May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 108, Autumn 2000

Page 11


CC/ICS honorary member Robert Hardy is cross—nay furious—with The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper’s recent series on learning a foreign language included an article about British actors who speak fluent French, yet it didn’t even mention him. And Mr. Hardy has only just finished an eight-month stint—yes, eight months —playing Churchill on stage in Paris in a play about Charles de Gaulle…. Florence King, the right-wing misanthrope, invoked John Duke of Marlborough in a scoff at a U.S. Vice Presidential candidate. “If either of the Liebermans says ‘Only in America one more time…England had a Jewish prime minister 132 years ago [and] England’s first Jewish knighthood was bestowed on Sir Solomon Medina by William III in 1699, in gratitude for his financing of the wars won by the Duke of Marlborough. So far as is known, neither Sir Solomon, nor, later on, Baron Nathan Rothschild, screamed ‘Oh, my God! I don’t believe it!’ like a Lotto winner”…Beltway boffin David Gergen, who worked for both Nixon and Clinton, anticipates in his latest book the upcoming Clinton Memoirs. The President, writes Gergen, “is capable of writing memoirs that could rival Churchill‘s in insight; he is that talented.” We report, you decide….Churchill came within seconds of being shot in the back by Mrs. Churchill, a former Royal Air Force pilot says. The incident happened when WSC and Clementine were inspecting a squadron of fighter aircraft in 1939, according to Wing Commander James Sanders. As the future prime minister stood in front of Cdr. Sanders’s fully armed Gladiator fighter plane, his wife was sitting in the cockpit being shown the controls. She was about to put her hand on the firing button when Cdr. Sanders knocked her hand away just in time, he said at a reunion at London’s Imperial War Museum. “It seems unbelievable that Clementine would have been allowed so close to the firing button of a fully armed aircraft,” writes Terry Reardon, who sent us this datum, “but it is an interesting edition to the unending Churchill chronicles.”

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