Q: On life and living

If I want to understand Sir Winston Churchill’s philosophy of life and living, what books would you recommend? —B.A., via email

A: Lengthy sources

At first your question reminded us of the old fraternity initiation technique: asking pledges an unanswerable question. I remember mine personally: “Tell us your philosophy for living among men.” This was an intentional red herring. Whatever you answered, it obviously would never satisfy the questioner!

But in pondering the thought, there very definitely is a body of work that helps answer your query. Please use the Hillsdale Churchill Project’s online annotated bibliography for details and notes on books mentioned,  or to search for others in the same field. Search for key words like “philosophy.”

Churchill Style by Barry Singer

The book to start with is Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill. Author Barry Singer owns Chartwell Booksellers and will sell you an inscribed copy—along with copies of other books below, many of them inscribed by the authors.

Churchill Style expertly discusses Churchill’s philosophy of life and how he lived it. Mr. Singer has a unique approach. He considers nine facets of Churchill that were the essence of his style: autos, books, cigars, dining, fashion, friendships, home, imbibing and pastimes. (I”m glad he included cars—there are amusing stories there.)

The publisher, Harry Abrams, is well known for elegant productions, so Churchill Style is an heirloom, finely printed and bound and laden with full color illustrations, including rare first editions of Churchill’s books. It is a book readers will refer to often. Mr. Singer’s Hillsdale lecture on the subject is accessible here.

No More Champagne by David Lough

Churchill (or his friend F.E. Smith) was known to have declared, “Winston is a man of simple tastes. He is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.”

With no inherited wealth, WSC had to earn enough to finance his pleasures, remarking, “I lived from mouth to hand.” The standard work on his finances is David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money. Reviewing this book for Hillsdale, Michael McMenamin wrote:

Ploughing fresh ground, Lough offers a well-written, deeply researched text about Churchill’s finances, and how they affected his politics. As private as some may regard personal finances, the book does not detract from Churchill’s greatness or humanity. It is an absorbing story about an extraordinary man ensuring his financial survival with one hand, while warning about the danger to, and then leading the fight for, Western Civilization with the other. Uniquely, Churchill did both.

Churchill’s Bestiary by Piers Brendon

Animals were important in Churchill’s life. He was always surrounded by pets—or, at least, animals he thought of as pets. He was fiercely loyal to those he “knew personally,” and liked to use animal analogies in his speeches. Fortunately for students of his life, 2019 brought us a comprehensive book devoted to the subject: Piers Brendon’s Churchill’s Bestiary reviewed here. From my review:

This is an encyclopedic account of Churchill’s life with animals, starting with “Albatross” and ending in “Zoos.” That spans only a fraction of Piers Brendon’s comprehensive book. He avoids repeating material in previous accounts, and goes much deeper into the subject.

Most of the anecdotes have not appeared previously and are thus quite valuable. Mr. Brendon deeply investigates each species. The text is sprightly and readable, “unputdownable.” Anyone interested in this aspect of Churchill’s life owes it to themselves to buy a copy.

In his own words

For Sir Winston’s own comments on his philosophy of life, see the chapters “Personal Matters” and “Tastes and Favorites” in my book, Churchill by Himself aka Churchill in His Own Words. Here are quotations relating to Churchill personally: his character, habits and family, and his prescriptions for living life to the full, which he certainly did.

Many quotations speak to his political and personal characteristics, some with a high degree of frankness. Reactions to election results, and thoughts about his being variously a Conservative and a Liberal, are pithy and pointed. Of course his domestic existence always came second after politics. But family life was a rousing, warm affair, except for his occasionally tempestuous relationship with his son Randolph.

WSC’s comments to and about his wife Clementine, the best of which I trust are here, would make a perfect series of greeting cards for any husband wondering how to express himself. Their daughter Mary gave testimony to her father’s favourite maxim describing his marriage: “Here firm though all be drifting.”

What strikes me about these quotations as a group is what one of his secretaries said about Churchill: “He was so human, so funny—that always saved the day.” Marshal Tito, a most perceptive man, was once asked what most struck him about WSC. “His humanity,” Tito said immediately. “He is so human.”

Philosophy of politics

If your interest extends to political life there are three chapters in Churchill by Himself containing quotations on war and the two World Wars. Another chapter covers “Political Theory and Practice.” Also, there are at least two powerful scholarly studies of his political philosophy that should be part of the serious library.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill’s Political Philosophy (1981) is rare but worth seeking out. (Try bookfinder.com,) It is based on a Gilbert lecture which uniquely captured Churchill’s attitudes toward politics and government. WSC’s overriding doctrine, Gilbert says, can be summarized in five words: “His quarrel was with tyranny.”

Likewise excellent on political philosophy is Larry Arnn’s Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government. As a bonus, this book contains WSC’s essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” From the book review by Justin D. Lyons:

Churchill studies reveal important lessons that remain powerfully relevant for the leaders and citizens of free societies. This notion is itself founded on the belief that though the threats to civilization may have altered since Churchill’s day, there is consistency between his challenges and ours—that he is a good guide to follow in the cause of defending freedom.

Such a belief must lie behind any conception of history as providing guidance. If these commonalities do not exist, neither Churchill’s story, nor history in general, has anything to say to us now. This is a unique and important work on Churchill’s political thought.

Addenda

These books focus closely on your question, though we could go on naming specialized studies. For example, who were the mentors who made Churchill what he was in life? For three such individuals, see Michael McMenamin’s “Churchill’s Mentors,” Part 1 of which is posted here, with links to two more parts.

Churchill’s life was long and occupies the authors of over 1200 books, not including the thirty-one volumes of Official Biography. Many contain exaggerations, and it is well to look out for them. For just one such example see “On Churchill’s ‘Sybaritic’ Lifestyle” (2016).

We hope this answers your question and provides at least a start on a complicated but intriguing subject.

“Blood, Sweat and Gears”: Churchill as Motorist

1: “Mors the Pity,” 1900s-1920s.

2: “Daimlers and Austins,” 1930s.

3: “There’s Safety in Humbers,” 1940s-1960s.

“Driving Miss Nancy: Nipped in the Astor Bar,” 2022.

”Winston could not possibly be an alcoholic. No alcoholic could drink that much.” —C.P. Snow

Alcoholic rambles

Updates from 2009-2010. A reader asks whether William Manchester was being factual or just cute when he wrote that Churchill was not an alcoholic, despite the quantities WSC is alleged to have consumed. Manchester wrote:

The legend that he is a heavy drinker is quite untrue. Churchill is a sensible if unorthodox drinker. There is always some alcohol in his bloodstream and it reaches its peak in the evening after he has had two or three scotches, several glasses of champagne, at least two brandies, and a highball.

Manchester was right in general but wrong in the details. Churchill had an impressive capacity for alcohol, but nobody saw him put that much away in one evening. Field Marshal Alanbrooke several times wrote that the boss was plastered—but Brookie wrote a lot of bad-tempered things in his diary late at night when he was tired and frustrated from arguing over strategy.

A dearth of proof

None of his family or friends ever saw Churchill the worse for drink. Only once do we have reliable testimony otherwise: Danny Mander, one of his bodyguards at Teheran, recalled escorting a well-lubricated Churchill and Anthony Eden home after a lengthy series of toasts with the Russians. Even then, Mander was careful to note: “They were not ‘falling down drunk,’ just singing songs and feeling good.”

Churchill’s alcoholic intake was exaggerated, not least by himself. Whatever the amount, it was not enough to affect him. He began young. Until age twenty-five, he wrote in My Early Life, he had found whisky repugnant.  Then in 1898, he joined the Malakand Field Force on India’s Northwest Frontier:

[T]here was nothing to drink, apart from tea, except either tepid water or tepid water with lime juice or tepid water with whisky. Faced with these alternatives I “grasped the larger hope.…” Wishing to fit myself for active-service conditions I overcame the ordinary weaknesses of the flesh. By the end of these five days I had completely overcome my repugnance to the taste of whisky.*

*WSC, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 140-41.

“The Papa Cocktail”

Churchill nursed “a bit of whisky” daily and for hours. His daughter Mary once mixed for me what she called “The Papa Cocktail.” You cover the bottom of a tumbler with a thimbleful of scotch, then fill it with water. Not even any ice! I thought the result was quite disgusting. (She agreed.) 

Churchill’s private  secretary, Jock Colville, referred to this concoction as “scotch-flavoured mouthwash.” A glass of it was almost always at his elbow, sipped from time to time—giving outsiders the impression that he was addicted.

It is simply not so. In his autobiography, WSC is for once candid on his drinking: “I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk—except on very exceptional occasions and a few anniversaries.”

Exaggerations

Certainly Churchill liked to fan his high capacity. A frequent declaration was: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” Enemies from Labour politicians to Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels took this to suggest a red-nosed drunk. Churchill was occasionally wont to play the role.

“Prof!” he often exclaimed to his scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann over dinner. “Pray calculate the amount of champagne, whisky and other spirits I have consumed in my life and tell me how high it would reach in this room.”

The Prof would take out his slide rule and pretend to calculate: “I’m sorry Winston, it would only come up to a few inches.” On cue Churchill would reply: “How much to do—how little time remains!”

Some who exaggerate his drinking like to quote his famous encounter with Bessie Braddock MP. Accosting Churchill leaving the House of Commons, she claimed he was “disgustingly drunk.” Churchill retorted that Bessie was “disgustingly ugly….but tomorrow I shall be sober and you shall still be disgustingly ugly.”

His bodyguard at the time, Ronald Golding, told me this exchange actually took place. But, he added, “Mr. Churchill was not drunk, just tired and wobbly.” Nor was WSC’s response original. In the 1934 film It’s a Gift, the W. C. Fields character, when told he is drunk, responds: “Yeah, and you’re crazy. But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.”

A shunner of pipes?

A reader sent me a Daily Telegraph article stating that Churchill occasionally smoked a pipe as a break from cigars: “I can find no reference to him having ever smoked a pipe—can you?” I cannot.

I think the Telegraph story is a stretch. There is no testimony to Churchill ever smoking a pipe. There are indications that he deplored pipe smoking (though he tolerated it from Sir Arthur Tedder). Some believe this arose through his antipathy (which grew in the early 1930s) to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

By looking for Baldwin references, I found a key cigar-and-pipe standoff between Churchill and “SB” in 1924, when they were on better terms, in Martin Gilbert‘s Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, page 59 quoting Churchill (from an unpublished note) after the 1924 general election. Baldwin was forming his new Conservative government:

I was shown into the Prime Minister’s office. After a few commonplaces I asked him whether he minded the smoke of a cigar. He said “No,” and pulled out his famous pipe. Then he said “Are you willing to help us?” I replied guardedly, “Yes, if you really want me.”

I had no intention of joining the Government except in some great position, and I had no idea—nor had anyone else—what was in his mind. So when he said, “Will you be Chancellor of the Exchequer?” I was astonished. I had never dreamed my credit with him stood so high…. I should have liked to have answered, “Will the bloody duck swim?” but as it was a formal and important conversation I replied, “This fulfils my ambition….”

Undoubtedly at that point, Churchill would have happily smoked Baldwin’s pipe himself.

What about cigarettes?

There are indications that he deplored Virginia cigarettes, though he smoked stronger cigarettes early in his youth and at least once later. I was a proofreader for Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm 1940-1965, the third volume of The Last Lion. In it I found the first reference to Churchill smoking cigarettes.

Paul cited a comment by Jock Colville from 1943, after WSC had met with Turkish President İnönü. Despite mutual cordiality, İnönü had refused to enter the war. Colville found WSC puffing a Turkish cigarette—the only time he’d ever been seen with with one. Gesticulating with it, Churchill said, “It’s the only thing I ever got from the Turks.”

Further reading

Michael McMenamin, “The Myth of Churchill and Alcohol: A Distortion of the Record,” 2018. This is the most comprehensive article I have encountered on the subject. Next to the Bengal Famine, it draws the most reader comment on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

“The Alcohol Question—Again,” 2011.

