“What men they were. How can we not, reading of their actions that extraordinary day, hold our manhoods cheap when we contemplate what they attempted and achieved? It makes us wonder how we would have fared had it been our generation that had to liberate Europe….”  Of the many national remembrances of D-Day, we found this the most compelling. Read it here.

One, two, many National Churchill Days

Why did the United States designate April 9th as National Churchill Day? Why not, for example, June 6th? That day marked, as Andrew Roberts writes, “the greatest single service that the English-Speaking Peoples rendered civilization.” WSC had a lot to do with it.

April 9th has a certain national significance for Americans. That was the day, in 1963, when President Kennedy proclaimed Sir Winston an honorary citizen of the United States.

He was too infirm to attend in person. But it is always worth recalling what he thought about it all. Here is his letter to the President, read by his son Randolph:

In this century of storm and tragedy, I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands.

Nor has our partnership any exclusive nature: the Atlantic community is a dream that can well be fulfilled to the detriment of none and to the enduring benefit and honour of the great democracies.

1940

Of course, 10 May, the date he became Prime Minister, was another Churchill Day. He himself believed that “nothing surpasses 1940…

By the end of that year this small and ancient Island, with its devoted Commonwealth, Dominions, and attachments under every sky, had proved itself capable of bearing the whole impact and weight of world destiny. We had not flinched or wavered. We had not failed. The soul of the British people and race had proved invincible. The citadel of the Commonwealth and Empire could not be stormed. Alone, but upborne by every generous heart-beat of mankind, we had defied the tyrant in the height of his triumph.

Few would gainsay him. In 1940 Churchill gave a country, outnumbered and outgunned, alone except for the Empire-Commonwealth, the courage to stand the “faithful guardians of truth and justice”—until “those who were hitherto half blind were half ready.”

That year proved that one person can make a difference. Just one—as Charles Krauthammer observed: “Only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.”

1944

And so four years later we launched the “Great Crusade,” as Eisenhower put it (today perhaps politically incorrectly). Western civilization was saved. Yet it was not, William F. Buckley Jr. argued, “the significance of that victory, mighty and glorious though it was, that causes the name of Churchill to make the blood run a little faster….It is the roar that we hear, when we pronounce his name….

It is simply mistaken that battles are necessarily more important than the words that summon men to arms, or who remember the call to arms. The battle of Agincourt was long forgotten as a geopolitical event, but the words of Henry V, with Shakespeare to recall them, are imperishable in the mind, even as which side won the battle of Gettysburg will dim from the memory of those who will never forget the words spoken about that battle by Abraham Lincoln…. The genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy.

A Churchillian resource

Hillsdale College seeks to refract that energy with two unique teaching tools: Winston S. Churchill and The Churchill Documents, comprising the official biography and the Churchill Papers of Sir Martin Gilbert, his biographer for forty years.

In each of the twenty-three volumes of The Churchill Documents, we are struck by the sheer volume and variety of the subjects Churchill grappled with. There were enemies and allies, allocation of national resources, urgent pleading from statesmen and generals. Often they demanded the impossible. Often cabinet dialogue was intense.

Nowhere is there so thorough a record of one statesman’s decisionmaking; nowhere were the decisions so consequential. Even now, in the digital age, Churchill’s workload would tax several capable people. His output was extraordinary, his reasoning understandable, communications thoughtful, his scope global. And there was this rare quality: It was simply impossible for Winston Churchill to write a boring sentence.

Today, as in 1963, we study Churchill because he stood for something—the principle that “the people own the government, and not the government the people.” He exemplified certain critical human possibilities that are always worth bringing to the attention of thoughtful persons. In 1943 he spoke at Harvard of our heritage:

Law, language, literature—these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law”—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.

***

This post is updated  from my article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project on National Winston Churchill Day, 9 April 2016 

Related reading

“Empire First: The War on Churchill’s D-Day,” 2023.

“D-Day +79: ‘Rough Men Stand Ready,'” 2023.

