev Letter–at least as far we know! It is virtually certain that he was not involved in the forgery, though he initially accepted it as genuine. He did take political advantage of the Zinoviev uproar. Even if it were forged, he said, it was nothing new where Bolsheviks were concerned. He called Ramsay MacDonald a “futile Kerensky.”

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Murray
Churchill visiting President Eisenhower at his Gettysburg farm, 6 May 1959. Sergeant Murray stands behind them. (Hillsdale College Press)
Remembering Eddie Murray, Churchill’s Bodyguard 1950-65

Remembering Eddie Murray, Churchill’s Bodyguard 1950-65

"Murray's devotion to Churchill was genuine, and I have no doubt that if danger had threatened he would have stood before him. He certainly made the great man’s life easier and the Boss, I think, had a real affection for him. It was Churchill’s inevitable reaction to stand up for any member of his entourage who was under attack. As Lady Churchill once said (looking at me rather pointedly): 'Winston is always ready to be accompanied by those with considerable imperfections.'" —Anthony Montague Browne

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Peninsula
The landing of 4th Battalion, Australian troops at ANZAC Cove, Gallipoli, 25 April 1915. (Ernest Brooks, Imperial War Museum, public domain)
Gallipoli Peninsula 1915: Failure is an Orphan

Gallipoli Peninsula 1915: Failure is an Orphan

From May to November 1915, Churchill held a meaningless sinecure, his only task the appointment of rural judges. “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.”

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RML Books

Richard Langworth’s Most Popular Books & eBooks


Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality

Churchill by Himself

Churchill in His Own Words

Churchill and the Avoidable War

The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill

The Patriot’s Churchill

Triumph Cars - The Complete Story
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