“Churchill the Drunk. Or: Fasten Seatbelts on Bar Stools,” 2022.

“Memo to Peggy Noonan: Churchill Was Not a Drunk,” 2019.

“Churchill’s Magnanimity: Stanley Baldwin,” 2021.

Q: Who coined the a half-breed insult?

Didn’t one or more of Churchill’s detractors use this slur to criticize him? Google is no help. Surely you know? —S.B., Cleveland

A: Rab Butler

My colleague Michael McMenamin summarizes the answer to your question:

In his controversial book, A Republic, Not an Empire, American news commentator Pat Buchanan joined with England’s John Charmley to argue that it would have been better for Britain to make an honorable peace with Germany in 1940….

Charmley…attributes it to Churchill’s rhetorical skills and concludes with negative references to WSC’s “theatricality” [by Alexander Cadogan] and his “disorderly mind” [by Lord Halifax]. He repeats “Rab” Butler’s view of Churchill as “the greatest adventurer of modern political history,” Lord Hankey’s description of him as “a rogue elephant,” and John Colville’s memorable “half-breed American.”

“Winston and his rabble”

John Colville was quoting Richard Austin “Rab” Butler, then on the Foreign Policy Committee. He initially shared Butler’s doubts. His view on 10 May 1940 is worth quoting in full, since many elite Conservatives shared it:

7.15 PM: Alec [Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass] and I went over to the Foreign Office to explain the position to Rab, and there, with Chips [Channon] we drank in champagne the health of “The King Over the Water” (not King Leopold, but Mr. Chamberlain).

Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed.

He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the “pass had been sold” by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

A civil servant, Colville was then assigned to the new prime minister, though three days later his opinion hadn’t changed: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

Some opinion changed

Yet even then, Colville was beginning to soften. “It must be admitted,” he wrote in his diary, “that Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive; and men like Duff Cooper, Eden, Lord Lloyd and Herbert Morrison should be able to get things done.”

Churchill made Butler President of the Board of Education, his first cabinet-level position, on 20 July 1941—only to wax apoplectic when he found Butler had been in touch with the Swedes about a possible truce with Hitler. Historian Andrew Roberts believes it was Butler who kept Lord Halifax open to a compromise peace long after the Cabinet had backed Churchill’s determination to fight on. Yet he kept Butler on until 1945.

Churchill insiders tended to look upon Butler as an opportunist with no particular loyalties. Speaking in 1985, WSC’s last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was typical. Relating Butler’s “half-breed” comment, he referred to Rab as someone “who was later to achieve great prominence in this country, but in my view no true fame.”

“The Respectable Tendency”

Michael McMenamin, in his and Curt Zoller’s seminal book on Churchill and Bourke Cockran, reflected again on Churchill’s reputation among what Andrew Roberts called “the Respectable Tendency” of the Conservative Party. The Tories who disdained Churchill were similar to those American aristocrats who disparaged Theodore Roosevelt:

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, explaining why her father disliked Churchill, takes on added significance: “Because they were so alike.” Which indeed they were: well-known writers before they were politicians, impulsive risk takers, soldiers and accomplished speakers. One was called a “cowboy” by his detractors, the other a “half-breed American.” Both eventually held their country’s highest office and each was a Nobel Prize winner—giants of their time.

“Mettle”

The historian Graham Stewart summarizes the High Tory attitude toward Churchill as he replaced Chamberlain—just in time, as it happened—in May 1940. Commenting on Butler, Dunglass and Channon drinking the health of the deposed Chamberlain, Stewart writes:

The cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had a better claim to being aristocratic than many of those who affected to look down on him. Dunglass would inherit an earldom, but Butler was primarily wealthy because he had married into the Courtauld family, the same path that Channon—a half-breed American—had taken into the Guinness family.

So it went for a few weeks after Churchill took over. The more fair-minded among the Respectable Tendency eventually changed their minds. Some of the others never quite did. The former saw in Churchill a quality he himself cited when asked for the most important characteristic of a statesman: “Mettle.”

Related reading

“The Respectable Tendency and the New PM, 1940-2019,” 2019.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Consistency: ‘Politics before Country,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“Barbara Leaming’s Churchill Defiant: Still the Best on Churchill Postwar,” 2022.

Q: Origins of the Lalique rooster

Many visitors to Chartwell admire the René Lalique crystal cockerel, which resides in the drawing room. It belonged to Clementine Churchill from the 1940s.

The story of its provenance is very strong, since it was a personal gift from Charles de Gaulle, likely in the Second World War era. What little we know is based on Celia Sandys’ description (in Churchill’s Little Redhead). There doesn’t appear as yet to be any textual record in the Cambridge Archives, and I’ve not yet found it mentioned elsewhere in print. Were there any other mentions? —Eugene McConlough, England (Mr. McConlough is a Chartwell docent)

A: De Gaulle’s apologia

René Jules Lalique (1860-1945) was a French jeweler known for his crystal and glass art, from diminutive perfume bottles to chandeliers. Uniquely, Lalique glass sculpture also served as motorcar bonnet mascots (hood ornaments).

As an automotive writer in another life, I am familiar with Lalique’s work on classic luxury cars of the Twenties and Thirties. Of course in that application, it usually comprises only the rooster’s head. The Lalique cockerel at Chartwell is the whole bird—large, complete, and unusually posed with his feathers folded.

The cockerel is the symbol of France—thus often Lalique’s subject. There is no doubt, as you say, that Chartwell’s was a gift to Clementine Churchill from Charles de Gaulle. Katherine Carter, the National Trust administrator, kindly provided the photo above, showing its location in the drawing room.

Celia Sandys, and the guidebook Churchill at Chartwell by Robin Fedden, both mention the Lalique bird. But there another important reference that sheds light on the loyalty and character of Clementine Churchill.

Clementine Churchill, 1979

According to Lady Churchill’s daughter and biographer, the Lalique cockerel symbolized Gaulle’s regard for Clementine. This blossomed after a wartime argument. At Winston Churchill’s personal decision, Britain destroyed large elements of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir. The object was to prevent their falling into German hands. Mary Soames writes:

On 3rd July [1940],  the Royal Navy opened fire on the French Fleet; three battleships were destroyed, with the loss of 1300 lives, and the remaining French ships at Oran and in other North African ports were either destroyed or immobilised.

It must have been just at the time of these searing events—the painfulness of which no one felt more keenly than Winston himself—that General de Gaulle lunched at Downing Street. The conversation turned to the future of the French Fleet, and Clementine said how ardently she hoped that many of its ships and crews would carry on the fight with us.

To this the General curtly replied that, in his view, what would really give the French Fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns “On you!” (meaning the British).

Clementine from the first had liked and respected this dour man, but she found this remark too much to bear and, rounding on him, she rebuked him soundly, in her perfect, rather formal French, for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country.

“Certain things a woman can say…”

From the other side of the table Winston sensed that something had gone amiss and, in a conciliatory tone, said to the General: “You must forgive my wife. Elle parle trop bien le français [She speaks French too well].”

Clementine interrupted him, and said in French: “No, Winston, it is because there are certain things that a woman can say to a man which a man cannot say, and I am saying them to you—General de Gaulle!”

After this verbal fracas, the General was much upset, and apologised profusely; and the next day he sent a huge basket of flowers for Clementine. Later on in the war he was to give her a beautiful Lalique cock—the emblem of France—which she greatly treasured.

“The Constable of France”

Surely whenever Churchill looked upon the glass bird, he must have remembered his many ups and downs with the great Frenchman. Yet their mutual respect survived. WSC wrote memorably in his war memoirs:

On the afternoon of June 16 [1940] M. Monnet and General de Gaulle visited me in the Cabinet Room…. [Monnet] turned to our sending all our remaining fighter air squadrons to share in the final battle in France, which was of course already over…. But I could not do anything to oblige him in this field.

My two French visitors then got up and moved towards the door, Monnet leading. As they reached it, de Gaulle, who had hitherto scarcely uttered a single word, turned back, and, taking two or three paces towards me, said in English: “I think you are quite right.”

Under an impassive, imperturbable demeanour he seemed to me to have a remarkable capacity for feeling pain. I preserved the impression, in contact with this very tall, phlegmatic man: “Here is the Constable of France.”

Related articles

Diana Cooper, “Duckling, Wormwood and the War,” 2024.

“Dieu Protège La France,” 2015.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

”Casablanca, Admiral Darlan, and Rick’s Letters of Transit,” 2021.

“Churchill on Joan of Arc: Agent of Brexit? Maybe Not,” 2020.

“Origins of the de Gaulle Quote, “I’ll Kiss Him on All Four Cheeks,” 2019.

We are all bemused by the machinations of AI (Artificial Intelligence). As Hilaire Belloc said about the intelligence of women: Men come to look upon it “first with reverence, then with stupour, and finally with terror.”

Anyway! Last week I updated the AI version of Churchill’s comments on bananas. And wondered, since I first provided what he actually said, whether ChatGPT had picked it up. Evidently not! But ChatGPT now offers something he never said.

Nevertheless, AI continues to progress, offering an amusing pastime. Take your favorite remark by anybody. The only requirement is that it be an exact, well-known quotation. Send it to ChatGPT. Ask them to reproduce it as a scene in a Shakespeare play. I promise you will be amused.

Drunk and ugly: the actual encounter

First, here is the original transcript of the famous confrontation, confirmed by an eye-witness. The venue was the House of Commons, the year 1946. The speakers were Winston Churchill and the Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, Bessie Braddock.  From my book, Churchill by Himself, page 573:

Braddock: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more, you are disgustingly drunk.”

Churchill “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

This famous exchange was confirmed to me by Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective. He was on the spot to observe it—no better witness. Churchill was leaving the House of Commons after a long, late evening debate.

Lady Soames, who said her father was always gallant to women, doubted the story, but Golding explained that WSC was not drunk, just tired and wobbly, which caused him to fire the full arsenal. Churchill was, however, relying on his photographic memory. In the 1934 movie It’s a Gift, W.C. Fields’s character, told he is drunk, responds, “Yeah, and you’re crazy. But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.” So Churchill was really paraphrasing W.C. Fields.

The AI Shakespeare version

We fed this transcript into ChatGPT and asked for an AI version as a scene from Shakespeare. The result took only seconds:

Characters:

• Sir Winstonus Churchillius, a stout, witty statesman, full of jests and gravitas.
• Lady Bessica Braddockia, a fiery noblewoman with a sharp tongue.

Setting: A grand hall in Westminster. Tapestries hang from the walls, and the faint clink of goblets echoes through the air.

Enter:  Sir Winstonus Churchillius, goblet in hand. Lady Bessica Braddockia approaches, fanning herself dramatically.

Lady Bessica:
Hail, Sir Winstonus, thou art returned
From feasting, drinking, or some sport absurd?
Thy face is flushed, and eyes like moons do glow;
Dost thou drown England’s cares in wine’s deep flow?

Sir Winstonus:
Lady Bessica, sharp of wit and tongue,
Thy voice dost pierce like arrows deftly flung.
Yet in thy charge, some truth may yet reside,
Forsooth, my goblet’s brim hath oft been plied.

Lady Bessica:
O, gallant knight, though words like honey flow,
Thy gait doth tell what sober truth may show.
Thou reek’st of vintner’s wares! Thy steps betray
A man whose goblet oft doth go astray.

Sir Winstonus (with a wry smile):
And thou, fair dame, art not of angels born,
Thy tongue’s keen edge doth all who cross thee warn.
Yet in thy zeal to strike with jest and jeer,
Thou dost forget the mirror drawing near.

*

Lady Bessica (pointing dramatically):
Thou speak’st of mirrors? Look upon thy girth!
A vessel vast, no ship of slender berth!
Thou art, Sir Winstonus, round as a barrel!
Dost thou compete with Bacchus in this quarrel?

