"My Early Life" Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s Escape from the Boers, 1899

28 June 2019

Escape from the Boers, 1899:

Please can you comment on, the “Dutchman, Burgener by name,” mentioned by Churchill in his account of his escape from the Boers in his autobiography, My Early Life? Is he one and the same person as the Charles Burnham mentioned by Sir Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life? Perhaps the surname was changed to protect Mr Burnham`s position in South Africa? Yet thoughthree decades had elapsed by the publication of My Early Life. It seems certain that Churchill knew of Burnham and the role that he had played.…

Churchill on Horses

5 August 2015

“We need a horseman for our next president,” writes Gary Hodgson in the Fort Morgan Times, who then goes on to quote “the famous reining champion, team roper and all around cowboy…Sir Winston Churchill,” who allegedly said: “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

Unless Mr. Hodgson has found a new attribution, that charmer is not Churchill’s. It’s listed in the “Red Herrings” appendix in Churchill by Himself, page 575, with this note:

Repeatedly attributed to everyone from Woodrow Wilson’s physician to Ronald Reagan. “Clergyman Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) is one person to whom the thought was attributed in his time.…