January 11, 2013

Why does Churchill continue to make headlines 47 years after his death?
©Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 
MACLEANS, 19 December 2012—Last month, in the Canadian national weekly magazine Mclean’s, journalist Katie Engelhart mused about why, “The much-quoted British politician still makes headlines—47 years after his death?”

She goes on to write, “When Winston Churchill was a young boy, he was convinced of his imminent importance. The late British prime minister ‘had a very strong sense that he was going to make his mark on history,’ says Natalie Adams, an archivist at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England. ‘So he kept everything. And we have everything.'”

This sentiment is quite clearly evident in Churhcill’s, My Early Life, and in the many letter’s to his mother that have survived and are now part of the Churchill Archives.

“In October, Churchill’s personal papers were made available on the Internet. The archive is ‘the closest the U.K. has to a presidential library,’ said Jonathan Glasspool, managing director of the publisher Bloomsbury Academic. ‘Its publication online will become a landmark in 20th-century historical studies.’

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Forty-seven years after his death, Churchill is still a regular newsmaker and a benchmark against which today’s leaders are endlessly measured. ‘Winston Churchill’s legacy is as enormous and as powerful as ever,’ says U.S. historian David Woolner, who worked on the digitization,'” Engelhart continued in her article.

Books are still being published adding to the conversation, panels continue to debate on the topic’s of his day, and monument’s are still be erected in his honour. In recent days, whenever there is a crisis in the world, people refer to Winston Churchill as the paragon of leadership needed to solve the world’s problems.

Churchill great grandson Duncan Sandys recently remarked in a speech how so many of the problems in the world today are the very same problems of Churchill’s day. He said, “It is interesting how so many similar issues exist from his (Churchill’s) era. During his 60 years in public life, Churchill was engaged with social reform, the role of government in our lives, military spending, education reform, global finance, nation building as well as war…”

Engelhart concludes her article in Maclean’s by posing the question, “What would Churchill have made of all this ogling?”

“At the online archive’s opening ceremony, grandson Nicholas Soames recounted an early memory. As a small boy he snuck into his grandfather’s bedroom and found him reading in bed. ‘Is it true you’re the greatest living man, granddad?’ Soames inquired. To which Churchill replied: ‘Yes. Now bugger off and leave me in peace,'” she reported.

Read the entire article here at Macleans.

©Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images