Sir Winstonus (placing hand on his belly):
A barrel, say’st thou? O, cruel jest indeed!
But barrels hold the finest wine and mead.
Yet thou, good dame, art no delicate dove;
The pot and kettle may yet learn of love.

Lady Bessica (gasping in mock outrage):
Out, vile retort! Thy jest doth stab too deep.
Yet truth be told, I cannot silence keep.
Thy wit, though sharp, hides wisdom’s kindly balm;
A tempest fierce, yet ever seeks the calm.

*

Sir Winstonus (raising his goblet):
Lady Bessica, thou art a noble foe.
Thy fire doth warm where icy winds might blow.
Let us, then, toast, not bicker in this hall,
For England needs us both to stand, not fall.

Lady Bessica (taking a goblet from a passing servant):
To England, aye, and to the bonds we weave,
Though tempests rise, we shall not take our leave.
Forsooth, Sir Winstonus, thou art a rogue,
Yet one I’d fight beside, ‘gainst any vogue.

Both raise their goblets high and drink deeply….

Sir Winstonus:
A rogue, thou say’st? That title I shall wear!
Yet call me rogue, and not a bore, I swear.
Let history judge, when both are but a name,
Which spark burned brighter in Britannia’s flame.

Lady Bessica:
Then let us spark together, fiery bright,
And burn away the shadows of the night.

Exeunt, laughing and bantering, arm in arm.

“If we shadows have offended,
“Think but this, and all is mended:”

—Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Software engineer Ian W.D. Langworth explains how AI reproduces the famous encounter in Shakespearean form:

A large language model (LLM) focuses on a corpus of text, such as all of Wikipedia. Or an even larger corpus, such all of the scannable Internet. The training happens by feeding the model a large amount of text, asking it to predict the next word in the sequence. Doing this billions of times produces many levels of refinement. The model learns the patterns in the text, and can then use these patterns to generate new text.

The result is a specially formatted multi-gigabyte file which can be used to generate text. This is called a “model.” You can use this model to generate text by feeding it a prompt.

In this case, the model was trained on Wikipedia and the Internet. Obviously, it learned of the Braddock-Churchill exchange somewhere on the web—in addition to the works of Shakespeare.

Accuracy is irrelevant. The model doesn’t necessarily have a concept of “truth.” It’s just a statistical model that has learned the patterns in the text. It is not reasoning—just pattern matching. Given the model, the prompt, and a random number generator, it will generate text that matches the patterns it learned during training.

Related reading

“Update: AI Churchill Quotes- Yes, We Have No Bananas,” 2025.

“Mary Soames Centenary 1922-2022: A Remembrance by a Friend,” 2022.

“Drunk and Ugly: The Perennial Quotation Chase,” 2022.

“Churchill the Drunk. Or: Fasten Seatbelts on Bar Stools,” 2022.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

The following story was published in 2023. We wondered if Artificial Intelligence had picked it up since. Apparently not, but they have muddied the waters. Again we asked the question: “What did “Winston Churchill say about bananas?” Last time ChatGPT said “nothing.” Now it replies with a red herring:

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying: “Why a banana?” This remark was made during a discussion about the design of weapons, particularly regarding the choice of the “banana-shaped” Sten gun magazine. Churchill, known for his sharp wit and curiosity, reportedly questioned the ergonomic and practical considerations behind the design. The comment highlights his attention to detail and his interest in the functionality of military equipment, though it has since been taken humorously in various contexts.

ChatGPT (2023)

Many have heard of ChatGPT, a language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3. “It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.” Recently, users have asked ChatGPT for Churchill quotes or speeches on all manner of subjects—and even essays about Churchill—which are remarkably convincing.

Steve Forbes, who advocates a return to the Gold Standard, asked ChatGPT for a Churchill speech supporting it. (As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29, Churchill returned Britain to Gold, for which he received much criticism.)

ChatGPT provided Mr. Forbes with a convincing transcript that sounded just like Churchill, but contained nothing he ever uttered or wrote. ChatGPT is also able to cough up genuine Churchill quotes. Unfortunately they have also mistakenly scanned many things he never said, and occasionally disgorge those, too.

No bananas

My colleague John Plumpton records one case, however, where ChatGPT was stumped. A user asked the chatbot for Churchill quotes relating to bananas. Here is the reply. (John writes: “I trust you have not lost your sense of humour”…)

We’re sorry, but it doesn’t appear that Winston Churchill ever made any quotes specifically about bananas. However, we can provide some fictional quotes that use his style and references to bananas….

Their fictional quotes they supplied were hilarious, and show the range of ChatGPT’s scans of Churchill’s actual words:

Bananas are the fruit of victory.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender to a lack of bananas.

Never in the field of human consumption was so much owed by so many to so few bananas.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to eat a banana.

But yes, he had some bananas

The only problem with all this is that Churchill did say things about bananas…. Thanks to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project’s scans of his 20 million published words, we have ChatGPT right where we want them:

A man walking down the street is confronted by a costermonger’s barrow filled with bananas. (Laughter.) I think it a great achievement, reflecting the utmost honour and credit upon all who were concerned in it, that this fruit—I will say delicious fruit, although I am not myself partial to it—which contains so many valuable food and fuel constituents, which a few years ago was the curious luxury of the rich, has now become an article of frequent consumption amongst the masses of the people. (Hear, hear.)  —WSC, Adelphia Hotel, Liverpool, 5 May 1906 (Complete Speeches, 1974, 8 vols., I: 622.)

And…

Churchill also made several references to bananas in his 1908 African travelogue:

Kampala, the home of 60,000 persons, is permanently invisible. The whole town is buried under the leaves of innumerable banana plantations, which afford shade and food to its people, and amid which their huts are thickly scattered and absolutely concealed. —WSC, My African Journey (1908; Leo Cooper edition 1989, 69.)

And as Prime Minister three decades later, he hadn’t lost his regard, despite his personal distaste, for the staple fruit of the tropics:

I should be much obliged if you would let me know the reasons which have made it necessary to stop the import of bananas altogether.” —WSC to Lord Woolton (Minister of Food), 29 November 1940 (The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, Never Surrender, May-December 1940. 2011, 1159.)

“Let not the slothful chortle”

Ian Langworth, who plies the trade of software engineer in Silicon Valley, reminds us not to be too complacent about all this. ChatGPT has only been around for a few years. “Give them another half decade and they’ll probably have picked up every word Churchill wrote.” (And why not? More and more of it is falling into the public domain.)

Unfortunately, at least so far, they lack the discernment to reject all the things he never said that are attributed to him far and wide.

Before we lazily laugh at the tech boffins’ failure accurately to pinpoint the Great Man’s every word, we might stop to consider: They are just getting started.

As WSC was wont to say on occasion: “Let not the slothful chortle.”

Tune in in five days…

…as ChatGPT presents a famous Churchill encounter and riposte as a Shakespeare play. (I am not making this up.)

I was honored to be invited to join Lord Roberts, author of Walking with Destiny at Secrets of Statecraft. It was fun to chat with the author of the foremost one-volume life of Churchill, about where Sir Winston stands on his 150th birthday. We mutually concluded that he stands as tall as ever.

Mistakes real and imagined

Andrew Roberts: “It’s sort of classic, isn’t it, that the more you look into Churchill’s actual actions, the less the detractors really have to say? They’ve a few lines that they can come out with, especially obviously, on social media. But when you actually dig into the truth, there’s less and less behind it. Would you say that’s fair, historically?”

Richard Langworth: “Yes, I think so. Of course there are many cases where he made mistakes, serious ones. They never seem to come up. Instead we always get these long trails of red herrings.”

AR: “Let’s go into some of them.”

And we did: all criticisms are here: the real, the  imagined, the preposterous. We covered the gamut, from women’s suffrage to the Bengal Famine.

Churchill today

AR: “Now tell me why you think that 150 years after his birth, we should still be interested in Churchill, what he has to teach us today.”

RL: “That’s a tall order, Andrew.”

AR: “Sorry, old boy, that’s why you’re on.”

RL: “First, I like what you said at the end of the Netflix documentary. Who else could still make people laugh sixty years after his death? I mean, we will say that about Groucho Marx. But a politician? Can you think of another one?

“Beyond that, we need to remember him because he spoke everlasting truths about the relations between peoples, about governance, about the value of liberty. Those are as relevant as ever today.

“I was alive and sentient in 1959, which was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. And I don’t remember anything like as much attention paid to him as we do to Churchill today. Of course, we live in a different era, an age of 24/7 saturation media. But he does seem to be permanently on everyone’s mind.

“As to what appeals about him: Sir John Gielgud said ‘Churchill was as ordinary as any of us and as extraordinary as any of us can hope to be.’

“But of all answers to that question, I always come back to Sir Martin Gilbert‘s. He was asked to explain Churchill in just one sentence. Sir Martin didn’t hesitate:  ‘He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.’”

Related articles

“No Cutlet Uncooked: Andrew Roberts’s Superb Churchill Biography,” 2018.

“Reviewing Netflix’s Churchill at War: The Things We Do For England,” 2024.

“Churchill at 150: ‘A Certain Splendid Memory,’” 2024.

“Get Ready for Churchill’s Anti-Sesquicentennial,” 2024.

“Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare,” 2020.

Churchill at War

A four-part Netflix documentary starring Christian McKay as Winston Churchill, premiered December 4th.

From Gaza to Ukraine, United Nations to United Europe, our legacy is the war that made us what we are. Winston Churchill had much to do with it, and Netflix now offers its version of his story. It is a one-dimensional portrait of a politician—not of  the humanitarian who thought profoundly about governance, life and liberty. Yet the warrior emerges approximately as he was.

There’s a way to derive a mostly correct picture of the man from this show: ignore Part 1. The other three parts also suffer from occasional forays into fiction. But they are far more accurate, with honest dialogue, well-chosen quotations and spectacular footage, much of it freshly colorized.

A creaky wind-up

Part 1, alas, is a palimpsest of counterfactuals. Were it not for Andrew Roberts, and several other scholars who have actually spent time studying Churchill, this introduction to him is light, frothy and tendentious. It bids fair to mislead the unwary viewer.

Sprinkling in celebrities and the odd hostile biographer doesn’t help. (The more hostile they are, the more they indulge in the familiarity “Winston.”) Among the celebrities is George W. Bush, who says Churchill grew up in a “dysfunctional family.” By Victorian standards it was more functional than the Bushes. Why Bush? Or Boris Johnson? Ask most politicians about Churchill and what you get are generalities: blood, toil, tears and sweat. But Netflix also consults more serious commentators, who commit greater errors….

• Churchill’s father’s career-ending 1886 resignation ​​comes when “his budget was rejected.” No, it was over a minor Army appropriation. Okay, no biggie.

​• In South Africa in 1899, young Churchill “takes over defense” of the famous armored train from ​Boer attackers. ​Poor Alymer Haldane, who actually defended it, spent half a century lamenting that “Winston got all the credit.” And now Netflix bites Aylmer again.

• We skid past Churchill’s climb to fame and Parliament, informed that he changed parties twice—not over principle, but as an opportunistic power​-grab. Not so. After his 1904 switch he waited two years to get power. The second time​, in 1924, he was handed power before he switched. Where do people get such stuff? Have they read anything?

Escaped scapegoat

Churchill’s vital efforts to prepare the fleet for war in 1914 are ignored as Netflix homes in on the Dardanelles operation, whose failure temporarily ruined him. Aside from confusing naval operations with the Gallipoli landings, which he had nothing to do with, the account is reasonably accurate. ​They assert incorrectly that he quit the Admiralty in 1915 in order to go fight in the trenches, but his service​ there (later) is ​accurately represented.

We witness his deep depression over Gallipoli, but Christian McKay, impersonating WSC, gets the diction wrong and looks more like his son-in-law Christopher Soames. By straining hard, we can just visualize McKay in the role. But he’s no match for Robert Hardy​ (The Wilderness Years) or Gary Oldman​ (Darkest Hour), who spent months studying their character “to find a way in.”

