Winston S. Churchill Archives - Page 2 of 42

Those Infamous Facsimile Churchill Holograph Letters

10 September 2024 Comments 0 Comments

People are still falling for those reproduction Churchill thank-you letters produced by the thousands using a spirit duplicator. "The ultimate thrift shop haul," headlined the Daily Mail in July 2023. "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." Actually, $1 is about what it's worth—plus perhaps $50 for a nicely matted and framed example. Update 2024: Six originals do exist.

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Churchill said — WSC with Lt. Gen. Stone and his daughter Sarah (whose husband he did not wish to shoot), on a visit to his old regiment, the 4th Hussars, Cairo, 3 December 1943. (Imperial War Museum, public domain)

Churchill Quips: God, Santayana, Musso & Not Getting Scuppered

5 September 2024 Comments 0 Comments

The story goes that in the middle of the Second World War, Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys told WSC that “Hitler and Mussolini have an even greater burden to bear, because everything is going wrong for them.” Supposedly Churchill said in reply: Ah, but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law! I will not dignify that with quotation marks because it is nothing Churchill said. Not even about Vic Oliver, a son-in-law he really disliked. What worried Churchill was what might happen "if God wearied of mankind."

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Chief Great Leader: The Myth of Churchill’s Iroquois Ancestors

30 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

"Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case, the object of this enquiry is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocahontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe." —Randolph Churchill, way out in fiction, to South African Immigration officers in the days of Apartheid.

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Churchill’s V-Sign (both ways) and the Peace Symbol

26 August 2024 Comments 3 Comments

It is virtually certain that Churchill was unconscious of the meaning of the palm-in V-sign. Former secretary Elizabeth Layton Nel told me he was "astonished" when (with some embarrassment) she told him what it meant. This moment is humorously reenacted in the great film "Darkest Hour, "with Gary Oldman as WSC and Lily James as Elizabeth.

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Re-Rat Awards 2009 to Senators Gregg Arlen Specter

15 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” He was prescient. Re-Ratting is a lost art.

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Winston Churchill as Motorist: Always in a Hurry

11 August 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Habitually late, Churchill would typically “pile into the Humber around 5:30 for a 7:00 speech a hundred miles distant. As his chauffeur swings into the high road, Churchill crouches, with a flask, on the edge of the back seat and urges him to greater speeds. Once, doing 80 on a curve, a rear tyre blew and “a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles.” Realizing who it was, they helped fix the tyre. “Churchill made no sign of apology but cried, ‘Drive off!’ The constables saluted humbly.”

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Literary Queries: Churchill Signatures and Inscriptions

30 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Is the signature genuine? Yes, it seems so. From your photo it looks suitably aged and seems to have been there a long time. Inscribed books or photographs with the signatures pasted in or added to the matte are sometimes encountered. They are not, of course, as valuable as books the author personally inscribed, particularly if he named the recipient (such as the example above).

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Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took As Good As He Gave

25 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Not all were pleasant ribbing: “The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.... [His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book…while dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms.” —Nye Bevan

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Churchillisms: Puddings Without a Theme

20 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

"[We are] passing through a period of eclipse which may well be converted into a period of decline. There is anxiety abroad, and can we wonder at it! Why should the Government complain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for…. They have no theme [and] have deluded the masses of their supporters in the country into believing they are about to bring into being some vast, splendid, new world." —WSC

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Churchill and the Red Scare: The Zinoviev Letter

10 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

The conspiracy theorists have not got round to accusing Churchill of actually writing the Zinoviev Letter–at least as far we know! It is virtually certain that he was not involved in the forgery, though he initially accepted it as genuine. He did take political advantage of the Zinoviev uproar. Even if it were forged, he said, it was nothing new where Bolsheviks were concerned. He called Ramsay MacDonald a “futile Kerensky.”

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