Chequers Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Life Amid Chaos: “The Hope Still Lives…The Dream Shall Never Die”

23 March 2020 Comments 1 Comment

My brother Andrew Roberts inspired this post, when he asked for Churchill quotations about childbirth. Yes, even now, friends have brought a new life into the world. Three months ago, my son and daughter-in-law did likewise.

Life Goes On

On 30 May 1909, Clementine Churchill was pregnant with their first child, Diana. Winston, asking her to practice social distancing, wrote these beautiful words: “We are in the grip of circumstances, and out of pain joy will spring, and from passing weakness new strength will arise.”

Four and one-half decades later, his daughter Mary was a fortnight overdue for the birth of Charlotte, her fourth child.…

Not Churchill, re Germany: “We butchered the wrong pig”

23 January 2020 Comments 3 Comments

A German correspondent writes: “Churchill is misquoted as saying—with reference to the Nazis versus the Soviets—‘We butchered [or slaughtered] the wrong pig.’ The implication: he should have fought Stalin, not Hitler.

“This seems to me revisionist wishful thinking. He could never have said that, since there is no such idiom in English. He would have had to say, ‘We fought the wrong enemy.’ Can you reveal some authentic information as to the origin of this misquotation?”

Several queries along these lines followed publication of Herbert Kuhner’s “A Revival of Revisionism In Austria.…

Churchill, Leslie Howard, Vivien Leigh and “Gone With the Wind”

31 August 2019 Comments 0 Comments

“I am a longtime Gone With the Wind collector and researcher, and give presentations at GWtW events. I’ve also been the GWtW Answer Lady on several websites. Did Churchill and Roosevelt read Gone With the Wind? someone asked. It seems that FDR read quite a bit of the novel, but I couldn’t come up with anything about Churchill. I hope you don’t mind me tossing you this question. Maybe you’ve run across a mention of it. I assume that Churchill did see the film as FDR did on 26 December 1939, after the movie opened in Washington.…