Part 1 ends as Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940. The accuracy improves as 1940 approaches. Despite earlier errors,  this is a fair presentation compared to popular mythology like Brian Cox in Churchill, but hardly rates a cigar, given the banal content.

Jon Meacham, who should know better, says WSC “got lots wrong, but among what he got right, WW2 ranks pretty high.” Duh! That’s as profound as we get, though to his credit, Meacham is more poignant later on. But after laboring through Part 1, I was beginning to think: “The things we do for England.”

A better pitch

The weakness of using celebrities or “historians” who are anything but Churchill specialists is still evident in the last three parts, but less disconcerting. Let’s get over the quibbles first.

• It’s true that the first bombing of London (August 1940) was accidental, prompting British retaliation on Berlin, leading to the London Blitz. But Netflix says Hitler and Churchill “egged each other on,” not acknowledging that bombing open cities had been the German practice since they leveled Warsaw in 1939.

• In July 1940 Churchill “sank the French navy.” (It wasn’t the whole navy.) In August 1941, he pleads with Roosevelt to declare war, and is instructed about the U.S. Constitution. (That never happened—he knew the Constitution as well as FDR.) U.S. entry into the war in December is dramatically portrayed, omitting that Hitler locked-in the “Germany first” strategy when he declared war four days after Pearl Harbor.

• The 1943-44 Bengal Famine is misrepresented by Kehinde Andrews. Churchill caused it—well, he refused to send Canadian grain. (Actually he sent more grain, via Australia.) Andrews claims Churchill saw his “main task” as “defending the Empire.” No, he saw his main task as defeating Hitler, and doing that helped lose the Empire. Mr. Andrews offers several other red herrings. (“I like the martial and commanding air with which the Rt. Hon. Gentleman treats facts,” Churchill once quipped. “He stands no nonsense from them.”)

• Churchill is condemned for the 1944 “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin. We are not told that he saw this as a wartime expedient, not a permanent arrangement—or that it saved Greece from communism.

Netflix gets lots right…

…about the war. It covers the quandary over bombing Auschwitz; concerns over invading Europe; D-Day (if nothing about how Churchill made D-Day possible). Here the dialogue is accurate, the war footage admirable, the commentary balanced.

They can’t help editing some great speeches, even though deleted words would use up only a second or two. They make up for this by getting many right (unlike the British Post Office on a recent commemorative stamp: “You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory.”)

Key quotations are deployed effectively, like Churchill’s warning to FDR of where the U.S. will be if Britain goes under. His classic speech at Harrow, clean and unedited, includes its often-ignored proviso: “Never give in—except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is all to the good. Every time a faux expert muddies facts, Roberts or another solid historian—Meacham, Allen Packwood, Catherine Gale Katz—makes up for it with truths. Even David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Minister, is thoughtful and doesn’t succumb to populist virtue-signaling. “The British people,” Lammy says, “saw in Churchill the image of themselves.”

After Part 1 I was expecting the worst, but on balance it’s a good show, and the finale is well done. Kudos to Lord Roberts and others for keeping it on track, and for his eloquent finale:

Physically brave, morally brave, full of insights and foresight, humorous to the point that he can still make people laugh sixty years after his death, Winston Churchill represented a resolute spirit that is very, very rarely seen in human history.

More film reviews

Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years: Forty Years On and Still Number One, 2019.

”Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour: Then Out Spake Brave Horatius,” 2018.

“Darkest Hour Myth-Making: Don’t Mess with Marcus Peters,” 2018.

“Brian Cox as Churchill: An Interview with Charlie Rose,” 2017.

“Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies,” 2017.

New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941

Somewhere east of Ottawa, a special train bore the Prime Minister of Great Britain toward Washington. He had been in Canada to address Parliament. His most memorable lines in that speech came as he spoke of the French in 1940:

When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! … Some neck.

A week earlier Churchill had won cheers from hardened American politicians in Congress, hurling defiance at the enemy:

They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking…. What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

A high sense of the moment

Few besides those alive and sentient at that time can understand the magnitude of the task as the New Year began. Hitler held Europe from the Channel almost to Moscow. Nazi U-boats prowled the Atlantic, strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing toward Suez. Stalin’s Red Army was desperately hanging on. America had received a heavy blow at Pearl Harbor. Japan ran amok in China, British and Dutch East Asia and the Pacific.

Churchill saw only opportunity. “I was lucky in the timing of these speeches in Washington and Ottawa,” he wrote….

They came at the moment when we could all rejoice at the creation of the Grand Alliance, with its overwhelming potential force, and before the cataract of ruin fell upon us from the long, marvelously prepared assault of Japan.

Even while I spoke in confident tones I could feel in anticipation the lashes which were soon to score our naked flesh. Fearful forfeits had to be paid not only by Britain and Holland but by the United States, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in all the Asiatic lands and islands they lap with their waves. An indefinite period of military disaster lay certainly before us. Many dark and weary months of defeat and loss must be endured before the light would come again.

It didn’t matter. Churchill would make fighting speeches everywhere, to audiences large and small, to listeners grand and ordinary, time and again, until the end. One of his later bodyguards was flying Hurricanes in 1942. He said to me: “After one of those speeches, it didn’t matter that we were outnumbered and outgunned. We wanted the Germans to come.”

Here’s to the New Year

The train rushed on as the last minutes of 1941 ticked away. Soon it was steaming southward on New York Central’s broad tracks along the Hudson. Appropriately close to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, the Prime Minister called staff and reporters to the dining car. He wished, in a few words, to “cast some forward light upon the dark, inscrutable mysteries of the future.”

Of course he voiced confidence in the certainty of victory. He did not minimize the challenges, nor forecast when deliverance might come. That would depend “on our exertions, upon our achievements, and on the hazardous and uncertain course of the war.”

He entered the dining car amid cheers and applause, raising his glass to the company. “It was with no illusions,” he wrote, “that I wished them all a glorious New Year”:

“Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.”

“Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations….’ Or: ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect.’ Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conversational.” —Winston S. Churchill “to my colleagues and their staffs,” 9 August 1940.

Canceling Clichés

Commentator Bill O’Reilly proposes a new Cancel Culture for a collection of jargon that Churchill would define as “grimaces.” A cliché, he says, is “a phrase or opinion that is overused and lacks original thought.” Good on Bill, and we applaud his nominations for grimaces we never need to hear again. He forgot “issues,” but it’s not a bad list….

“Circle back”: A banal term often used in presidential briefings

“Here’s the deal”: President Biden’s favorite.

“Deep Dive” (used interchangeably with “From 30,000 feet”): Supposed to refer to your detailed opinion (from the worm’s eye, or from on high). Often encountered in the media—always painful.

“Perfect Storm”: Description of the 2024 U.S. election.

“At the end of the day”: O’Reilly: “What day? Thursday? Stop it! Athletes in particular.”

“It is what it is.” Dreadful.

“Give a listen.” Used in absence of an intro. Beloved by Brett Baier on Fox. [I added that one.]

“I’ll be honest”: This implies that most of the time you’re not honest.

“Sorry, not sorry”:  O’Reilly: “Sorry, you are a moron.”

“Game changer”: All-purpose slough off.

“We’ll see”: When you don’t know what you’ll see.

“The new normal”: Means you don’t know what is normal.

“Slam dunk”: “The most over-used phrase in the language.”

“By the way”: “What way? Where? Stop!”

Why has this jargon so permeated the media? One of the culprits, O’Reilly suggests, “is the collapsing public education system. In New York City, taxpayers spend $31,000 per student per year and many students cannot speak proper English.”

 Some issues over “issues”

O’Reilly is targeting brief phrases or single words. Somewhat longer “wooly phrases” have also been creeping into our language—for a long time. For decades now, we have substituted politically correct fad-phrases for long-understood words in everyday language.

My pet favorite is the word “issues,” as substituted for “problems” or “difficulties.” The idea is that we must not be judgmental (another popular favorite) about our troubles, because our troubles may be right. After all, a mugger with a knife is only expressing his issues.

No. Issues are subjects on which there are different points of view. Most of the time, when we say we have “issues,” we mean to say we have ”problems.” But we want to be nice.

This word-substitution is subconsciously catching, because we all want to use hip forms of speech. If editors don’t watch out, even we fall for it. I recently had to stop myself from saying that I had “issues” with certain fanatics who are trying to kill us. What I had, of course, are “problems,” if not “violent objections.”

“Reaching out”

Then there is “reaching out.” One doesn’t contact someone any more. One “reaches out.” The theology behind that is that “contact” suggests you are “demanding” something. Like the courtesy of a reply, which might be “offensive.” By “reaching out,” you become a supplicant, making a tentative plea that will not offend anyone. Your contact doesn’t really have to answer. (And have you noticed? Quite a few of them don’t.)

One might expect anyone familiar with the life of Winston Churchill to tilt toward traditional language, and one would be right. I don’t care what you think about the wars in Ukraine or Syria or Gaza, economic policy, immigration, religion, global warming, or the leaders of countries. All those are legitimate, er, issues, over which reasonable people may disagree.

Real issues

Issues (in the legitimate meaning of the word) came up at a scholarly panel over the “percentages” agreement. That was the “spheres of influence” agreement in eastern Europe, between Churchill and Stalin at the “Tolstoy” conference in October 1944. That, it was said at the time, proved that Churchill and Britain were no different than Stalin and Russia. Both sides had identical objectives, i.e., their own national interests. But British interests in Greece involved things like the ouzo concession for Harrods, or maybe Greek support for British Mediterranean policy. Soviet interest in Romania were everything Romania had or could produce.

There are those who would have us believe that the Western democracies are no better than Nazis, Soviets, or Islamofascists. We hear the line quite often nowadays. A High Personage will suggest that the displacement of Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was morally equivalent to the Holocaust.

Right, that’s an issue. Why then are there no “issues” over other forced migrations since 1945? Such as sixteen million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in India; 800,000 Jews from Arabia; Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars “relocated” by Stalin; Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin islanders; or Italians in Istria? What about three million ethnic Germans in Silesia and the Sudetenland? Or, more recently, the Greeks of Turkey and Cyprus and the Vietnamese boat people?

“Many of these refugees built new lives and a higher standard of living than in the lands they left,” wrote Andrew Roberts. “None are today actively demanding the right to murder people who have now lived in their former lands for over seven decades.” Sorry. I digress.

A shade of difference

Celebrate Mr. O’Reilly’s modest proposal: Avoid fashionable filters and fad-words in language. “Short words are best,” Churchill said, “and the old words, when short, are best of all.” His thoughts and deeds, however antique they may sound today, still represent concepts we can understand. No issues there.

Related reading

“Churchill on Jargon: The Language as We Mangle It,” 2019.

“Churchill on Jargon: “Let Us Have an End to This Grimace,” 2024.

“Athens, 1944: Some Lighter Moments in a Serious Situation,” 2020.

“Churchill, Orwell and 1984.” 2022.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

The perfect subject

Tim Benson, Churchill: A Life in Cartoons (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024), 224 pages, Amazon $32.99, Kindle $14.99.

Tim Benson, of London’s Political Cartoon Gallery and Café, now turns his attention to a figure cartoonists loved to praise, ridicule and lampoon. Sometimes Churchill received all those treatments at once—notably by the great David Low. In 1954 Low penned a magnificent tribute showing the eighty-year-old Prime Minister being congratulated by all his previous incarnations. The caption was sincere: “To Winston, from his old friend and castigator, Low.”

Significantly, Churchill never resented the negative attention. His daughter Mary told Mr. Benson that in her youth she was “mystified” by what she deemed cruel and callous drawings of her father hanging around Chartwell. Indeed, he often bought and framed some.

Praising Low in his essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists,” Churchill asserted that politicians feared neglect more than ridicule. They were “offended and downcast” when the cartoons stopped: “We are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days are ended.”

