Churchill by Himself, my encyclopedia of Winston Churchill’s most quotable remarks, is to be republished. (If the publishers can ever agree about what form and substance they will allow each other to produce.) To the the original 4000 quotes I’ve added so far 600 new ones.

The “Red Herrings” appendix of misquotes has also grown apace. That, however, is always kept up to date online. You can look it up:

All the “Quotes” Churchill Never Said

Misquotes Part 1: Accepting Change to European Union

Part 2: Fanatic to Liberty

Misquotes Part 3: Lies to Sex

Part 4: Sexism to Ypres

A trove of misquotes

The original “Red Herrings” appendix (2008) contained about 80 misquotes. Since then, with new discoveries it has more than doubled to 175. This is not surprising, since Churchill continues to engage the public interest. A browser search for “Winston Churchill” yields 87 million hits. (Abe Lincoln still comfortably leads with 144 million.) Since 2008, 270 new books about Churchill have been published, never under 14 per year. The recent record is 34 in 2015. So we should not be surprised that misquotes have grown apace.

Verification methods have never varied, although the research tool is improved. This is a digital file constantly expanded by new publications by and about Churchill. Yes, there are still “new books by Churchill”—if you consider his private letters and writings. These comprise The Churchill Documents, published through 2019 by Hillsdale College Press. The last half-dozen of these giant references add another five million words to the 20 million-word Churchill canon. Add another 80 million words about him by historians, biographers, contemporary diarists and memoirists. Of course, this is not every word he ever uttered. But if we can’t find a quote there, or in a valid source elsewhere, we file it as “unattributed.”

Ear-witness: “Every time you see something big….”

New research sometimes causes us to change a quotation’s status. Long regarded among misquotes, is this famous exchange of urinal humor: Clement Attlee, in a House of Commons washroom, as Churchill shuffles away from him: “A bit stand-offish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill replies: “Every time you socialists see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

This was long regarded as sheer fiction. But we finally noticed that a former Churchill private secretary, David Pitblado, claimed to have been an ear-witness. Pitblado’s account, to William Manchester, is in The Last Lion, vol. 1, page 35. Manchester oftentimes played fast and loose with facts, but Pitblado was not known for embroidering them. So we moved this exchange to the ranks of the genuine.

Among the misquotes: “Bring a friend, if you have one…”

Alas, a world-famous exchange between Churchill and Bernard Shaw has now joined the ranks of misquotes.

Shaw supposedly writes WSC: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill supposedly replies: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”

Alas for quoters, Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, blew the story apart. In the Churchill Papers he found a set of letters (CHUR 2/165/66,68) in which both Shaw and Churchill denied the exchange. The play in question was “Buoyant Billions” (1948).

Fresh fodder for misquotes…

…constantly appears in new Churchill quote books. Most entries lack attribution, even a date—which makes them immediately suspect. A recent example is The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (2017). Hilariously, even the title is not original: The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (2001) was another highly inaccurate compilation.

Reviewing the former, William John Shepherd found 28 entires, 11% of the book, unrelated to anything Churchill said by all the resources we could muster. A dozen were credited to other persons, like: “There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst is that half of them are true.” (Churchill said this, crediting a “witty Irishman.”)

Smart Words furnished another 20 brand new misquotes for our “Red Herrings” department. They range from the banal (“You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer”) to the vulgar (“At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands”)  to Yogi Berra-style (“It is never necessary to commit suicide, especially if you live to regret it”).  They contain a number we wish Churchill had said, but cannot verify: “If I could not be who I am, I would most like to be Mrs. Churchill’s second husband.”And: “A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.”

All of these add to the growing store of Churchill non-quotations. The misquotes industry—what Nigel Rees called “Churchillian Drift“—is going strong.

From one crater to another

No sooner does the campaign for Churchill’s memory quell emissions from one crater than another one erupts. The campaign to delegitimize Churchill as Hero continues, but the main volcanos have already erupted. Now we have the odd subsidiary crater spouting the same old stuff. Not much is new, so this is only for the record.

