July 4, 2013

FINEST HOUR 136, AUTUMN 2007

ABSTRACT
QUEEN ANNE IS ALLEGED TO HAVE SAID TO CHRISTOPHER WREN ABOUT ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL: “I FIND YOUR WORK AWFUL, TERRIBLE AND AMUSING.” AT THE TIME, THE QUEEN MEANT “POWERFUL, STRONG AND AMAZING.” A SIMILAR JUXTAPOSITION OF MEANINGS OCCURRED IN THE EARLY PAGES OF CHURCHILL’S WW1 MEMOIRS…

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Professor David Fromkin, who delivered the third Churchill Lecture on the Making of the Modern Middle East in 2003, wrote us after reviewing the recent 2005 Free Press edition of The World Crisis, which appears to contain a serious “howler” on page 17.

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Writing of the January 1906 British election, Churchill states that the outcome was “a Conservative landslide.” Of course, the election was really a Liberal landslide: the Tories were reduced from about 400 to a mere 100 seats.

Professor Fromkin, who found the same “error” in his 1923 first edition, sensibly asked, “Is it really possible that in the long publishing history of The World Crisis, and in many editions from many publishers, nobody caught this error before?”

Along with Churchill Centre Executive Director Dan Myers and the editor, I found this extraordinary, particularly since the rest of the paragraph in Churchill’s account deals at length with the actual details of the Liberal landslide. A good copy editor would not have missed that! I can also confirm that the first edition (Scribner) includes the same “error” on page 24, as does the Thornton Butterworth edition, as reported by David Fromkin. If it has made it all the way through to the recent Free Press edition, I thought, it’s safe to expect that we will find it everywhere else.

And so, I thought to myself, Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, who edited The Great War for Newnes (the illustrated, abridged edition first issues in serial magazine form) must have caught the phrase. The Great War was the only occasion, other than the 1931 abridgment, when a wholesale, detailed look at the work occurred. But no, he missed it as well (see page 7, vol. I).

As one would expect, in the abridged edition, which was, after all, a Thornton Butterworth work and required no further substantive editing by the British publisher, the statement remains. (Its U.S. counterpart is at left.)

Finally the light dawned: Churchill had it right! Today, the political meaning of a “landslide” is the precise opposite of what it was during elections a century ago—or even in 1923, when Churchill published the first volumes of The World Crisis.

After realizing all this, I thought that I should look to see if any of the foreign publishers tried to correct the word “landslide.” They all seemed to get it right, in the sense of a Conservative disaster and an overwhelming Liberal victory.

For example, the Spanish La Crisis Mundial uses the word “derrumbamiento” to describe what happened to the Conservatives, while the French La Crise Mondiale used the equivalent “ecroulement,” both of which imply collapse or crushing disaster. At the same time, the Italian La Crisi Mondiale looked at the result from the other side and wrote of the 1906 election that it “fu un successo liberale di cui non si ricordava l’uguale.” Clearly they all knew what Churchill meant to convey by his use of “Conservative landslide.” Churchill wins again!

That led me to wonder whether there was another meaning of “landslide” in English. The Oxford English Dictionary 1933 edition—closest to Churchill’s publication date—provides not even a separate entry for “landslide.” Under “land” the OED mentions “landslip,” meaning “the sliding down of a mass of land on a mountain or cliff side.”

Putting a book away a few moments ago led me to a neighbouring volume, published in 1973, which I have owned since 2004. It is entitled—wait for it—Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906. —RIC