Churchill was irresistible to scribblers. His many characteristics and “props” were gifts to them: the stooped posture, tiny hats and balding locks of the young MP; the spotted bow tie, siren suit, cigar and V-sign of the seasoned statesman. All that, and his political prominence, made Churchill a central cartoon character for half a century.

A wartime chronicle

Given the vast Churchill cartoon universe, Tim Benson concentrated on greatest events. Thus the division into nine sections: “1914-20” covers the Great War and its aftermath; “1931-39” is entirely devoted to Appeasement and rearmament. The Second World War occupies six sections, 1940-45; and there is a brief postwar coda.

The book skips the young war correspondent and Conservative-turned-Liberal, who provided much grist for early cartoonists. Nor do we glimpse the Colonial Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer cartoonists lampooned in the 1920s. What we do get is a cartoon account of the years of Churchill’s greatest impact. Here Tim Benson is in his depth, providing many drawings few readers will have seen.

With the exception of the omitted periods, this is as comprehensive a reference as one could imagine. Early in the Great War, Churchill is pictured alongside an English bulldog. As First Lord of the Admiralty in Nelsonian garb, he hurls defiance at the Germans—who hurl it back. (Lüstige Blatter, the German humor magazine that mocked him in the Second World War, was already targeting him in the First.)

The Benson collection

The depth of this book can only be appreciated by owning a copy. Despite the cost (more on that later), no Churchillian should be without it. It is a kaleidoscope of WSC’s life and times.

For instance, I wrote of Churchill’s friend Hilaire Belloc, who toasted WSC’s departure from the government to fight in Flanders in 1915: “They drank Winston’s health and sang the French children’s song ‘Malbrouck s’en vat’en guerre’ (Marlborough goes off to war). They congratulated Churchill for “breaking loose from his official bondage to the gang of incapables….”

What fun to be reminded of Belloc’s tribute by the great cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed, on page 18! Deftly, Benson accompanies the drawing with Churchill’s remarks after his first twelve days in the trenches: “I always get on with soldiers…. Do you know I am quite young again?”

Finest hours

A Life in Cartoons devotes itself mainly to the Second World War. The uplifting spirit of British cartoonists in the black days of 1940-41 is at once evident. A glow of resolve swept Britain; there were no carping media midgets such as we hear from today. That was a time, as Churchill put it, “when it was equally good to live or die.” Benson’s coverage invokes the spirit of thorse hard, glorious times.

Enemy cartoonists feature prominently. Early in 1940, the Daily Worker trumpets Churchill leading the poor little neutrals into war. Benson balances this with Leslie Illingworth’s drawing of a Nazi crocodile sprawled across Europe. Underneath it is Churchill’s quip: “Each [neutral] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

The pace picks up as Hitler invades Russia. Now German cartoonists wonder whether Stalin or Churchill will betray the other first. But the alliance holds. The Daily Sketch pictures Roosevelt leading a sailing race in a boat marked “Lend-Lease.” Melbourne’s Herald adds a dose of Aussie humor: Tojo being fed a cigar (lit end first), and wrestler Churchill putting a toe-hold on a screaming Mussolini.

Soon after Russia is invaded, the enemy-become-ally protests the lack of a “Second Front.” Pravda’s Boris Efimov regularly ridiculed Churchill’s “stalling,” Benson notes. As D-Day approaches, the Daily Sketch shows southern England bristling with tanks, guns, Americans, and a cigar-equipped figure saying: “First of all, gentlemen, welcome to our right little, tight little island.”

Depth and erudition

The array of rarely- or never-seen cartoons shows that this book could only be assembled by someone with a vast reach for material. For instance, Benson relies on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (where else?) for Hal Coffman’s wry drawing of May 1940, when Churchill replaced Chamberlain. As Neville bails out of the government aircraft, Winston quips: “I always did wonder why you carried that umbrella.”

It is important also to note Benson’s narrative richness. He carefully explains the meaning of each cartoon, which today can be obscure. A typical example is “The Obstruction” by Jimmy Friell, in a 1944 edition of the Daily Worker: The Curzon Line being blocked by a soldier representing the exiled Warsaw government. Poland, Benson explains, objected to having its borders shifted. This high-quality research adds a vital dimension rarely found in art books.

An indispensable work

A small bone to pick has nothing to do with the author’s work. The cramped, horizontal, 8×7-inch format is disappointing in such a work. Yet the small pages contain a vast amount of white space that could have housed larger type and images. Many cartoons are too small to be fully appreciated without a magnifying glass.

Such a volume deserves a larger format and the option of a hardback, since it is not likely to gather dust. Readers will repeatedly pull it out for reference, and hardbacks hold up better.

The author’s erudition and vast resources deserved more from his publishers, who, though distinguished, do him a disservice. (I remember Heinemann, thirty years ago, refusing a minimal commitment to continue the companion volumes of the official biography. Martin Gilbert’s supporters went cap in hand to an old friend of Sir Winston for a donation that produced three more. Ultimately and thankfully, Hillsdale College took over and finished the job.)

Tim Benson (full disclosure) is an old friend who has aided this writer countless times over the years. Knowing in advance of his expertise, I expected the high quality of his work. Perusing the book is a never-ending revelation, and it quickly grows on you. A Life in Cartoons deserves a place in every serious Churchill library.

More on cartoons and cartoonists

“‘The Charlie Chaplin of Caricature’: Churchill on David Low,” 2020.

“Poy (Percy Fearon): The Classic Churchill Cartoonist,” 2022.

“Echoes and Memories: Foreword to Gary Stiles’s Churchill in Punch,” 2022.

“In Search of Winston Churchill’s First Political Cartoon,” 2021.

William John Shepherd, “Gary Stiles Offers a Brilliant Catalogue of Mr. Punch’s Churchill,” 2022.

Q: Was there a Churchill-Diesel relationship?

A Hillsdale colleague refers us to an excellent 2023 book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, by Douglas Brunt…

Diesel vanished from the steamship Dresden while crossing from Belgium to England on 29 September 1913. Theories on the cause include accident, suicide or murder. On the eve of the Great War, the German government was anxious to maintain its progress on Diesel propulsion.

Douglas Brunt speculates that Diesel was being wooed or recruited as an asset of the British government, in particular by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He offers no documentary proof, but points to a great degree of circumstantial evidence. Churchill’s incentive may have arisen from British problems developing Diesel engines for submarines. Obviously it would be a great advantage to have the inventor’s services.

A: Inconclusive

Douglas Brunt makes a good case for Diesel being murdered or thrown overboard by German agents, presumably to keep his talents from falling into British hands. We consulted our sources, including every word of Churchill’s in print or archived. There are forty hits for “Diesel.” A few testify to British anxiety that the Germans would steal a march with Diesel propulsion of military vessels or vehicles.

We found only one reference involving Churchill, by the historian R.W. Thompson in 1963. It concerns Churchill’s initial activities as First Lord of Admiralty after his appointment in October 1911. From The Yankee Marlborough (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 164:

Churchill, now with the aid of Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, laid down two keels to one in competition with the Germans. It was not only a question of ships, but of types of ships, of propulsion and fuel, of armament, of the development of submarines and a naval air arm.

Rudolf Diesel had probably revolutionised propulsion, and with that coal, and even oil, might become obsolete. The internal combustion engine might rule the world, and the old “steam” empires were in a new race which might be dominated by science and technology.

It was an unpleasant thought. A constant stream of new and unknown factors, and problems of obsolescence, were constantly hampering the planners of weapons and strategy in a manner previously unknown, and undreamt of.

“Why Coal Must Go”

Jacky Fisher, the retired Admiral whom Churchill brought back as his First Sea Lord in 1914, was the driving force behind the Royal Navy’s conversion from coal- to oil-fired warships. But Fisher was also a proponent of internal combustion engines (including Diesels) for smaller craft.

On 4 October 1912, when Churchill was actively courting Fisher to take charge of oil conversion project. the Admiral wrote a memorandum: “A New Navy: Why Coal Must Go, Why the Internal Combustion Engine is Vital.” Sent to Churchill, it is a characteristic example of Fisher’s fervent prose

The enclosed, written for some of our faltering colleagues, may amuse you. Don’t send it to the Daily Mail. It’s written currente calamo as you will observe. On Nov. 26, 1910, every newspaper in America reported at length my words that the nation which first adopted Internal Combustion Propulsion would sweep the board commercially as well as pugnaciously!….

The British Admiralty is going to see a German battle-cruiser going round the Earth without refuelling in eighteen months from now, and all our wonderful marine engineers are simply servile copyists of a damned skunk called Diesel! And we haven’t got a workman or a metallurgist who is capable to produce anything approaching the foreign article.

I am going to become a naturalized Jew and go to Palestine as I think the end of the world must be near and the last trump begins there and I want to get in first somewhere!”

Archival resources

The Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge holds several Fisher-Churchill letters on coal-oil conversion. None, however, mention Rudolf Diesel—not surprising if his help was being sought surreptitiously.

There is no doubt that British naval thinkers were concerned that Germany might be first with Diesel-propelled submarines. The engine was also ideal for Churchill’s idea of  “land caterpillars” (tanks). But we found no evidence of Churchill’s interest in Rudolf Diesel himself.

It is known that Diesel boarded the Dresden that fatal October in 1913 intending to meet with the British about licensing his invention. By then Churchill and Fisher were well along on the conversion from coal to oil for capital ships, and WSC had secured an oil supply through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. How far Diesel developments had affected designs for submarines or Churchill’s “landship” (the tank) bears further investigation.

Diesel links

Douglas Brunt interview about his book by Charles C.W. Cooke, 2023.

“‘OMG’: Churchillian Origins of the Popular Texter’s Phrase,” 2023.

“Dardanelles Straits, 1915: Success Has a Thousand Fathers,” 2024.

Marcus Frost, “Churchill’s ‘Landship’: The Tank,” 2016.

Christopher H. Sterling and Richard M. Langworth, Review of Barry Gough’s Churchill and Fisher: Titans of the Admiralty, 2018.

I‘m working on an article and need to know: (1) Into how many languages were Churchill’s Second World War memoirs translated? (2) Into how many languages was his 1959 abridged one-volume edition translated? —G.A., Bilbao, Spain

(Updated from 2012.) According to Ronald I. Cohen’s Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Continuum, 2006, 3 vols., I: 729-30), The Second World War was translated into nineteen languages: Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Not all of these comprised the complete six volumes. The Turkish edition contained only the first two volumes. Wendy Reves, wife of Churchill’s literary agent, Emery Reves, told me that the publishers refused to pay for the rest! The first Russian edition (1956-58) contained only the first three volumes, though Ronald Cohen also lists a later, complete Russian edition published in 1997-98.

On the one-volume abridged edition (1959), Mr. Cohen lists eight translations: Arabic, Catalan, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Slovene.

Official histories

Does Great Britain have an official History of the Second World War, like the American “Green Books”? Where might I find them?  —L.L., Raleigh, N.C.

Yes: several specialized multi-volume series, under the umbrella title History of the Second World War, were published by HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Since 2006, HMSO has been part of the Office of Public Sector Information within the British National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office.

There are five sub-series, for example, Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (five volumes, 1970). Other series were Military, Civil, Intelligence and Medical. HMSO also published individual collections of papers and documents.

The scope is colossal. For example, the Military Series alone comprises thirty-two volumes. There are nine groupings: Grand Strategy, The War at Sea, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, Home Defence, Victory in the West, The War Against Japan, Mediterranean and Middle East, and Civil Affairs & Military Government. Some of these also appeared as abridged one-volume editions.

There are disclaimers in the volumes stating that the opinions are those of the authors. Their quality varied, and some were controversial. Captain Stephen Roskill, who wrote all three volumes of The War at Sea, was one of Churchill’s strongest critics. Books were subsequently published by pro-Churchill naval authorities which disputed Roskill’s conclusions.

You can search for individual titles on Bookfinder, but major libraries should have them; they may also have been digitalized.

