http://localhost:8080/national-anthems Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:28:59 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 http://localhost:8080/national-anthems#comment-71224 Wed, 13 Mar 2024 06:04:54 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=17041#comment-71224 Thank you for this fine article and its remembrance of anthems sung at several International Churchill Conferences. You are right that Ambassador Alan Keyes’s rendition of many verses of five nations’ national anthems at the 1993 conference was memorable. But his operatic singing goes back further, to a series of black tie Lincoln Day Dinners on February 12 that began at Harvard College in the 1970s, when he was a graduate student of Harvey Mansfield in government. Alan used to lead us in singing The Star Spangled Banner, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and other songs of the Civil War era, such as Marching Through Georgia, by no means neglecting the lesser-known verses. Probably the culmination of these dinners was the one held at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C. on February 12, 1984, when the after-dinner speech was delivered by Professor Walter Berns, followed by a recitation from memory of the Gettysburg Address by Joseph Alsop. It was all written up the next day in the Style section of the Washington Post. Afterwards the entire party walked in the moonlight to the Lincoln Memorial, where Alan Keyes led us in singing all of the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, after which we received a verbal warning from a dour National Park Service officer who mumbled something about “demonstrating without a permit.” We were impenitent. This experience led me later to suggest his bravura performance at the ICS conference in 1993.
As for the 2000 International Churchill Conference in Anchorage, it was Mary Soames’s second visit as guest of hono(u)r of The Right Honourable Sir Winston Spencer Churchill Society of Alaska. Her first visit had been in September several years earlier, when she first saw Mt. McKinley, as it was then known, and its twin peaks, which were named the Churchill Peaks in 1966; this time we were fortunate to host her on her birthday at dinner at Alyeska, in Girdwood. Not only the lesser-known verses of God Save the Queen were sung, as you noted, by Keith Padden, one of the Canaries who lead the assembled diners in singing Harrow School songs at our annual birthday dinners on November 30 at the Hotel Captain Cook, which always flies the Union flag in honor of its namesake, along with Old Glory and the Alaska flag with the Big Dipper and the North Star; but we also heard Solveig Barber sing several verses of O Canada in both English and French, and Sharon Jones, who had also sung with the Canaries when we first hosted Lady Soames, led diners in singing all four verses of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Anent our national anthem, I would like to invite people all over the world who may be visiting Alaska on Independence Day (for most of our visitors do come in the summer) to join us at the Veterans’ Memorial Flagpole on the Delaney Park Strip in downtown Anchorage at 1.00 p.m. on any July 4 for the annual reading of the Declaration of Independence. Each year we sing all four verses of The Star-Spangled Banner, and Sharon Jones has also been one of those who has led the singing at that event. We introduce visitors to our state song, Alaska’s Flag, before ending the ceremony with the ringing of a bell once for each year of American independence. The program begins with the singing of Fair Harvard, using the traditional words of the song, because it is organized by the Harvard Club of Alaska as a tribute from an older association, Harvard College (1636) to a younger one, the United States of America (1776). In these days when Harvard ought to be brought back to its noble purpose, this annual ceremony, which goes back almost three decades, reminds us, along with its graduates’ distinguished service in the War to Save the Union, Winston Churchill’s 1943 speech at Harvard, and Harvey Mansfield’s distinguished career of teaching, that Harvard at least has an admirable past.

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