On July 1st in Forbes emitted “Churchill the Failure: The Paraxodical Truth about the Best and Worst Leaders.” This was sent to their corrections department (no reply):

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The author makes insightful points about leadership. He then constructs a narrative about Churchill based on the eruptions of critics who crop evidence to suit themselves. (1) Racial slurs in Churchill’s conversation are extremely rare. (2) Without the diaries of Leo Amery, hearsay evidence cited to show Churchill’s “hate” of Indians would not exist. Indeed, Amery’s own diaries include racist terms Churchill never used. (3) Churchill in WW2 praised “2.5 million Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu [and] the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers.”

(4) Amery’s alleged Churchill quotes are all from 1942-44. In that period, according to Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Almost everything Churchill said about Indians was related to the nationalist movement. Negotiating with nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderates were demoralized and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis to win. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) In truth, Churchill and his Cabinet pulled out every stop to alleviate the Bengal Famine. Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Churchill and Gandhi, writes: “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.”

If we condemn Churchill for the rare racial epithet, should we also condemn Amery, who made them wholesale? What about Gandhi, who said nothing about the famine? In South Africa Gandhi wrote that whites should be “the predominating race.” Blacks, he said, were “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” Gandhi racist? Surely not. We must look at the total picture of every historical figure. Amery served honorably. Gandhi led India to independence. Churchill saved civilization. All three were good and decent men. But there are differences.

The Crater Halifax: death of a thousand Post-It notes

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, protestors surrounded the Nemon statue of Churchill in a “Walk Against Winston.” There was no spray-paint or attempts to pull it down. These polite folk were armed with Post-It notes. They included the familiar litany of false charges, out of context quotes. Of course there was hearsay from Leo Amery (see above): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Terry Reardon replied on behalf of the Churchill Society Canada: “Attacks on Winston Churchill in the Canadian media are nothing new. On our website are replies to articles in the Toronto Star and the National Post.”

Reardon referenced Arthur Herman’s definitive article on the Bengal famine (above). It laid out fact after fact on the causes of, and Churchill’s actions to alleviate, food shortages. He also attached Churchill’s 8 October 1943 directive to the new Viceroy, Lord Wavell, which is even more definitive. From The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, 421:

Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages…. Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good. No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand…. The declarations of His Majesty’s Government in favour of the establishment of a self-governing India as an integral member of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations remain our inflexible policy.

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The reply, from one of the Walk Against Winston organizers: “Churchill and his government’s policies directly and unquestionably contributed to massive death and suffering in the case of the Bengal Famine. While Churchill’s role in opposing Hitler is significant historically, I don’t think the masses of brown and black people who he and his fellow ruling elites colonized, dispossessed, exploited, and consigned to oblivion would agree with your laudatory and rose-coloured characterization.”

How do you answer people who refuse to rebut or even acknowledge facts? They know what they think.  They’ve read their Twitter and Facebook. It is all generalities, without a source or a reference. Don’t bother them with the truth. They’ve already made up their minds.

Déjà vu all over again

An article called “Rethinking Churchill” ran on ORF, a website founded in 1990 “at the juncture of ideation tempered by pragmatism.” In a two-part article, the author repeated the same charges refuted three years ago by Soren Geiger for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project: “By my count, he makes twenty-two distinct claims about or against Winston Churchill in his 900-word article,” Mr. Geiger wrote. “I could deal with each of these one at a time. But here I will examine some of the most serious. In so doing, I aim to reveal his allegations against Churchill as unfounded and his historical analysis as embarrassingly sloppy.” To read, click here.

In ORF, the author adds another one: “The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes [Churchill] authored on the World War II led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to grant him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments.”

This may play well in the Twitterverse. Few there will know that Churchill’s prize in literature came before his vainglorious self-serving WW2 volumes were complete. The Nobel Committee cited his works of “historical and biographical description.” They particularly singled out Marlborough and My Early Life. You can look it up. So much for that crater.

