(Updated from first appearance in 2012.)  A reader writes to ask what Winston Churchill was doing on January 24th, 1907. I hadn’t the foggiest idea. So I spent awhile trawling through the 100 million words by and about him compiled by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

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It seems something was often happening in Churchill’s life on January 24th. It is best known as day his father died (1895), and when he dief as well (1965). A synopsis of each January 24th in his life would be interesting—as it would be for September 11th, that day of infamy.

On January 24th, 1907…

…Churchill was at the Colonial Office, London, dealing with an upcoming Colonial conference and a diplomatic kerfuffle. The Governor of Jamaica, Sir James Alexander Swettenham, had churlishly demanded that marines from an American warship, USS Missou, return immediately to their ship. The ship was at Kingston during the devastating earthquake of January 14th. American crew members had been sent into town to lend humanitarian assistance.

Governor Swettenham, under the pressures of the moment, felt this action unnecessary and impertinent. He declared that the American action was like a visiting “British admiral landing an armed party to support the New York police.” Rear Admiral Charles H. Davis, Jr. took offence in return, and his complaints reached higher authorities.

On January 24th Churchill advised King Edward VII that, acting on a telegram from Lord Elgin, the Colonial Secretary (in Scotland), Swettenham had been rebuked and ordered to apologize to the Americans. Sir Alexander did, and immediately resigned. Though a distinguished colonial administrator in British Guiana before Jamaica, he never held office again. He died in obscurity in 1933.

Tourmaster and host

Searches for the date uncover two January 24ths when Churchill acted as PR man. January 24th, 1941 found him escorting Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s envoy, to Dover. There they toured British gun emplacements. The same day he wrote FDR, inviting him to tour the new battleship HMS King George V, arriving at the Chesapeake. It was all part of Churchill’s campaign to convince the President that Britain was in the war to the end. Hopkins’ favorable impressions led to the FDR-Churchill Atlantic Meeting in Newfoundland.

On the January 24th, 1943, America was two years at war, and the Anglo-Americans met at Casablanca. There Roosevelt demanded Germany’s “unconditional surrender”—a much debated declaration. Again the jolly host, Churchill took the President by car to Marrakesh, which he called “the most beautiful place on earth.” Together they watched the sun set over the Atlas Mountains, and pondered an uncertain future.

But the most unusual January 24th I was reminded of came ten years later…

January 24th, 1953

In 1983, Sir John Colville, Churchill’s longtime private secretary, addressed my first Churchill Tour in London. He a told a remarkable story. It’s best in his own words.

I went up to his bedroom one morning to talk about something, and he was shaving. He said to me, “Today is the 24th of January.” I said yes, and he said, “It’s the day my father died.” I said something suitable, and he went on: “It’s the day I shall die, too.” There wasn’t any comment I could make. I just said yes and went on with whatever it was he wanted me for. But I remembered. It stuck in my memory.

Twelve years later, I think on the 10th of January, his family rang me up from Hyde Park Gate. They said he’d had a stroke—a big, final stroke—and the doctor said there was no chance of his surviving. My wife will bear me out, as she was in the room. I said: “He won’t die until the 24th.”

Ten minutes later they rang up from Sandringham, because The Queen’s private secretary didn’t want to bother Hyde Park Gate in case things were happening.. They thought that I might know something, since I was executer and trustee. The private secretary said, “Do you know the latest about Sir Winston?” I said yes, I’d heard. And again I said that he wouldn’t die until the 24th. Martin Charteris, who was the secretary, remembers to this day that I said that.

Churchill lay in a coma for 14 days and on the 24th of January he died. I can’t explain it. It may be coincidence. But it is, I think, the oddest single experience I’ve ever had in my life.

Seventy-five years ago today, Winston Churchill was pondering survival. Hitler gripped Europe from France to deep inside Russia. Nazi U-boats were strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing on Suez. Britain’s only ally beside the Empire/Commonwealth, the Red Army, was fighting before Moscow. America remained supportive…and aloof.

Eighteen months earlier he had become prime minister. No one else had wanted the task. “God alone knows how great it is,” he muttered, his eyes filling. “I hope that it is not too late.”

On the evening of December 7th, despondent over odds against him, Churchill was alerted to a radio broadcast. The Japanese had attacked the American fleet in Hawaii. Quickly he telephoned Washington: “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”

“It’s quite true,” came the booming voice of his friend across the Atlantic. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor….We are all in the same boat now.” A supreme climacteric had occurred. For generations, Americans would ask where they were on December 7th, as we do now for 9/11.

“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,” Churchill wrote:

I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!…Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

Pearl Harbor not only awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve (as Admiral Yamamoto is said to have observed). It welded an enduring relationship among the English-speaking Peoples. Today we call it the Anglosphere: the great democracies—and by that I mean to include India—which share to a great extent the same values, the same ideals.

What are they? Churchill defined them: “Common conceptions of what is right and decent; a marked regard for fair play; especially to the weak and poor; a stern sentiment of impartial justice; and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law’—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking Peoples.”

To know the present, know the past

Churchill’s wisdom is Hillsdale College’s privilege, as publisher of his official biography, to refract. Every day we pour through his archive, spanning fifty years of global prominence. Every day we are struck, as biographer Martin Gilbert before us, “by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.”

He was right, of course, 75 years ago. We were saved after all. “We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands. Let no man underrate our energies, our potentialities and our abiding power for good.”

The spirit of common purpose which Britain, America and the Commonwealth forged in 1941 serves today in countless relationships: commercial, economic, political, military: a fresh focus on national security in an un-national world. Whether the challenge is tyranny or globalization, fanaticism or free trade, our past is the key to our future. And hanging together, as the patriot Richard Penn said, is preferable to hanging separately.

Raymond Seitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, likes to picture the park bench in London where a sculptor placed a life-size bronze of Churchill and Roosevelt sitting together, smiling and shooting the breeze:

“They may be talking about where matters stand and how to handle things. They may be doing in someone’s reputation. Or maybe they’re recollecting that day a long time ago when they heard about Pearl Harbor and strapped their nations together in joint purpose. And maybe they’re saying that, even if today the ocean is different, we’re still in the same boat.”

Let no one underrate our energies, our potentialities, and our abiding power for good.