“Few great leaders are also great writers; none who were compare with Churchill. HIS NOBEL PRIZE was for historic and biographic eloquence and oratory in defense of liberty. Yet, unusually for a politician, he also thought deeply about the nature of mankind.” —RML
Those Infamous Facsimile Churchill Holograph Letters
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.
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.”
Unlike modern newscasters and some politicians, Churchill saw no reason to patronize foreigners by overemphasizing their pronunciation. In fact, he worked very hard to anglicize words that particularly annoyed him. Britons, he said, should stand forthrightly behind Anglicized nomenclature: "If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris 'Paree.' Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St. George’s Day." Churchill as speaker was devoid of faddish jargon. (Imagine what he would make of vernacular like “reaching out” (for “contacting”) or “issues” (“for problems”).
Is the signature genuine? Yes, it seems so. From your photo it looks suitably aged and seems to have been there a long time. Inscribed books or photographs with the signatures pasted in or added to the matte are sometimes encountered. They are not, of course, as valuable as books the author personally inscribed, particularly if he named the recipient (such as the example above).
Not all were pleasant ribbing: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.... [His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…while dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.” —Nye Bevan