“Churchill Today: A Life Worth Contemplting in the Digital Age,” 2022.

“How Churchill Saw the Future,” 2018.

Richard II and “This Sceptr’d Isle.”

We are asked: “Churchill quoted Shakespeare’s famous lines, ‘This scepter’d isle,’ in one of his speeches. They are the words of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, from Richard II, Act 2, sc. 1. Could you direct me to the speech?”

Churchill knew his Shakespeare and had a near-photographic memory. Darrell Holley’s Churchill’s Literary Allusions tells us he alludes to Shakespeare more than any other English author. King John, Richard III and Hamlet are his most frequent references. Henry V also moved and inspired him. He also closely read Richard II, generally accepting Shakespeare’s portrayal of his cruelty and vindictiveness. (Alas, Holley’s book enjoyed only one brief printing and is now rare and expensive. It is a standard work and richly deserves reprinting.)

“Let’s Boost Britain”

Churchill quoted the “Scepter’d Isle” passage in part, but not in whole. It first appeared in his article, “Let’s Boost Britain,” in the weekly Answers, for 28 April 1934. (His topic has considerable relevance at present.) Answers was one of the most obscure periodicals to which Churchill contributed. Fortunately, the late Michael Wolff, one of Randolph Churchill’s assistants on the official biography, scoured its pages to compile The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (1975). The essay, thus reappeared, is in volume IV, Churchill at Large. It begins:

This week we celebrate St. George’s Day, which is also Shakespeare’s Day, who wrote the noblest tribute ever penned to this England of ours:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise …
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea …

“Time-honoured Lancaster”

Churchill however was not finished with John of Gaunt, famous scion of the House of Lancaster. Ultimately, he and others deposed Richard II and installed Gaunt’s son Henry IV. Another quotation occurs in The Birth of Britain, the first volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Writing of Gaunt’s death, Churchill refers to him as “time-honoured Lancaster.” That phrase is from Richard II, Act 1, sc. 1.

“Some love, but little policy”

How closely Churchill read and absorbed Richard II is suggested by another deathless line he deployed at least twice. In negotiating her husband’s exile, Queen Isabel begs leave to go to France. Knowing they might then raise an army and return, the Earl of Northumberland exclaims: “That were some love, but little policy.” (Richard II, Act V, sc. 2.)

Churchill remembered that turn of phrase. In 1916, disgraced over the Dardanelles, he was fighting at the front. His wife Clementine, and his friend Archibald Sinclair, urged him to stay there until the time was ripe for his return to politics. Anxious to be back in the thick of debate, Churchill wrote Sinclair: “I can almost hear you and Clemmie arriving by the most noble of arguments at the conclusion that I must inevitably stay here till the day of Judgement: NO NO – ‘That were some love, but little policy.’”

Twenty years later, writing his Life of Marlborough, Churchill described one of Marlborough’s enemies: “Why, then, should he give up his weapon and the chance of setting a hostile House of Commons loose upon him? ‘That were some love, but little policy.’”

Interestingly, in both cases, Churchill put Shakespeare’s words in quotes but did not cite the author. That was a time when every English school child knew Shakespeare thoroughly. He simply didn’t have to.

“Death of Kings” 

Churchill’s best-known line from Richard II comes in The Gathering Storm, his first volume of Second World War memoirs. He writes of his visit to the fleet after becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 for the second time, Uniquely, he had last held that office almost exactly twenty-five years earlier…

My thoughts went back a quarter of a century to that other September when I had last visited Sir John Jellicoe and his captains in this very bay, and had found them with their long lines of battleships and cruisers drawn out at anchor, a prey to the same uncertainties as now afflicted us. Most of the captains and admirals of those days were dead, or had long passed into retirement… It was a strange experience, like suddenly resuming a previous incarnation. It seemed that I was all that survived in the same position I had held so long ago …. I motored from Loch Ewe to Inverness, where our train awaited us. We had a picnic lunch on the way by a stream, sparkling in hot sunshine. I felt oddly oppressed with my memories.