Related reading

“Winston Churchill’s World War Accounts: History or Memoirs?,” 2023

”Churchill and the Avoidable War: Book Outline,” 2017.

“Hillsdale College Acquires Cohen Churchill Recordings Collection,” 2018.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 20223.

“Grand Alliance: A Way Out of the Second World War?” 2021.

Q: What was it?

The Atlantic Charter was issued by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in August 1941. “We had the idea,” Churchill later told Parliament, “to give all peoples, and especially the oppressed and conquered peoples, a simple, rough and ready wartime statement of the goal towards which the British Commonwealth and the United States mean to make their way, and thus make a way for others to march with them….”

A reader asks if the Charter had a second iteration:

In your review of Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network, you link Martin Gilbert’s 2005 lecture on Churchill and America. In it, Sir Martin said: “One of the documents which I’ve never seen reproduced…was the Declaration of Principles which Churchill and Eisenhower signed in the White House.” Was this, as he hinted, a second Atlantic Charter?

A: “Perhaps—perhaps not”

Sir Martin was quoting, actually paraphrasing, Churchill’s description of the charter he signed with Eisenhower in 1954. He correctly said it was never published. Finding it proved a challenge.

Sir Martin’s book Churchill and America references the Eisenhower Papers at Johns Hopkins University. The university library could not find it. They referred me to the Eisenhower Library, which did not reply. (Some libraries seem to have difficulties even answering queries about materials in their care.)

Repeated online searches eventually produced the text. Back in 2005, Sir Martin wished that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair publish the “Second Charter” as a gesture of solidarity during the Iraq war.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project met Sir Martin’s wish that the “charter” be published, albeit on its seventieth anniversary. The wording certainly bears the imprint of Sir Winston.

Washington, 29 June 1954

As we terminate our conversations on subjects of mutual and world interest, we again declare that: 

(1) In intimate comradeship, we will continue our united efforts to secure world peace based upon the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which we reaffirm. 

(2) We, together and individually, continue to hold out the hand of friendship to any and all nations, which by solemn pledge and confirming deeds show themselves desirous of participating in a just and fair peace.

(3) We uphold the principle of self-government and will earnestly strive by every peaceful means to secure the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence. We welcome the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal. As regards formerly sovereign states now in bondage, we will not be a party to any arrangement or treaty which would confirm or prolong their unwilling subordination. In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure they are conducted fairly.

*

(4) We believe that the cause of world peace would be advanced by general and drastic reduction under effective safeguards of world armaments of all classes and kinds. It will be our persevering resolve to promote conditions in which the prodigious nuclear forces now in human hands can be used to enrich and not to destroy mankind. 

(5) We will continue our support of the United Nations and of existing international organizations that have been established in the spirit of the Charter for common protection and security. We urge the establishment and maintenance of such associations of appropriate nations as will best, in their respective regions, preserve the peace and the independence of the peoples living there. When desired by the peoples of the affected countries, we are ready to render appropriate and feasible assistance to such associations.           

(6) We shall, with our friends, develop and maintain the spiritual, economic and military strength necessary to pursue these purposes effectively. In pursuit of this purpose we will seek every means of promoting the fuller and freer interchange among us of goods and services which will benefit all participants.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston S. Churchill 

Self-government, self-determination

In the original Atlantic Charter, Churchill had been careful to distinguish self-government from self-determination. Britain and the U.S. agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

Churchill’s hand was again evident in the 1954 declaration, with its closely similar wording: “We uphold the principle of self-government…the independence of all countries whose peoples desire and are capable of sustaining an independent existence.” They welcomed “the processes of development, where still needed, that lead toward that goal.” (Italics mine.)

The British Empire was much diminished by 1954. But this wording preserved a certain flexibility for Britain over the colonies that remained. In the years which followed, under Churchill’s successors, colony after British colony became independent. Most evolved peaceably, and with far less strife than colonies of other empires. Today many are members of the useful, if sadly underutilized, Commonwealth of Nations.

“Rough-and-ready”

Churchill glossed over minor semantics in his report to Parliament. The statement, he said, was only “a declaration of our basic unity.” Angl0-American unity, he continued, was “the strongest hope that all mankind may survive in freedom and justice.

This was virtually the same meaning Churchill had attached to the 1941 Atlantic Charter: “A simple, rough-and-ready” statement by which Britain and America “mean to make their way.”

In retrospect

Was the 1954 Washington declaration a second Atlantic Charter? Probably not, writes Roosevelt-Churchill scholar Warren Kimball: “I’m a bit dubious about ordaining that statement, since it apparently attracted little attention and had no effect on history.”

Indeed, Churchill’s bright hopes for a “new charter” were quickly dashed. The Prime Minister was at sea, returning to England. There he dashed off a telegram to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, suggesting a high-level meeting with the Russians—absent Eisenhower.

Churchill informed Eisenhower, furious that he had not been consulted. ‘‘You did not let any grass grow under your feet,” he fired back. Back in London, the Cabinet was “even more indignant.” The Prime Minister had not consulted them, either.

Though the President later insisted he was “not vexed,” he wanted no Soviet summit. Privately, later, Eisenhower voiced the concern that “Winston would give away the store.”

Churchill’s initiative came to nothing. “I cherish hopes not illusions,” he replied. “And after all I am ‘an expendable’ and very ready to be one in so great a cause.”

In April 1955, convinced at last that he could not foster “a meeting at the summit,” Churchill resigned.

Three months later his successor and Eisenhower met with the Russians in Geneva.

Related reading

“Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing, After All Other Possibilities are Exhausted,” 2021.

“Researching the Atlantic Charter Conference, Argentia, Newfoundland, August 1941,” 2019.

“Bull in a China Shop (Dulles): Not Churchill’s Line,” 2022.

“Churchillian Phrases: ‘Special Relationship’ and ‘Iron Curtain,’” 2019.

“Cita Stelzer on the Angl0-American Special Relationship,” 2024.

Q: Russians and Greeks

I’m studying Churchill’s The World Crisis, Volume 2, 1915, describing the naval assault on the Dardanelles. It occurs in Chapter 9: “The Fall of the Outer Forts and the Second Greek Offer.”

After the successful naval bombardment of the Turkish outer forts in February 1915, Churchill felt close to gaining the support of the Greeks. His plans fell apart when “the Russian Government would not at any price accept the cooperation of Greece in the Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) expedition”*

What problem did Czar Nicholas II have with Greece?  What did the Russians see as a threat, which caused them to take this position? —J.D.

*Quotations are from Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), and the modern paperback (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pages 201-04.

A: “Quos Deus vult perdere…”

You cite a poignant episode in The World Crisis. In early 1915, the hitherto neutral Greeks became interested in  joining the Triple Entente against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Churchill’s actions demonstrate two of his lifelong goals: coalitions and collective security.

Czar Nicholas’ refusal of aid from the Greeks when victory seemed possible poses an example of what Winston Churchill frequently described as “falling below the level of events.” WSC did not conceal his distress that a supreme opportunity was thrown away:

The time-honoured quotation one learnt as a schoolboy, “Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat” [Those whom God wills to destroy He first makes mad], resounded in all its deep significance…. This was, indeed, the kind of situation for which such terrible sentences had been framed—perhaps it was for this very situation that this sentence had been prophetically reserved.

Military alliances in 1914. Italy (part of the 1882 Triple Alliance) ultimately joined the war against the Central Powers in May 1915. (Map by Historicair, Futeflute and Bibi Saint-Pol, Creative Commons)

“Before the end of April”

Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, while sympathetic to France and Britain, had refused to join them in the war until the naval assault on the Dardanelles in early 1915. This produced what Churchill calls “an immediate change.” Venizelos now proposed sending three Greek divisions to invade Turkey on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Churchill’s fertile imagination conjured up a stunning vision:

There was surely a reasonable prospect that with all these forces playing their respective parts in a general scheme, the Gallipoli Peninsula could even now have been seized and Constantinople taken before the end of April….

One must pause, and with the tragic knowledge of after days dwell upon this astounding situation which had been produced swiftly, easily, surely, by a comparatively small naval enterprise directed at a vital nerve-centre of the world.

The Czar’s veto

Two days later “a terrible fatality intervened.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Saznonov reported that Czar Nicholas II “could not in any circumstances consent to Greek cooperation in the Dardanelles.”

Russia, which had long coveted Constantinople, had welcomed the Dardanelles operation. But Russia saw Greece as a rival for the spoils. Suppose the Greeks joined in occupying the Turkish metropolis? The Russians would never allow Greek King Constantine to appear in Constantinople.

Desperately, Churchill and Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey sought to save the opportunity. Suppose the Greeks were limited to one division? Suppose Constantine promised not to go to Constantinople? Affronted, the King “relapsed into his previous attitude of hostile reserve.”

Meanwhile in St. Petersburg, Churchill wrote, Czar Nicholas remained adamant:

Russia—failing, reeling backward under the German hammer, with her munitions running short, cut off from her allies—Russia was the Power which ruptured irretrievably this brilliant and decisive combination….

Was there no finger to write upon the wall, was there no ancestral spirit to conjure up before this unfortunate Prince, the downfall of his House, the ruin of his people—the bloody cellar of Ekaterinburg?

(Churchill refers to the murder of the Czar and his family by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg on 17 July 1918.)

Alliances denied

The refusal of Nicholas II to see the larger picture and make the necessary compromises astonished Churchill. Always a proponent of collective security, he could not believe the Czar would throw away such a glittering prospect. Churchill believed even more was at stake. He was sure that victory over Turkey could bring Romania and Bulgaria into a “Balkan Front” against the Germans.

Once the Dardanelles fleet turned back on March 18th, and after the failure to take Gallipoli in succeeding months, the Bulgars weighed their options. In October Bulgaria joined the Central Powers and invaded Serbia. (The term “Prussians of the Balkans,” as Churchill famously labeled the Serbs, was originally applied—disparagingly—to the Bulgarians by Russian Chancellor Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky in 1903.)

Bulgaria’s actions finally brought the Greeks into the Entente, but never with full-fledged zeal. Constantine’s royalists continued to favor Germany, and he and Venizelos sparred, alternately in and out of power, until the King’s death in 1923.

Churchill’s lament

The Greek and Russian imbroglio flew against all Churchill’s instincts to build coalitions. On 6 March 1915—with Dardanelles prospects still promising—he drafted a letter to Sir Edward Grey:

I beseech you at this crisis not to make a mistake in falling below the level of events. Half-hearted measures will ruin all, and a million men will die through the prolongation of the war. You must be bold and violent. You have a right to be. Our fleet is forcing the Dardanelles. No armies can reach Constantinople but those which we invite, yet we seek nothing here but the victory of the common cause.

Tell the Russians that we will meet them in a generous and sympathetic spirit about Constantinople…. If Russia prevents Greece helping, I will do my utmost to oppose her having Constantinople. She is a broken power but for our aid, and has no resource open but to turn traitor—and this she cannot do. If you don’t back up this Greece—the Greece of Venizelos—you will have another which will cleave to Germany.

“Mortal folly done and said”

Churchill decided to sleep on his draft. It proved a wise decision. Morning bought a “laconic telegram” from Athens: “The King having refused to agree to M. Venizelos’ proposals, the Cabinet have resigned.” Churchill’s most powerful Greek ally was temporarily out of the picture.

Churchill published his letter in The World Crisis—“not in any reproach of Sir Edward Grey or the Foreign Office. They felt as we did. They did all in their power. But I print it because it registers a terrible moment in the long struggle to save Russia from her foes and from herself.”

“Mortal folly done and said,” Churchill frequently quoted Housman— “And the lovely way that led To the slime pit and the mire And the everlasting fire.”

Thank-you for your question. It is an example of the myopia of nations and leaders who cannot see the way to their own salvation through concerted action. And it is not so unfamiliar today, as we are often reminded on the evening news. It makes one wonder—as Churchill did—what might happen “if God wearied of mankind.”

Related reading

“Dardanelles Straits, 1915: ‘Success has a Thousand Fathers,” 2024.

