“Not a day passes when Winston Churchill, who proved indispensable WHEN LIBERTY HUNG IN THE BALANCE is not accused of something dreadful, from misogyny to warmongering. My book, Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality, confronts this busy industry.” —RML
“The State of Churchill Scholarship Today”: San Francisco Presidio, 15Jan22
At long last we have a meeting. Please save the date: January 15th, 2022 11am to 2:30pm at the Presidio Golf Club in San Francisco.
From Gregory B. Smith, Chairman Churchillians by the Bay. Telephone: 707 (974) 9324. Email: [email protected]
Our speaker will be Richard Langworth, Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian who will speak on the “State of Churchill Scholarship Today.”
Please note that to attend you need to do three things:
1. Send me a check made out to Churchillians by the Bay for $50. Email or phone for address
2.…
“Rapscallions”: Excerpted from an article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just fill out SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW (at right). Your email address will remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
On cancelling Winston
Mary Ellen Synon is a feisty Irish journalist who doesn’t mind taking a contrarian’s position on popular orthodoxies. Writing to oppose the latest uproar over Winston Churchill, she first explains that she’s entitled to be offended by him: “If you think Churchill was heavy on Indians, Muslims and Africans, brace yourself for what he said about the Irish.”…
Clarence B. “Bud” Juneau, the Packard Club’s longtime Vice President for publications, passed away March 25th, leaving his many friends bereft. This was my contribution to a special edition of The Packard Cormorant, Fourth Quarter 2021, published in his honor. —RML
Memories of Bud
Bud Juneau gave me my first real job. I don’t mean “work,” the things we do for some entity which pays us. I mean what we do individually, hoping for pay and solely responsible for success or failure. For me, this began with Bud.
In 1975 I resigned as senior editor at Automobile Quarterly and set out to be an independent motoring writer.…
I am completing an English assignment which looks at the speeches of Winston Churchill and would like to read press conferences or interviews Churchill gave during the Second World War. So far, I have been able to find only speeches. Please could you advise me whether any such interviews are in existence? —E.L.
Washington, 1941
Churchill rarely gave interviews—only two that I know of as a young man, and those reluctantly. Speeches (live) were his preference. However, on his 1941 visit to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt ushered him into his first press conference.…
The urge to proclaim one's virtue by inventing straw men is insidious, and creeps into many unexpected places. Churchill's true flaws are open to learned critique. But there's a difference between presenting "a broad range of views" and inventing myths. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors…many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.” —Edward Winslow, Mourt’s Relation: A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1621.…
“A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.”
The wisecrack, wrongly attributed to Churchill, was actually uttered by his Liberal ally, David Lloyd George. (Allegedly LG said it in 1909, during their battle to reform the House of Lords,) It didn’t make Churchill more welcome at Blenheim Palace, where his cousin the Duke of Marlborough forbade the name of LG in conversation.
The Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII) and the 2nd Duke of Westminster are occasionally attacked for their “near-treasonous activity in support of the Third Reich.”…
Allen C. Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), 608 pages, illus., $35, Kindle $15.99. First published in The American Spectator, 9 November 2021.
“Who’s that man on the horse?”…
…I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)
Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs.…
An Italian journalist writes for Churchill references to the attacks on Monte Cassino during the Italy campaign in spring 1944, asking about “his silence, later contradictory” on the bombing of the town’s ancient monastery. If the implication is that Churchill was uncaring over the destruction of ancient shrines and grand buildings, that would contradict his revulsion over the bombing of Dresden. If it is that this particular destruction didn’t appear in his statements at the time, that is true. War is hell, and to expect him to eulogize every devastating loss is to expect a lot.…
Q: Did Churchill say this about the Greeks?
“Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.” This quote is attributed to Churchill and sometimes accompanied by an audio clip which does not sound like him. My assumption is that he may have written it but the words were delivered by someone else. Is there any source of this quote or possible misquote? It is used regularly by the Greeks during Ohi Day celebrations.* It would be nice to find a source either way. —M.A.,…
