May 16, 2013

FINEST HOUR 140, AUTUMN 2008

ABSTRACT
TURNING POINTS IN THE LONG STORY OF A SMALL JOURNAL

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THE BEGINNING
Finest Hour 1, May-June 1968

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The name of this publication is up to you. Finest Hour is only temporary, unless you feel it should become permanent. In the meantime, we had to call it something. We didn’t much like the Churchill family motto “Fiel Pero Desdichado” (Faithful But Unfortunate), because for most of his ninety years Winston Churchill was as fortunate (he said so himself ) as he was faithful. By all means send some alternative publication names, we can offer a slate from which to choose.

Dues for the Winston S. Churchill Study Unit are fixed at $2 per member per year. Our only expense at this time is this newsletter. However, if you feel this paltry sum is minimal, by all means contribute whatever you think is proper. We tried to set the mood with $5. On the other hand, if $2 is all you wish to subscribe, that is all that’s necessary to assure you Finest Hour for the coming year.

The present officers are the earliest to express interest: Richard Langworth, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; Martin Hoff, Brooklyn, New York; Beverly Fowler, Spenard, Alaska; J.R. Styles, Greenville, South Carolina. Their duties at this time are nebulous, although a constitution and bylaws are now being framed for your approval which will define their responsibilities in detail.

Finally, this publication will be published in English, recalling Churchill’s paeans to his native tongue: “We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English….As I remained in the Third Fourth [form] three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.” —MY EARLY LIFE (1930)

THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Finest Hour 32, Spring 1975

We are approaching a most important event and one which requires your thought and action: the election of officers. The next election may possibly be the most important in our history.

We find the Society in need of extensive renovation. Because of the rapid growth in membership the machinery needs renovation or replacement. Our constitution is outdated and almost useless and we have outgrown our bookkeeping system. We need new direction and a new commitment to the principles of the Society, which principles themselves need considered restatement. The work of the next board of directors will be very important indeed. Additionally, an entire new slate of directors must be elected.

We are quite different from other organizations in an important respect: Except in the UK, few of our members have ever met more than a handful, if any, of their fellow members. How then can we (excepting the UK members) intelligently nominate other members for a position? In most organizations, the president is put out to pasture, the vice president moves up, and his position is filled by an officer or director. But this has never been true of us.

It is not too early to mention this subject, as proved by the last election, which resulted in a situation that, as forecast, was not to the benefit of the Society: I accepted reelection only on the promise and hope that a new editor would be forthcoming, I could not see how any working man could do both jobs well. My point was, I believe sincerely, more than proved.

We must begin now to consider how the Churchill Society can be perpetuated through the election of a good slate so that this kind of situation will not reoccur. There is but one answer to how nominations can be made if so few of us have met other members: We must overcome our own modesty and nominate ourselves! If you can contribute by serving in any office, you must overcome any diffidence you may have and put your own name forward. Finest Hour #33 will contain the call for nominations, Finest Hour #34 will contain the ballot and #35 will announce the results. Think, NOW! —DALTON NEWFIELD

THE END OF THE END
Finest Hour 33, Autumn 1981

On this date at last, Finest Hour has returned. For those with long memories, issue #32 was mailed nearly seven years ago, carrying sombre warnings about its imminent demise which were, alas, as good as its word. The trouble? We can answer in two words: No editor. Finest Hour ironically vanished at the height of the Churchill Centenary boom in stamps, books and keepsakes, and the International Churchill Society with it. For without an editor, there was no survival.

You recognize my poor attempts to paraphrase the Great Man. They are in my mind as I prepare this copy, on 15 May 1981, remindful of winter evenings a year and more ago, when I listened to Decca’s Churchill speeches and readings from The Second World War. I had begun, then, to overhaul my long-moribund Churchill stamp collection, and I was soon besieging Dal Newfield with research questions and book requests. I played those Decca records as I worked, trying to imagine what it was like in those “dark days and darker nights,” as President Kennedy put it, when Britain stood alone.

Somewhere during the next year Dal shyly—or slyly—suggested, “Why not resuscitate ICS? I have the treasury under control, and drawing interest. Think about it.” I did. ICS expired with 700 members and dozens of projects from auction to covers to a new handbook, and all that killed it was: No editor. In 1975 I was in no position to help. Now, six years and much experience later, I felt capable of producing a journal Churchillians would enjoy.

All the other good things which ICS alone can provide are also about to start happening again. We shall resume our commemorative cachet program. We shall in 1982 publish a new Churchill Collector’s Handbook. Meanwhile we shall devote these pages to all aspects of Churchilliana: stamps and books, coins and statues, facts and opinions, current events and reflections on the past. And there is something new: we shall soon escort forty members on a Churchill Tour of England, a congenial
eleven-day journey made possible through Dal Newfield’s expertise and our experience hosting similar tours for vintage car enthusiasts.