“Gallipoli Peninsula, 1915: “Failure is an Orphan,” 2024.

“Dardanelles-Gallipoli Centenary,” 2015.

“Dardanelles Then, Afghanistan Now: Apples and Oranges,” 2009.

“Lenin as Plague Bacillus, Churchill as Munitions Minister,” 2024.

***

A British historian contacted three Churchill authors–Amthony Seldon, Andrew Roberts and me–about Ivor Roberts-Jones’s Churchill statue in Parliament Square. It features in a forthcoming book on 100 famous UK monuments. “Is it true that Churchill personally selected the site?”

We all expressed our doubts, despite one contrary piece of evidence. Philip Howard, in The Times of 2 November 1973, reported after the unveiling of the statue:

In the 1950s, David Eccles, then Minister of Works, showed Churchill plans for the redevelopment of Parliament Square. Churchill drew a circle in the north-east corner and declared: “That is where my statue will go.”

We were not sure this is dispositive. Told a statue was planned, WSC might have casually proposed its place. But he was not particularly avid about statuary. Once, asked if he’d like one in London, he said he would much prefer his name on a park that East End children could play in. Seventy years later, we are still waiting for the park.

Asked for more comment, I responded to questions, which may be of passing interest. The new book—which I think is a grand idea—focuses on war commemorations. It is not about the recent culture wars, in which the London statue has been variously defaced by ignorant people who haven’t read enough history.

The commemorative function of statues is appropriate, given the ignorance that surrounds them. The advent of social media combines anonymity with the ability to reach millions with one injudicious click. On this and the Hillsdale Churchill website, we notice that 90% of our cogent, polite reader comments are signed by real people, while the vulgar or nasty ones are unsigned, except by pseudonyms. One American pundit who accepts replies always says: “Name and town if you wish to opine.”

Questions and answers

Are you British or American, and what inspired your professional and personal interest in Churchill?

American, born in Rye, New York with three immigrant grandparents, German, Italian and a smidge of Latvian. My interest began while watching the 1965 State Funeral on a flickering B&W telly. Having studied history, it occurred that this was somebody I should learn more about. I picked up The Gathering Storm, Churchill’s first volume of war memoirs, and was hooked. Above everything else he did, what a superlative writer! He is a model to scribblers. We follow meekly in his wake.

What is the perception of Churchill in America is today? Do most young people know who he is?  Recently a U.S. conspiracy theorist went viral with a denigration of Churchill. Was this proof of WSC’s ongoing relevance?

Historically, he will always be relevant. Yet a recent survey suggested that some appalling percentage of British schoolchildren think he was a fictional character. I fear the figure would be higher among Americans. History isn’t taught as it should be any more, which is why we need books on monuments, like yours.

Among those who know who Churchill was, impressions remain overwhelmingly positive, but shallow. It’s mostly the Second World War: blood, toil, tears and sweat. That includes, sadly, most politicians who profess to admire him. While books about him continue to pour off the presses, nowadays they tend to be either highly specialized (Mr. Churchill in the White House) or some off-the-wall demolition job, like Churchill’s Secret War.

The leader and the man

I am struck that you historians were all surprised by the idea that Churchill might have self-selected his spot in Parliament Square. Is there a danger that his subsequent popularity in the late Twentieth Century (when we started obsessively to commemorate the war) distorted our idea of him as person and leader? How would you sum up the leader and the man?

All three of us knew that he was not big on totems, though like anyone who has done great things, not averse to them! His wish for a park instead of a statue is I think more revealing than his spontaneous mark on a development plan.

You are quite right—our obsession with the war (and the many misinterpretations of it) has distorted his record. When asked to summarize him, I always quote Sir Martin Gilbert, who described Churchill in one sentence:

“He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction, rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.”

“Liberty itself”

For a little more detail, consider Sir Martin’s last words in the Official Biography:

Churchill was indeed a noble spirit, sustained in his long life by a faith in the capacity of man to live in peace, to seek prosperity, and to ward off threats and dangers by his own exertions. His love of country, his sense of fair play, his hopes for the human race, were matched by formidable powers of work and thought, vision and foresight. His path had often been dogged by controversy, disappointment and abuse, but these had never deflected him from his sense of duty and his faith in the British people….

From his daughter Mary had come words of solace…when at last his life’s great impulses were fading. “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father,’ she wrote, ‘I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does—Liberty itself.”

The London statue

Do you think the statue captures the essence of Churchill?  Standing in his greatcoat, at what stage in his life does the statue depict? Is Britain still at war?

It is not widely known that the existing statue was not the first proposal. Back in 1995, as editor of Finest Hour, I ran a cover photo of Roberts-Jones’s first bronze maquette, in Garter robes, which had come up for sale. It had actually been approved by the Royal Fine Arts Commission when Lady Churchill asked that the statue be in military uniform. Her daughter Lady Soames confirmed this to me. The greatcoat is perfect—not redolent of any one branch of the military.

Of course Lady Churchill was right. As her husband said, “Nothing surpasses 1940.” His grandson Winston thought, with some justification, that his warnings of the late 1930s were his true finest hours. But Lady Churchill knew he had to appear as the great wartime figure.

I think Ivor Roberts-Jones gave him the perfect expression as he gazes at Parliament. In his eerie short story, The Dream, about conversing with the ghost of his father, Lord Randolph mentions the House of Commons. His son wrote: “There was a sort of glare in his eyes as he said ‘House of Commons.’” (You can read this marvelous flight of fancy on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project website.)

“To err on the side of history’s defaulters”

How important are statues like Churchill’s in terms of telling a nation’s story? We also have one of de Gaulle in London, Churchill’s nemesis in many ways (after which Paris erected one of Churchill!)

Ah, Le Grand Charles. Brendan Bracken said, “Remember, Winston…he thinks of himself as the reincarnation of St. Joan.” WSC replied, “Yes, but my bishops won’t burn him!”

Yet in the end each of these two imposing figures respected and honored the other. De Gaulle gave Churchill the Ordre de la Libération, and attended his funeral. In a message to his widow, de Gaulle wrote: “In the great drama, he was the greatest.” And Churchill in his war memoirs called de Gaulle “the Constable of France.”

This is a quality we seem to be losing: “To err on the side of history’s defaulters,” in the words of the great Allen Guelzo. Heroes are what they are because the good they did far outweighs their faults. All those statues on Parliament Square are of people with human faults. Gandhi fought for Indian rights in South Africa but thought blacks “live like animals” and wanted whites to stay in charge. And yet, he was Gandhi—and on balance, a hero.

During the craze to tear down statues a few years ago, French President Macron boldly announced that no French statues would go. They are part of France’s heritage, he said—for good or ill. That was very courageous of him. Statues tell a nation’s story. If you object to one, erect one to balance it. Hillsdale College has no statue of Robert E. Lee—but we do have one of Frederick Douglass. There is no hiding from history.

“Eels get used to skinning…”

It is impossible to know, but what do you imagine Churchill’s response would be to acquiring a grass Mohican, red paint, etc.? Could one argue that iconoclasm is a sign of true national greatness? Would he see it like that?

His daughter impressed me with what I call The Mary Soames Commandment: “Thou shalt not proclaim what Papa would say about any modern issue. After all, how do you know?”

So we cannot say. Still, he did love critical caricatures of him, even bought and framed some. In his 1931 essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists” he wrote:

Just as eels are supposed to get used to skinning, so politicians get used to being caricatured.…If we must confess it, they are quite offended and downcast when the cartoons stop.… They fear old age and obsolescence are creeping upon them. They murmur: “We are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days are ended.”

Related reading

“Allen Guelzo on Robert E. Lee: ‘To Err on the Side of  History’s Defaulters,'” 2021.

“‘Since Thomas Jefferson Dined Alone’…JFK, Winston Churchill,” 2023.

“Foreword to a Review of ‘The Racial Consquences of Mr. Churchill,'” 2021

“In Defense of Churchill: Questions and Answers,” 2021.

“Churchill’s Legacy Today: Undented in the Digital Age,” 2023.

You want to stress content symbiosis, innovative, provocative and objective thinking, assessment of operational responsibilities, specific parameters targeted at a demographically mixed audience with varying tastes, discernment and intellectual approaches, ensuring that each medium reaches targeted audiences, making it more cross-generationally enticing, using more immediate and responsible electronic media.[1]

Was that jargon? We report, you decide. Such an astonishing number of words, all in one sentence, is liable to confuse somebody whose livelihood depends on communication, not obfuscation.

Jargon versus clarity

I did wonder at the time how Churchill, that peerless practitioner of English, would react to this kind of language. “Short words are best,” he said, “and the old words, when short, are best of all.”[2] Well now….

We can imagine what he would think about substituting fashionable jargon like “challenges” for handicaps or “issues” for difficulties. (“I have issues with my hotel bill,” a guest in front of me said. No, she had problems!)

What would Churchill make of that stand-by cliché “reaching out”? It is intentionally vague—meant to convey niceness. Would he wonder if it means a physical gesture? Or does it mean conversing, telephoning, writing, telegramming, faxing, emailing or tweeting? Instead of “reaching out,” what’s wrong with communicating?

Churchill would snort at catch-all jargon like “the rich” (for anyone earning a comfortable living), or tergiversations like “man-caused disaster” instead of “terrorism.” But even in his day he had his hands full. In 1950 he said:

I hope you have all mastered the official socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word “poor”; they are described as the “lower income group.” When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of “arresting increases in personal income”….

[Homes] are in future to be called “accommodation units.” I don’t know how we are to sing our old song “Home Sweet Home”…. “Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, there’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.”[3]

“Let us have an end of such phrases…”

Churchill learned English from a Harrow master, Robert Somervell, who instilled in him a love of clarity and a hatred of discombobulation. To his colleagues in 1940 he said:

Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect….” Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conversational.[4]

Years later he was still banging away: “In this debate we have had the usual jargon about ‘the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.’”[5]

Alas, woolly jargon has a long shelf-life, and “infra-” and “supra-” are with us yet.

Protesting the Ministry of Defence’s “barren, dismal, flatulent, platitudinous” 1947 White Paper, Churchill said:

It was one of those rigmaroles and grimaces produced by the modern bureaucracy into whose hands we have fallen—a kind of vague palimpsest of jargon and officialese with no breadth, no theme, and, above all, no facts.[6]

“Spit all this rubbish from their lips”

In 1942, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov wrote a turgid memo about the Royal Navy, saying, that Russia “will be in a position to draw the necessary conclusions as to the real state of affairs, particularly in regard to certain irregularities in the actions of the respective British naval authorities.”

Churchill reacted to that remark with one of his favorite pejoratives: “This grimace is a good example of how official jargon can be used to destroy any kind of human contact, or even thought itself.”[7]

In Cardiff in 1950, Churchill added: “I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.”

Aye, and the other democracies with it. Any year now. There is still time, brother.

Endnotes

[1] It led to a long process ending with a resignation, which is something you need to do at least once in your life. I have never regretted resigning or being sacked.

[2] Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The Times Literary Award luncheon, London, 2 November 1949, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VII: 7885.

[3] WSC, Cardiff, Wales, 8 February 1950, In the Balance: Speeches 1949 & 1950 (London: Cassell, 1951), 181.

[4] Sir Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15 Never Surrender, May 1940-December 1940 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 636.

[5] WSC, House of Commons, 27 June 1950, In the Balance, 291.

[6] WSC, House of Commons, 31 March 1947, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 & 1948 (London: Cassell, 1950), 53.

[7] WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), 516.

Related reading

“Speaker Jitters: Churchill Had Them, Necessitating Strategy,” 2024.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Collected Essays, Invaluably Compiled by Michael Wolff,” 2023.

“The Most Important Thing About Education: Churchill at Bristol,” 2023.

“Scaffolding Rhetoric: Churchill in Congress, 1941,” 2022.