Reader response

Mr. Geiger’s article above is entitled, “Winston Churchill the Racist Warmonger.” Scroll to the comments and you will find a reader reply. It mainly repeats all the above points, which the reader had clearly accepted. I responded. Most of it you’ve heard before. But for ease of reference, I include it here:

Dear Reader: Thank you for reading. Not a bad idea at all.

(1) Now please read Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” (2) Next read “Churchill on India,” particularly Churchill’s words to Gandhi and Nehru—hardly those of a despiser. Churchill believed India should have self-government; what he opposed—and, yes, acted against—was the Congress Party’s Brahmin dominance. Hence Churchill to Ghanshyam Das Birla: “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Gandhi’s reply: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

(4) Next, read Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) Before you accept Leopold Amery’s hearsay Churchill quotes, read “Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets’” to learn how many occurred in Amery’s (but not Churchill’s) everyday speech. Was Amery mouthing Churchill, or himself?

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(6) For what Churchill really thought about Indians read “The Indian Contribution in WW2”: “The glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma…. The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war.” This man hated Indians?

(7) On “poison gas,” read “Churchill and Chemical Warfare,” and learn the difference between tear gas (which he unfortunately labeled “poison”) and the gasses Germans began using in wartime. On “Aryan stock,” read “Churchill Derangement Syndrome,” for where and when he said it (and see last paragraph below). In the same piece, note that the “camel dung” crack is hearsay.

Nor is it possible to excuse Churchill as “a man of his time.” In fact he was far in advance of his time. From ages 25 to 80, examples abound of his concern for the rights of peoples of all colors, particularly in South Africa (you can read about that, too).

Bottom line: Churchill was human. He made mistakes, sometimes big ones. His language is almost absent of racial slurs, but he did believe a hierarchy of races existed back then. That is not the remarkable fact. The remarkable fact is that he consistently defended human rights. One has only to read to learn—something besides outbursts on the Twitterverse.

The “pernicious vermin” crater

The “stone him” crater

Fighting back: “The truth is great, and shall prevail.” *

Increasing signs that the search for truth survives. *”Don’t bother to read the comments”—same old stuff.

Why Churchill’s Leadership was Indispensable, Joseph Laconte, National Review.

“Churchill Out of Context,” Editorial Board, Toledo Blade

G. P. Taylor: “Stop Snowflakes and BBC Denigrating Winston Churchill,” Yorkshire Post

Cathy Gungell, “Is it Time to Stop Calling Churchill a Racist?“, UK Conservative Woman

Dominic Sandbrook, “Why should we be forced to pay for a BBC that portrays Winston Churchill as a mass murdering racist?”, Daily Mail

Edward G. Marks, “In Defense of Keeping Churchill’s Name on School,” Bethesda Magazine 

Bradley Gitz, “The Age of Dumb,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:  “In London, fake anti-fascists fighting imaginary fascists vandalized a statue of a real anti-fascist who fought real fascists by the name of Churchill. Or as another wag more succinctly put it, ‘Wait till they hear about the guys he fought against.'”

Thoughtful articles by historians

Heartening in the face of all this is the determined pursuit of truth by Indian scholars. Thanks and a tip of the hat to:

Video: “The Case for Churchill”

Churchill historian Andrew Roberts in a fair and balanced interview by Darren Grimes. Among other shibboleths, he covers Churchill “quotes” in his doctor’s diaries (minute 19). These were often imaginative afterthoughts, added twenty-five years later.

Dr. Roberts’ biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, calmly lays out the unvarnished truth, including Churchill’s flaws and mistakes. But as Roberts says, it’s easier to scrawl “racist” on a statue than it is to read a 1000-page book.

Update for 2019

Assault and battery…

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Nearly forty years ago an equally great Churchill performance, Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years,  was received with equal acclaim by press and public. Most importantly, there was no chorus of hate, no trumped-up charges, no hint that Churchill’s overall record was in anything except positive. Alas times have changed.