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

Once again, Churchill didn’t bother to reveal the source of his quotation. In that time a grammar school education was truly comprehensive, and not only in Britain. Churchill simply assumed that all his readers would know. 

Further Reading

“Churchill, Lincoln and Shakespeare,” by Lewis E. Lehrman

“Churchill and Shakespeare,” by Richard M. Langworth

“Churchill, Shakespeare and Agincourt,” by Justin D. Lyons

“Mirrored in the Pool of England,” lecture by Richard M. Langworth

Q: Did Churchill ever quote from Romeo and Juliet?

“I knew that Sir Winston Churchill was an avid Shakespeare reader and quoter. But can someone tell me if he ever quoted from Romeo and Juliet?”

A: Once, perhaps twice…

Darrell Holley’s excellent book, Churchill’s Literary Allusions, offers only one reference to Romeo and Juliet. The Churchill Project’s digital resource of Churchill’s eighty million published words by and about Churchill offers another, but his private secretary thought it was bogus. We are not so sure. Read on and decide for yourself.

Holley’s book is one Churchill scholars should keep at their desks. Long out of print and pricey, it is an outstanding specialty study deserving reissue, even as an e-book. We have tried to find the author without success. (Reader assistance welcome.)

Mr. Holley devotes an entire chapter to Shakespeare, citing nearly fifty Churchill allusions to the Bard in his writings and speeches. To no other English author, he writes, does Churchill allude so often:

Both by formal quotations, some quite lengthy, and by well-known phrases almost hidden in his text, Churchill makes allusion to many of Shakespeare’s plays. Somewhat surprisingly, he makes no reference to any of the sonnets. It is certainly not surprising, however, that Churchill should allude often to the histories and tragedies, King John, Richard III, and Hamlet being referred to most.

“Yoke of inauspicious stars”

Churchill’s Literary Allusions offers one citation from Romeo and Juliet. In his biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston writes: “Would he, under the many riddles the future had reserved for such as he, snapped the tie of sentiment that bound him to his party, resolved at last to ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars’….?”

As so often in that better-read age, Churchill didn’t bother to cite the play, assuming most of his readers would know the source.

Darrell Holley found this allusion in Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Sc. 3, almost at the end of the play, where Romeo slays Count Paris and lays him in his tomb before taking his own fatal draught:

Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!

“In three long hours…”

On 18 June 1940, Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville records another allusion to Romeo and Juliet. Colville felt certain this was not accurate:

I asked him if he would see General Sikorski tomorrow. “I will see him,” he said, “at noon,” and then went on to quote some entirely bogus quotation about that time of day, which he pretended was spoken by the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

It wasn’t a good idea to challenge Churchill’s recall of Shakespeare. And so we wondered, re-reading the play, whether Churchill had the quote right but not the speaker? The answer is: quite possibly. In Act 2 Juliet, talking to herself, says:

The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse.
In half an hour she promised to return….
Now is the sun upon the highmost hill
Of this day’s journey, and from nine till twelve
Is three long hours, yet she is not come.

So, the Nurse was due back at 9:30 but she’s been gone three hours and it is noon. That is the time Churchill specified for meeting General Sikorski. If he repeated those words of Juliet’s ascribing them to the Nurse, he had the quote right but the speaker wrong.

A note on my co-author

Valerie Lillington, born in England in 1932, lived in Trinidad and Canada before emigrating to Australia in 1962, where she taught high school English and drama for almost thirty years. That included a year’s teacher exchange to America. Twice a candidate for Parliament, she enjoys an active life of travel, acting and directing. Currently she runs fortnightly sessions on Shakespeare in the local library, where Romeo and Juliet was a recent topic. She also writes and talks copiously on Charles Dickens. Valerie writes:

I saw Churchill once in London, and remember gathering round the wireless, as we called it then, to hear him speak. I was almost seven when the war started, over twelve when it finished. As members of our family, became involved, it became urgent to hear anything we could. Two of my uncles were killed and another seriously wounded. There wasn’t anyone in my class at school who did not have similar stories to tell.

