Tag: Battle of Omdurman

Action
Action aplenty in the Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, 1898. In old age Churchill reflected: “It was very stimulating, but I did think ‘Suppose there is a spoil-sport in the hole with a machine gun?'” Painting by Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. (1856–1927), Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Churchill Quotes: “Action vs. Inaction….Religion of Blood and War”

Churchill Quotes: “Action vs. Inaction….Religion of Blood and War”

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N.B. We do not see Churchill in Woodville’s dra­mat­ic paint­ing above. He had drawn his pis­tol not his sword, in def­er­ence to his weak right shoul­der. For the skill and dex­ter­i­ty it took to sheath his sword and aim his pis­tol, see my review of Brough Scott’s Churchill at the Gal­lop (with Ben Bradshaw’s paint­ing of Churchill in the charge.)

Action and inaction

Q: Could you ver­i­fy the cor­rect word­ing for the Win­ston Churchill state­ment:  “I nev­er wor­ry about action, but only inac­tion.” There are var­i­ous iter­a­tions among the sources. —S.D.

From Churchill by Him­self, page 190 (note he placed quotemarks around “wor­ry”): “I nev­er ‘wor­ry’ about action, but only about inaction.”…

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escape
The escaped desperado: Durban, Natal, 1908.
“A Sun that Never Sets”: Churchill’s Autobiography, “My Early Life”

“A Sun that Never Sets”: Churchill’s Autobiography, “My Early Life”

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Win­ston S. Churchill, My Ear­ly Life: A Rov­ing Com­mis­sion. (Lon­don: Thorn­ton But­ter­worth, 1930; New York: Scrib­n­ers, 1930.) Numer­ous reprints and edi­tions since, includ­ing e-books. Excerpt­ed from the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project. For the full arti­cle, click here.

Connoisseur’s Guide

My Ear­ly Life appeared a year before the last vol­ume of The World Cri­sis. The sub­ti­tle, “A Rov­ing Com­mis­sion,” is from the first chap­ter of Churchill’s Ian Hamilton’s March. It seems he took it from an ear­li­er nov­el by G.A. Hen­ty, one of his favorite authors. The titles changed places in the first Amer­i­can edition.

A won­der­ful treat is in store in this most approach­able of Churchill’s books. …

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Galloper Jack Seely, Churchillian

Galloper Jack Seely, Churchillian

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A col­league asks if it’s true that Churchill com­rade Jack Seely was “arrest­ed for arro­gance” in the Boer War! It doesn’t sound to either of us like an arrestable offense, but fits the character—a lord­ly aris­to­crat-adven­tur­er, and thus almost inevitable Friend of Winston.

A Churchill biog­ra­ph­er, Esme Wing­field-Strat­ford, agreed: “Gal­lant Jack Seely, from the Isle of Wight…a light-heart­ed gam­bler with death, was about the one man who could claim a record to com­pare with that of Win­ston himself.”

C.N True­man thinks that Jack Seely could not have lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “He tru­ly belonged to an era asso­ci­at­ed with the British Empire and the atti­tudes embed­ded into a soci­ety that at one point had a gov­ern­ment that con­trolled a quar­ter of the world.”…

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Churchillnomics: The “Stricken Field”

Churchillnomics: The “Stricken Field”

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Young Win­ston Churchill’s sec­ond speech in Par­lia­ment was a bravu­ra per­for­mance tak­ing up his father’s theme for econ­o­my in the budget.

In Churchill in His Own Words (p 45) I date this quo­ta­tion 12 May 1901 and cite Churchill’s Mr. Brodrick’s Army, his 1903 vol­ume of speech­es (fac­sim­i­le edi­tion, Sacra­men­to: Churchilliana Com­pa­ny, 1977), 16:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an inter­val of fif­teen years, to raise the tat­tered flag I found lying on a strick­en field.

The “tat­tered flag” was Lord Ran­dolph Churchill’s cam­paign for econ­o­my in the late 1880s.…

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