• First published as “Great Contemporaries, Pamela Harriman,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale/Churchill, click here, scroll to bottom, and enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We never spam you and your identity remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Pamela: she got there on her own

In 1941 at the U.S. Congress, Winston Churchill disarmed whatever remaining critics he still had by declaring:  “Had my father been American and my mother English, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” Pamela Harriman (1920-1997) was all-English, yet rose to high American office on her own. She served as U.S. ambassador to Paris from 1993 until her death. Small-minded people, and there are plenty, belittle her lack of education, her glittery friendships with the great. All that is easy to mock, but beside the point.

Her colleague Richard Holbrooke rated her quite differently: “She spoke the language, she knew the country, she knew its leadership. She was one of the best.” President Jacques Chirac compared her to the two most notable American ambassadors, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He awarded her a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur‘s Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural award. Pretty good for a girl from the sticks who left home early, determined to succeed.

Pamela Beryl Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, daughter of the 11th Baron Digby. Her mother Constance was the daughter of 2nd Baron Aberdare. Her childhood home was her first Churchill connection. Minterne Magna in 1642 was the residence of John Churchill, father of the first Sir Winston.

A skilled horsewoman, Pamela competed at show-jumping including Olympia, where every fence was above her pony’s shoulders. In 1937 she was at a boarding school in Munich when she met Adolf Hitler—a dubious achievement her future father-in-law missed. Introduced by his admirer Unity Mitford, Pam never fell for whatever spell the Führer cast over Mitford.

“You are not still a Catholic?”

Pamela Digby’s first marriage, at age nineteen in 1939, was to Randolph Churchill, a decision taken on the fly. Randolph was off to war and, thinking he might be killed, anxious to produce an heir. Reportedly he had proposed to eight other women before Pamela.

Friends and family, she recalled, warned her that the mercurial Randolph was not a good long-term risk: Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, “took me for a long walk in the country and tried to dissuade me.” She replied: “If he is not killed and we do not get on together, I shall obtain a divorce.” In 1946, she was as good as her word.

Thomas Maier, author of The Churchills and the Kennedys, says the only Churchill concerned about the match was Winston. “Your family, the Digby family, were Catholic, but I imagine you are not still a Catholic?” he asked her. WSC had no religious prejudice, but as a politician always had to contemplate potential criticism.

Pamela assured him the Digbys had long been Church of England, and faithful Conservatives. “Yes, you had your heads chopped off in the Gunpowder Plot,” Churchill smiled. “That is right,” she answered—Sir Everard Digby.” (Mr. Maier notes that Sir Everard, a Catholic convert, was actually hung, drawn and quartered.)

“How great a man…”

Winston Churchill welcomed Pamela into the family. Becoming Prime Minister, he invited her to Downing Street. Pregnant with her son Winston, she recalled sleeping in a bunk bed in the bomb shelter, “one Churchill above me, another inside.” Pamela loved and admired the PM, and later did amusing imitations of him in her own deep voice.

Once during dinner amidst the Blitz, Churchill gazed around the table. “If the Germans come,” he told them, “you can always take one with you.” Pamela, all of twenty, was shocked at this. “But Papa,” she protested, “what would I fight with?”

WSC peered at her with a benignant smile: “You, my dear, may use a carving knife.” Her son Winston said she recited that vignette often, captivated by her father-in-law’s indomitable spirit. He added: “It was through her that it first dawned on me how great a man my grandfather was.”

Randolph to Averell

As friends had warned her, marriage with Randolph was not destined to be smooth. Neither were celibate in each other’s absence, and her affair with Roosevelt’s envoy, Averell Harriman, was an open secret. Winston nor Clementine never spoke of it.

Contrary to what you may hear from other sources, she fell for Averell the moment she laid eyes on him, one Blitz night at the Dorchester. There was no plot by Winston to use her. Inevitably, when he learned of it, Randolph Churchill exploded. Years later it still strained relations between father and son. But Randolph was hardly guiltless of indiscretions.

After her divorce, with little in her pocket except determination, Pamela and her young son Winston moved to Paris. She enjoyed a lavish life and romances. In 1960 she married Broadway producer Leland Hayward (renowned for South Pacific and The Sound of Music.) The marriage lasted until Hayward’s death in 1971. Six months later she married Harriman, then almost 80, caring for him devotedly. The old flame had never died, her son told this writer. “She often called Averell ‘the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’”

“Never give in”

Through Harriman and with Churchillian determination, Pamela became immersed in American politics. In 1980 and 1984, the Democrats were in disarray following twin sweeps by Ronald Reagan. Pamela quoted Sir Winston: “In war you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.” How often he’d been counted out in politics and recovered?

At her home on N Street in Washington she hosted glamorous parties and fundraisers. “She had an ability to attract people around her, and a willingness to try to be a catalyst for the party,” said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “Almost anybody who was asked was going to come to one of the gatherings at her spectacular house.” Her son Winston told me that politics aside, she was “one of the most conservative people I know. She would have brought the same zest had she married Ronald Reagan.”

As those two comments suggest, Pamela Harriman was admired from both sides of the aisle. She supported Clinton in 1992, and was rewarded with the Paris Ambassadorship. Yet at her confirmation hearings she was praised to the skies by the most conservative member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms.

“Darling, this is Pamela…”

She represented it seems the politics of a bygone age, a more Churchillian age. Like her first father-in-law, she saw it as a noble profession, where mutual respect was de rigueur. Years ago I published a piece on Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. As one might expect, it stressed the Fulton theme of peace through strength. Pamela Harriman wrote a rebuttal emphasizing Churchill’s Fulton title, “the Sinews of Peace.”

Paul Robinson, formerly Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Canada, read it, disagreed, and confessed that he remained among her greatest admirers. Earlier he had named Harriman and Weinberger co-vice-presidents during his chairmanship of the English-Speaking Union. “They were both superb,” he said. “And very good together—despite everything!”

Shortly before President Clinton arrived in office he proclaimed an admiration for Winston Churchill. I remember sending him, through Pamela Harriman, a blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the Churchill five-cent U.S. commemorative stamp. Delighted, she delivered it herself, and so we made her a pink version.

She telephoned to express her thanks, with the husky opening line that must have thrilled a thousand Washington insiders: “Darling, this is Pamela.” It would have been, and always was, superfluous to ask, “Pamela who?”

“Elegance itself”

Pamela lived life her way—a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far with a formal education that ended at age sixteen.

How did she manage it? She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. During her term as ambassador, Paris and Washington collided over alleged U.S. espionage, the “Europeanization” of NATO, leadership of the United Nations, peace initiatives in the Middle East, power rivalries in Africa. She handled it all with consummate skill, retaining the respect of her hosts despite those tests.

President Chirac lamented her loss: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the United States in France does not do justice to her achievement. She lent to our longstanding alliance the radiant strength of her personality. She was elegance itself…a peerless diplomat.”

That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

The following article, from 2009 and updated in 2023, is republished only to alert readers that six originals of the notorious facsimile thank-you notes have now surfaced! For the details, scroll to “Addendum: the originals” below.

Don’t fall for them…

…those multiple Churchill thank-you letters, each of which is a carefully made facsimile. “The ultimate thrift shop haul,” headlined the Daily Mail. “Budget shopper is left STUNNED after buying a ‘priceless’ handwritten letter signed by Winston Churchill for just $1—after finding it buried in a New York store.”

I kept waiting for the shoe to drop on this story—but the Mail apparently believe it’s true. The letter is a facsimile, one of thousands, worth perhaps $50 if nicely framed. Apparently some are still being taken in. (Updated from 2019.)

“Signed Holograph Letter…

…by the British Prime Minister, on debossed House of Commons Notepaper, thanking a well-wisher for a kind message on his birthday, 1947. Folded once, slightly yellowed from age, otherwise a fine copy. $1200.”

This was an actual offer on the Internet, but the honest seller, alerted by an observer, conscientiously withdrew the item.

More than one collector has been taken in by these remarkable facsimile holograph notes, produced by Churchill’s Private Office from 1945 through at least 1959—some of them so convincing that casual observers swear they are originals.

Facsimile Reproductions

From 1945, at least nine variations of replica holograph notes were reproduced in quantity to thank well-wishers, whose congratulations poured in on Churchill’s birthday and other occasions. They are very well produced and appear original. They were made by a “spirit duplicator,” commonly known as a Roneo machine—similar to, but producing better quality than, a mimeograph. Early examples actually use Churchill’s blue-black ink, though they are not color separations, as I previously suspected. In any case, they are not originals and were not signed by Churchill personally.

The key to identifying a facsimile is its lack of a salutation (“My dear X”). Secretaries would simply place them in envelopes and post them by the hundreds to anyone who sent Churchill a token of respect. The value of these facsimiles on the market is incidental. A true autograph letter by Churchill is, of course, worth much more.

Origins

The first-known facsimile, dated 1945, acknowledged congratulations following V-E Day and sympathies after Churchill’s party’s defeat in the 1945 General Election. In November that year, Churchill’s birthday was the signal for well-wishers to send cards, letters and gifts. But this was not the end, or even the beginning of the end.

From the time Churchill was thrown out of office in 1945 almost until the end of his days, letters, cards and gifts flowed in. They attested to the esteem people all over the world held for him. So from time to time, his Private Office made him sit down with his big fountain pen and ink a note—sans salutation, sometimes dated, sometimes not. The original was reproduced on the Renograph and then destroyed. Run off by the thousands, they were popped into the post. Write to Sir Winston, and chances were good you would get a “handwritten” reply!

Recollection

A former bodyguard, Ronald Golding, told me: “The deluge would start in November and continue through New Year’s. It came in great sacks, delivered daily.” The boss sat down again and drafted a note for his 76th birthday in 1950. After he became Prime Minister again, the birthday greetings reached a crescendo. By then the Private Office decided not to date the thank-you note so that it could be used again the following year. The print on this and later notes is plain black ink.

For his 80th birthday in 1954, Sir Winston received many official gifts on behalf of Parliament and the Nation. This required a new facsimile note. It used light airmail paper, since many congratulations came from abroad.

After Churchill retired in 1955, the Private Office adopted Chartwell notepaper. Sir Winston’s signature was shakier by now, and 1959 may be the last time he penned one for reproduction. Sometimes the notes accompanied unsigned books.

High quality

The spirit duplicator produced convincing facsimiles, especially in the early days. The intensity of the dark blue ink varied with nib pressure, as it does normally. Churchill’s signature usually bears his characteristic flourish, and looks genuine. Of course it was—in the original prototype.

In the beginning, secretaries would often type the name and sometimes the address of the recipient at the bottom of each facsimile note. But soon the workload prevented this modest personalization. Through 1950, most notes bore an embossed House of Commons seal. When Churchill returned to office in 1951 they adopted a printed 10 Downing Street letterhead. After he retired, the heading was Chartwell, Westerham, Kent. After his hand became shaky,  his private office reprinted previous notes, deleting the dates.

Values

A note to an individual, with salutation, entirely in Churchill’s own hand, is worth four figures or more, depending on the recipient. To someone like Lloyd George or Neville Chamberlain, the value would be very high; one to Franklin Roosevelt, assuming any escaped the archives, would be priceless.

But the printed facsimile notes should not command more than $50 or so on todays market. They are nice little items, fun to frame, but by no means rare.

Addendum: the originals!

I often wondered what happened to the originals penned by Churchill, long thinking they were destroyed. Not quite! We now know that at least six survive.

In September 2024 I heard from the owners of six original holograph notes Churchill wrote for reproduction. They were passed down to the granddaughter of Frank Rimell, manager of W. Straker Ltd, a printers and stationers, Ludgate Hill, London.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Strakers reproduced Churchill’s thank-you notes. At leasat six originals still exist, on embosssed House of Commons notepaper. Written between 1946 and 1950, and willed to Mr. Rimell’s heirs, they reside in the original document wallet where Frank Rimell carefully preserved them. Any reader with interest may contact me, and I will forward your message to the present owners.