More Churchill and Shakespeare

“Churchill’s Memorable Allusions to Shakespeare’s Richard II,” 2019.

“The Pool of England: How Henry V Inspired Churchill’s Words,” 2019.

“The Burton-Churchill Eruption: Coming Soon in Your Neighborhood,” 2016.

We are often asked which historical and contemporary personages most influenced Winston Churchill’s thought and statesmanship. One is right to start with Lord Randolph Churchill, Napoleon, Clemenceau and Marlborough. The classics open another avenue. Readers can find pithy remarks by Churchill on many of the following figures in Churchill by Himself.

Lord Randolph Churchill

His father was the first of young Winston’s political inspirations, and the subject of his first biography. “Like Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches,” Winston wrote. “In his speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a wealth of knowledge, which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.” Alas, Randolph died too young. His son remarked in My Early Life: “There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” See also John Plumpton, The Writing of Lord Randolph Churchill.

Seekers of Churchill’s inspirations must read his essay “The Dream”—an imaginary 1947 conversation with the ghost of his father, who died in 1895. Read also the excellent appreciation of the piece by Hillsdale College Churchill Fellow Katie Davenport. “The Dream” originated when, at the dinner table, WSC was asked what historical figure he would like to see filling an empty chair. His reply was instantaneous: “Oh, my father, of course.”

Bourke Cockran’s oratorical inspirations

There is no doubting Cockran’s significance. Churchill was quoting him to a later Democrat politician, Adlai Stevenson, in the mid-1950s. (Stevenson had to look him up!) Cockran was vital not only to Churchill’s oratory, but to his political thought:

It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations, but his conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard…. He taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ. He could play on every emotion and hold thousands of people riveted in great political rallies when he spoke…. Above all he was a Free-Trader and repeatedly declared that this was the underlying doctrine by which all the others were united. Thus he was equally opposed to socialists, inflationists and protectionists… In consequence there was in his life no lack of fighting.

Is this not the very description of Churchill himself? There is a fine book on the subject. Becoming Winston Churchill, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, is the standard work on their relationship. 

John Morley and “Mass Effects”

Like Cockran and Churchill, John Morley tried always to avoid war. Unlike Churchill, Morley was a pacifist. He resigned from the Cabinet when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Earlier that year, Churchill paid Morley a fulsome tribute: “For many a year he was an ornament of our Debates, and his learning and intellectual elevation, his brilliancy of phrasing, and the range of his experience, constitute assets and qualifications which the Government value in the highest degree.”

Morley is Churchill’s first subject in his book Great Contemporaries. In it he refers to his famous essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” which deplored the rise of the state and the homogenization of thought and politics:

Such men are not found today. Certainly they are not found in British politics. The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the war have swept the shores bare. I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch….  The world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, “Whither?” And to these few only a babel responds.

Clemenceau: faithful but unfortunate

Known as “The Tiger” for his aggressive politics, Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister, 1906–09 and 1917–20. His determination to win the war was legendary. In 1917 Churchill heard Clemenceau declare, “no more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues, neither treason nor half treason—war, nothing but war.”

One might say Clemenceau was a kind of French Churchill (or the nearest France came to one). They were alike in another respect: both were dismissed in their hour of victory. Churchill’s words about himself apply to Clemenceau, and remind us of the Churchill family motto, “Faithful but Unfortunate.” In 1940, Churchill wrote, “I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.” Thus also Clemenceau, shortly after his own world war ended.

Marlborough’s parallels

Churchill, a superb military historian, describes Marlborough’s campaigns with precision. But considering WSC’s inspirations, one might ponder the Great Duke’s geopolitical aspects. Leo Strauss, for example, called Marlborough: His Life and Times “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” His essay is in Harry Jaffa, ed., Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston Churchill (1981).

