“The great thing is to get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand. AND WRITE WHEN THERE IS SOMETHING THAT YOU KNOW And not too damned much after.” —Ernest Hemingway
Interview: Some Thoughts on Churchill’s London Statue
The statue dilemma: All those statues on Parliament Square—not just Churchill's—are of people with human faults. During the craze to tear down statues a few years ago, French President Macron boldly announced that no French statues would go. They are part of France's heritage, he said, for good or ill. That was very courageous of him. Statues tell a nation's story. If you object to one, erect one to balance it. There is no virtue in hiding from history.
Churchill said, “Short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.” How would that peerless practitioner of English, would react to the kind of language around us today? We can imagine what he would think about substituting fashionable jargon like “challenges” for “handicaps” or “issues” for “difficulties.” What would he make of that stand-by cliché “reaching out”? Oh dear....
Pamela Harriman was a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. President Chirac was saddened by her death: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the U.S. 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.
The great Tucker Flapdoodle: Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, we are told. He invaded Poland only because Chamberlain and Churchill forced him. He never wanted France, dropped peace leaflets on Britain. The Germans were baffled over what to do with millions of Russian POWs because Churchill kept fighting long enough to bring Stalin in. Then Churchill got America involved. Here we consider just one of these unique charges: that in his bloodlust, Churchill firebombed Germany's Black Forest. (We hadn't heard that one before.)
People are still falling for those reproduction Churchill thank-you letters produced by the thousands using a spirit duplicator. "The ultimate thrift shop haul," headlined the Daily Mail in July 2023. "Budget shopper is left STUNNED after buying a 'priceless' handwritten letter signed by Winston Churchill for just $1—after finding it buried in a New York store." Actually, $1 is about what it's worth—plus perhaps $50 for a nicely matted and framed example. Update 2024: Six originals do exist.
The story goes that in the middle of the Second World War, Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys told WSC that “Hitler and Mussolini have an even greater burden to bear, because everything is going wrong for them.” Supposedly Churchill said in reply: Ah, but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law! I will not dignify that with quotation marks because it is nothing Churchill said. Not even about Vic Oliver, a son-in-law he really disliked. What worried Churchill was what might happen "if God wearied of mankind."
"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.
It is virtually certain that Churchill was unconscious of the meaning of the palm-in V-sign. Former secretary Elizabeth Layton Nel told me he was "astonished" when (with some embarrassment) she told him what it meant. This moment is humorously reenacted in the great film "Darkest Hour, "with Gary Oldman as WSC and Lily James as Elizabeth.
Meet the Tiger: Remember, I’d been driving an Alpine, so the rest of this car seemed more or less familiar. At the Rootes showroom on Fifth Avenue, they rolled down the plate glass and gingerly drove to the waterfront. Then I got onto the East Side Drive and put my foot down. Lightning struck! I had one thought: I’ve got to get one of these!
On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” He was prescient. Re-Ratting is a lost art.
