Emma Soames Archives - Richard M. Langworth

“Every chance brought forth a noble knight”: Jill Rose, “Nursing Churchill”

27 August 2018 Comments 0 Comments

Jill Rose, Nursing Churchill: A Wartime Life from the Private Letters of Winston Churchill’s Nurse. Foreword by Emma Soames. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2018, 286 pages, $27.95, Kindle $20.02. Reprinted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For Hillsdale reviews of the hundred Churchill works published since 2014, click here. For a list and description of books about Churchill since 1905, visit Hillsdale’s annotated bibliography.

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Jill Rose…

…begins this fine World War II narrative with a friendly warning. Don’t wait till your parents are gone before preserving their memories. The parents of “baby boomers,” Rose writes, lived through the most momentous times of the 20th century.…

Nashville (2). Joyful Humbug: Churchill’s “Indian Forebears”

20 October 2017 Comments 0 Comments

Many of the Churchill family down at least through Sir Winston’s grandson believed that American Indian blood ran in their veins. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 1….

“Mama is part red Indian…”

No exception to the family belief (until she saw contrary evidence) was Churchill’s daughter Mary. “I remember my daughter Emma, playing with her friends,” Lady Soames recalled. “Suddenly she warned them not to misbehave. ‘Mama, you know, is part red Indian, and if we are naughty she will go on the warpath.’”…

Churchill’s Common Touch (2)

18 March 2015 Comments 1 Comment

Continued from Part I…

Part 2: Alice Bateman

Two other Westerham common folk who benefitted from Churchill’s characteristic kindliness were Tom and Alice Bateman, farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Percy Reid, a stringer for a London newspaper, who kept an eye on Chartwell doings after World War II, wrote charmingly of a cattle sale in his book, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham (Folkestone: Regency, 1969):

Capt. and Mrs. [Mary Churchill] Soames—who then lived at Chartwell Farm—were at the sale most of the time and [their children] Nicholas and Emma were also taking a child’s interest in what was going on.…