Andrew Roberts places Marlborough among WSC’s inspirations in his Churchill: Walking with Destiny:

Churchill’s strategic views, already profoundly affected by the Great War, were to develop significantly during his writing of Marlborough as he considered how his ancestor approached coalition warfare. “It was a war of the circumference against the centre,” he wrote of the War of Spanish Succession, just as it was to be for Britain after the Dunkirk evacuation…. [Churchill] admired Marlborough’s single strategy above the “intrigues, cross-purposes, and half-measures of a vast unwieldy coalition trying to make war…. Not for him the prizes of Napoleon, or in later times of cheaper types.”

Napoleon: writer and statesman

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon vies with Walking with Destiny in quality, a fine source for naming Napoleon among Churchill’s inspirations. Dr. Roberts explained that Churchill’s admiration was for the statesman and writer, not the dictator:

As an English Tory, I was expecting not to like Napoleon when I took up my pen…. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable parts of researching this book to discover that of course the Emperor had a hugely engaging personality and attractive character…. I like to think of [him] as the Enlightenment on horseback. The builder, the educator, the encourager of science and industry, the self-made man, the thinker, the writer, the giant and the genius. Instead my countrymen only see the soldier, the conqueror, the invader. They blame all the Napoleonic Wars on him—ignoring his pleas for peace and despite the fact that many more wars were declared on France than he declared against others.

Classical philosophers

Churchill’s inspirations extend to several classical authors or philosophers, like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and of course Thucydides. Paul Rahe, in “Why Read The River War?”, compares Churchill’s book with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War: “Nowhere can one find a subtler depiction of the moral and practical dilemmas faced by the statesman in a world torn by conflict. Moreover, Thucydides’ environment was bipolar—as was ours in the great epoch of struggles on the European continent that stretched from 1914 to 1989….”

See also Justin Lyons’ “On War: Churchill, Thucydides and the Teachable Moment”: “Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach. To convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done is the essence of political leadership.”

The works of William Shakespeare figured high with Churchill, who knew many plays by heart. He alluded to Shakespeare more often than any source other than the King James Bible. Shakespeare probably doesn’t’ qualify among Churchill’s inspirations. Rather, he was a rich source of the deathless phrases that punctuated Churchill’s expression.

Churchill read many more classics in his self-education as a young man. (For the full list, see his autobiography, My Early Life, Chapter IX, “Education at Bangalore.”)

In 1927, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife Clementine, “I am becoming a film fan.” He installed projection equipment for movies at Chequers, the country home of British prime ministers, in 1943, and at his family home Chartwell in 1946.

“Churchill and the Movies” is the final event by Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives in the 2018-19 academic year. It explores two movies regarded as Churchill’s favorites and two biographical movies in historical context. My lecture addresses Henry V with Laurence Olivier. We will discuss Churchill’s understanding of Shakespeare, and application of the lessons of The Bard’s plays.

The venue for this event is the Searle Center, which seats 800. It includes a new spacious entrance and lobby and a completely renovated kitchen. The facility also boasts an escalator, the first one in Hillsdale County.For current information click here.

In 2019, Hillsdale completes the final volume of Churchill’s official biography.  The largest biography in history, it began under Randolph Churchill, fifty-six years ago. Hillsdale also houses the Sir Martin Gilbert Papers, and sponsors Churchill seminars, publications, tours and online courses. Though located in Michigan, Hillsdale is certified as a charity by Revenue Canada as well as the IRS.

In 2014 I joined joined Hillsdale College as Senior Fellow for the Churchill Project, an endowed, permanent center for Churchill Studies. The culmination of my Churchill work over the years, it is an honor to be associated with this preeminent institution. I have now been with its students on many occasions. Inspiring work. I have never met such uniformly learned, thoughtful young people, able to converse on, and seriously to debate, a myriad of topics. They give us the feeling that Churchill was right: Never despair. There is hope yet.

