Churchill is misquoted as saying—with reference to the Nazis versus the Soviets—‘We butchered [or slaughtered] the wrong pig.’ The implication: he should have fought Stalin, not Hitler. This seems to me revisionist wishful thinking. He could never have said that, since there is no such idiom in English. He would have had to say, “We fought the wrong enemy.” Can you reveal some authentic information as to the origin of this misquotation?

Several queries along these lines followed publication of Herbert Kuhner’s A Revival of Revisionism in Austria. Apparently Kuhner gave the source as Lord Boothby. (The website says it is currently under revision.)

Wrong pig – wrong quote

If I may digress into amusement, Churchill would have found this phrase offensive to pigs. He did use animal analogies, and could have invented such an idiom. But he liked pigs. He never compared Britain’s enemies to porkers. His favorite animal villains were tigers, jackals, hyenas, crocodiles and boa constrictors….

I searched the Hillsdale College Churchill Project digital scans of Churchill’s canon, some 80 million words by and about him. This includes virtually everything in his books, articles, speeches and published papers. I found no instance of this phrase, either with the word “slaughtered” or the word “butchered.” Nor the words “wrong pig.” Neither did I find any statement of his suggesting Britain had “fought the wrong enemy.” This includes the memoirs of Lord Boothby.

The primary enemy

One of Churchill’s virtues was to recognize the main threat to civilization at each juncture in his career. From 1933 to 1945, he was certain that Nazi Germany was that threat. He did begin to think, late in the war, that one mortal foe had given rise to another. But he always kept things in perspective.

His change of view as the war wound down was obvious. Here is a key private remark recorded by his private secretary, John Colville, on 23 February 1945. The venue was Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence. The source is Colville’s diaries, The Fringes of Power (1986), 203-04:

[W]e sat in the Great Hall and listened to The Mikado played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The P.M. said it brought back “the Victorian era, eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Antonine Age.” Now, however, “the shadows of victory” were upon us. In 1940 the issue was clear and he could see distinctly what was to be done. But when [Air Marshal] Harris had finished his destruction of Germany, “What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?”

Perhaps, however, the Russians would not want to sweep on to the Atlantic, or something might stop them, as the accident of Genghis Khan’s death had stopped the horsed archers of the Mongols, who retired and never came back. Harris: “You mean now they will come back?” Churchill: “Who can say? They may not want to. But there is an unspoken fear in many people’s hearts.”

1947

Later Churchill wrote of a fancied encounter with the ghost of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Entitled “The Dream,” it recounts their conversation about the years since his father’s death in 1895. Now it was 1947, and Winston says:

Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands. They are Communists now, you know—Karl Marx and all that. It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.

No—never despair, he always said. But the historical image of Genghis Khan was still on his mind.

1955

In autumn 1955, after Churchill had retired as Prime Minister, he and his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, dined together for seventeen evenings. Those encounters were fascinating, Anthony wrote. “All sorts of curious pieces of information came out….

Concerning 1940, I played the Devil’s Advocate. Leaving aside the appalling issue of the extermination camps, which was then not evident, would it have been better if we had joined the New Order, as a substantial part of France was then inclined to do?…

Hitler most certainly would have attacked Russia and, unharassed in the West, almost certainly would have won. Would the equally monstrous tyranny of the Nazi regime have been mitigated or abbreviated by British influence? Hitler had always respected Britain. Would we have kept our Empire and our financial strength?

Churchill’s reply was brief:

You’re only saying that to be provocative. You know very well we couldn’t have made peace on the heels of a terrible defeat. The country wouldn’t have stood for it. And what makes you think that we could have trusted Hitler’s word—particularly as he could have had Russian resources behind him? At best we would have been a German client state, and there’s not much in that.

This I think summarizes Churchill’s consistent view of the West’s two great antagonists of his era. Significantly, he always kept open the prospect of what he called “a settlement” with the Russians—particularly after Stalin’s death. He never entertained the notion of settlement talks with Hitler.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

The Dream…

… is the most mysterious and ethereal story Winston Churchill ever wrote. Yet the more we know about him, the better we may understand how he came to write it.

Replete with broad-sweep Churchillian narrative, The Dream contains many references to now-obscure people, places and things. The new online version published by Hillsdale provides links to all of them. You need only click on any unfamiliar name or term for links to online references. After reading the story, click here for a thoughtful appreciation by Katie Davenport, a Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College.

Churchill wrote The Dream in 1947, a low point in his political career. Two years earlier, British voters had turned his Conservative Party out of office. The former Prime Minister was now a frustrated Leader of the Opposition. But political reverses often brought out the best in his writing. Churchill’s great war memoir, The World Crisis, began appearing at a similar low point, after he had lost his seat in Parliament in 1922-24. Marlborough, his noble biography, was written in the 1930s, as he grieved over the nation’s failure to heed his warnings about Hitler.

Origins

The poignancy of The Dream is heightened by the appearance of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Dead in 1895 at the age of forty-six, Lord Randolph had not lived to see, nor indeed ever imagined, his son at the pinnacle of their country’s affairs.

Lord Randolph’s own career had lasted scarcely twenty years. Elected to Parliament in 1874, he rose meteorically. By 1884 he was Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in 1886 he resigned over a trivial matter, never to rise again. Compared with Winston, Randolph was a footnote in British history.

The boy Winston worshiped his father from afar, but never conquered Lord Randolph’s disdain. It was his lifelong regret that his father did not live to see what he had achieved. It is part of the artistry of this tale that the inquisitive young father of forty never learns what his seventy-three-year-old son became.

The Dream was first mentioned during a family dinner at Chartwell, Churchill’s beloved home in the lush Kentish countryside, twenty-five miles outside London. He entitled the story “Private Article,” showing it only to his family, resisting their urgings that it be published. In his will he bequeathed the text to his wife, who donated it to Churchill College, Cambridge. On the first anniversary of his funeral, 30 January 1966, it was published in The Sunday Telegraph. The Dream has also appeared as a stand-alone volume in two private printings and a fine 2005 edition by Levenger Press.

Reactions

Winston Churchill was a man of transcendental powers. He could, it seems, peer beyond reality. Jon Meacham, author of the seminal Franklin and Winston, believes The Dream sheds light on Churchill’s ability to put a better face on things than they really were: to revere a father who overlooked him; to revere Roosevelt, who, in their later encounters, was less than forthright.

Margaret Thatcher, in my view the greatest British prime minister since Churchill, took a right and kind view of The Dream’s Victorian lurches—which are anything but politically correct. In 1993 I presented her with a private printing. She thanked me in her own hand the next day. “I read it in the early hours of this morning,” she wrote, “and am totally fascinated by the imagination of the story and how much it reveals of Winston the man and the son.” Later I asked what she thought of Churchill’s remark about women in the House of Commons: “They have found their level.” Lady Thatcher beamed: “I roared at that one.”

While vague about the hereafter, Churchill always held that “man is spirit,” and believed in a kind of spiritual connection with his forebears. On 24 January 1953, he told his private secretary, John Colville, that he would die on that date—the same date his father had died in 1895. Twelve years later Churchill lapsed into a coma on January 10th. Confidently, Colville assured The Queen’s private secretary: “He won’t die until the 24th.” Unconscious, Churchill did just that.

One question about The Dream that tantalized his family  is whether the story was really fiction. When asked this question, Sir Winston Churchill would smile and say, “Not entirely.”