Robert Pilpel Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s Prep for the “Iron Curtain” Speech 1946

31 January 2019 Comments 0 Comments

Q: Where did Churchill write the Iron Curtain address?

When we first moved to the United States we bought a home in New Canaan, Connecticut that had once been owned by Bernard Baruch and used has his get-away. We were told that, as he and Churchill were friends, Churchill had been invited by Baruch to stay there and it was there he wrote his Iron Curtain speech. We were never sure whether this was true or whether it was something a local real estate agent had dreamed up. There was another house down the road where George Washington was said to have slept on his way through!…

Cockran: A Great Contemporary

22 November 2016 Comments 1 Comment

Q: How important was Congressman Bourke Cockran’s influence on the young Churchill?

A: Very. The late Curt Zoller was the first to write in depth about Bourke Cockran. This man played a vital but little understood role in forming young Churchill’s political philosophy. In 1895, Zoller wrote, when young Churchill traveled to New York on his way to Cuba,

…he was greeted by William Bourke Cockran, a New York lawyer, U.S. congressman, friend of his mother’s and of his American relatives. Winston’s Aunt Clara was married to Moreton Frewen. (The peripatetic “Mortal Ruin” would later badly edit Churchill’s first book, Story of the Malakand Field Force.)…

Churchill in New Orleans

12 March 2009 Comments 0 Comments

I’m doing research for a video tour book on lesser known places in New Orleans. I recently heard that Winston Churchill made a visit here in 1932. Is this true? -B.K.

Yes, Churchill was in New Orleans on his 1932 lecture tour, between 16 February and 11 March, during the last hectic leg of his abbreviated schedule. (In December he was nearly killed by a car in New York and had recuperated in the Bahamas through 22 January.) On 11 March he boarded the Majestic in New York and sailed home. His New Orleans appearance would likely have been around February 18th-22nd, or just after the 23rd when he was in Atlanta, since train schedules would have had him in both cities within a day or so of each other.…