The Freshman Pledge

We, the students of Hillsdale College, commit ourselves to diligent study and patient reflection. Having come to learn, we are proud to do so with integrity and will conduct ourselves with exemplary honor. As sacrifices past and present make possible our education, we too become stewards of this College for the generations yet to come. We pledge ourselves to the pursuit of truth, the love of the good, and the cultivation of beauty, for the sake of our minds and hearts and for an ennobled society. By so doing, we embrace the high calling of liberal education.

* * *

See also “Churchill Bio-Pics”

LONDON, APRIL 29TH— If the Great Man woke up from his “black velvet—eternal sleep,” perhaps to enjoy a cigar and a cognac during the pageantry in London, he might have felt a sense of satisfaction, and invoked his favorite Boer expression: Alles sal reg kom—“All will come right.” The words he spoke sixty-four years ago at another Royal Wedding have stood the test of time. “We could not have had a better King,” he said in 1953: “And now we have this splendid Queen.” The road has indeed been hard these six decades of her reign, but “unerring graciousness and human simplicity” have marked her every step along the path. We join in wishing Prince William and his bride a happy life. Live long, and prosper.

Written for a birthday tribute in October 2010….

We have all heard about the art of Timothy Robert Hardy, even though we don’t need to do so, since it is self-evident. But that really doesn’t matter, does it? His three-decade involvement with the Churchill saga provides a balsamic reiteration of what we know, are glad that we know, pity those who do not know, and are proud to be associated with.

It began with his peerless portrayals of Sir Winston in the 1981 “Wilderness Years” TV documentary; David Susskind’s 1986 “Leaders” series; a London stage play; the mini-series “War and Remembrance”; and—just this August 20th—a brilliant reading from Churchill’s tribute to “The Few” on its 70th annniversary. (Click here for the video.)

We can only begin to imagine the prodigious effort Tim made to master the role of Winston Churchill—to find, as he put it, “a way in.” Yet playing Churchill, he said, was “one of the best things that has ever happened to me.” Speaking to us in 1986, he likened the job to scaling Everest: “I shall never look down from the peak, but as long as I live I shall delight in gazing upwards toward those towering rocks.” The Churchill Society thought enough of his mountaineering to offer him the Blenheim Award, its highest accolade. But his acceptance honored us much more.

Robert Hardy has the distinction of having been on both sides in the Churchill story—for in 1974 he played von Ribbentrop toRichard Burton’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm.” He told me he yearned to direct the great Anthony Hopkins as Churchill, but I said this must never occur until he is too old. And he still isn’t!

Long before he played Winston Churchill, this devoted student of Shakespeare played many of the Bard’s heroes and villains—roles he savored. He once remarked to an interviewer: “I have to keep saying to myself, ‘To play Hamlet at your age is out of the question. Stop it!’”

Others know him best for his superb role as Siegfried Farnon in “All Creatures Great and Small.” My wife once said to him, “You’ll always be Siegfried to me.” Tim quickly replied, “You’ll always be Barbara to me.”

Nowadays, we know him as Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films. He admitted to Barbara that his only regret in that role is that he was not equipped with his personal owl.

His knowledge of archery and his scholarly book, Longbow, led to his becoming archery consultant to the Mary Rose Trust: studying the longbows and arrows found in the famous ship, now being restored in Portsmouth. Through his intervention, one of our Churchill tour parties was given a private tour of the ship by its curator, who explained the lengthy process of drying ancient timbers.

The unfailing quality of Robert Hardy’s work is equaled by the unfailing courtesy of his manner. Those who meet him for the first time are struck by his gentility, as of course by his wit and erudition. There is something about him that is a dramatic betrayal of the persona one expects from a public reputation.

He has said that Winston Churchill was the one man last century who could lead us through the worst of times by the force of his mesmerizing speeches, monumental courage and personal charisma. I say in reply that Robert Hardy’s work expresses all the Churchillian qualities. Through his skill, the true Churchill emerged for out of the blue distance of time, for new generations to contemplate. That is something for which Churchill admirers are deeply grateful and honored—as I am to be part of this tribute to Timothy Robert Hardy, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.