“A Cer­tain Splen­did Mem­o­ry…”  Din­ner of the New Eng­land Churchillians, Union Club, Boston, 21 Novem­ber 2014.

Yes­ter­day at West­min­ster Abbey, over a thou­sand of her friends and admir­ers joined in a memo­r­i­al to Lady Soames. A few weeks ago, in a spe­cial edi­tion of Finest Hour, fifty of them wrote about her. So it is time­ly to remem­ber her here in Boston, where she was with us so many times.

Tim­o­thy Robert Hardy led that issue because after all, a Shake­speare­an actor who dou­bled as her Papa is bound to know the right words, and he did.

He began with their meet­ing in 1981, with Chartwell a clut­tered film set as he played her father in the “Wilder­ness Years” TV series. “What she in her kind­ness said of my attempt,” Tim wrote, “made me feel I was for­giv­en for all presumptions.”

And that was Mary, as I pre­sume to call her—because she insist­ed on it the first time we met. Not because it was I. She was like that with everyone.

I knew we’d feel her loss quick­ly, and it hasn’t tak­en long. She’d be there with us now, glar­ing at the things peo­ple said about her father in just the last few weeks: That he starved three mil­lion Bengalis…that he want­ed to nuke Moscow…that he skipped Roosevelt’s funer­al in a fit of pique.

Well. She always urged us “to keep the mem­o­ry green and the record accu­rate.” I know she would be in the fray with us now, say­ing “Real­ly, my dear,” to peo­ple who write books about him—not sol­id books, but frothy hagiogra­phies or pop­ulist shock­ers. And some who, through their fame in oth­er spheres, are ele­vat­ed to ora­cles, who blithe­ly inform us what Churchill would do about ISIS or Iraq or the Nation­al Debt.

Mary always had an answer for peo­ple like that. I rec­om­mend it to you when­ev­er you hear some self-pro­claimed expert say what her father would do today. Her answer always was: “How do you know?”

“From that time on,” Tim Hardy con­clud­ed, “I have so many mem­o­ries of times spent with this great lady: aris­to­crat­ic, straight­for­ward, gen­er­ous, open-heart­ed, gen­tle, able to be sharp, humor­ous, wit­ty, poised, loy­al, with an extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty to get peo­ple to meet oth­ers with whom she thought they would become friends.” Well, sure, all who knew her thought that. But Tim says it bet­ter than most.

“There still is much to say,” wrote her sis­ter Sarah, in the poem that closed her memo­r­i­al issue, “And yet, my tongue and pen, so wont to fly, have of a sud­den both run dry.”

And so I am just glad to recall—in her father’s words about his own father—”a cer­tain splen­did mem­o­ry, which many Hon­or­able Mem­bers still preserve.”