In perilous times it strikes us moreover that Sir Winston Churchill’s wit and wisdom, his zest for liberty, and above all his feelings for that great community of English-speaking peoples across the globe, are appropriate to dwell upon. I am heartened with the heady thought that the President of the United States thinks so too. For certainly Ronald Reagan is a Churchillian. Do you recall his inaugural address, when he paraphrased WSC in saying he had not become president to preside over the liquidation of America? Remember too that day in April, when a stray loonie tried to do to him what others had done to Lord Mountbatten, and how he cheered us by referring again to the words of Churchill: “Nothing is more exhilarating than to have been shot at without result”?

I hope you will enjoy this issue, meager though its twelve pages are, with the assurance that the page count will increase as our numbers multiply. I think I know a good deal about it all, and I am sure I shall not fail. And so, impatient for the next issue, I sleep soundly, and have no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams. —RML

REVIVING THE DREAM
Finest Hour 56, Autumn 1987

There hasn’t been a “new book” by Winston S. Churchill since the Collected Essays was published in 1975. Thus the publication this month of The Dream is an event of double satisfaction to us. We publish below excerpts from the preface.

We are on the brink of our most ambitious project ever: raising $250,000 to fund ten additional Companion or Document Volumes of Martin Gilbert’s official biography: The Churchill Papers 1939-1965. The old Companion Volumes stopped dead in September 1939. Without our intervention, they would have stayed that way. All supporters will receive a copy of The Dream, magnificently bound in padded leather and gilt with rich moire endpapers, printed by letterpress, illustrated by a painting depicting the scene in Chartwell’s studio.

Return now to the dining room at Chartwell, late 1946: Winston Churchill, Leader of the Opposition, is enjoying a quiet dinner with his family. During a pause in the conversation, his daughter Sarah points to an empty chair: “If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?”

Sarah expected her father to name one of his heroes—Caesar, Napoleon or Marlborough. He took only a moment to consider. And then he said simply, “Oh, my father, of course.” He had chosen his greatest hero of all.

The Dream is uncharacteristic of Churchill’s writings, though the writing is not. It is exciting because it captures the ethos of the man, the ironies of a life “already long, and not without incident.” The supreme irony of the piece is, of course, that Lord Randolph Churchill, briefly brought back to life in his prime, hears his aging son recite the sweeping, tragic history of the 20th century, without any revelation of the myriad roles Winston himself played. But there are many others.

“Is there still a Tsar?,” Lord Randolph asks. “Yes, but he is not a Romanoff,” Winston replies. Lord Randolf asks if there has been war. Winston replies: “We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge.”

The latter is one of the many revealing passages. A devoted monarchist, Winston Churchill nevertheless publicly expressed his faith in democracy; in The Dream he sadly despairs of it. Yet, “having gone through so much, we do not despair….we are trying to make a world organisation in which we and America will be very important.” As for the remaining Dominions of the Crown, “They are our brothers.”

But to go on is to spoil the text for the reader. We must allow Sir Winston that happy luxury—how he would have enjoyed it.

One question about the piece remains, at least in this writer’s mind. Just how much of it was fiction? Sir Winston was a man of transcendental powers. In 1953 he told Jock Colville that he would die on 24 January, the same day as his father died; 12 years later he lapsed into a coma on 10 January, and Colville was able to assure The Queen’s private secretary, “he won’t die until the 24th.” For the most part unconscious, Churchill did just that. Was it coincidence? What his family called The Dream was labeled by Sir Winston a “private article.” There is no doubt that it was not entirely a dream to him.

TOWARD THE CENTRE
Finest Hour 67,
Second Quarter 1990

HOUSE OF COMMONS, 2 JUNE—What an honor to speak within these walls, to share the excitement that has engulfed the
International Churchill Societies during the 50th anniversary of the year Sir Winston said “nothing surpasses.” There are so many anniversaries to remember. Tonight marks the fiftieth anniversary of the final evacuations at Dunkirk. Fifty years ago at 3am tomorrow morning, General Alexander was the last soldier to leave, having cruised the beaches to be sure there were none left behind.

“Alex,” as Churchill called him, was one of the great generals of the war. Who can forget the famous exchange between the PM and Alexander as the latter prepared to take command in North Africa? “Your prime & main duty,” Churchill wrote, “will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt & Libya. (2.) You will discharge, or cause to be discharged, such other duties as pertain to your command without prejudice to the task described in paragraph 1.”

That order in Churchill’s hand was given Alexander on 10th August 1942. And do you remember Alexander’s reply in February 1943? “Sir: The orders you gave me on August 10th, 1942 have been fulfilled. His Majesty’s enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitania. I now await your further instructions.”

It was typical of Alexander, a man of few words, who in a calm, orderly and unflashy way got the job done.

The Field Marshal would approve of the way the Churchill Societies have got their jobs done over the past year. We have evolved to four independent Societies in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia, the first three independently registered as charitable or educational organisations. To advance work of joint interest, Finest Hour, our other publications and the rotating international conferences, we formed an international council of Churchill Societies. By far the largest amounts are expended on Finest Hour, which has recently reached forty pages; also Churchill Proceedings; Douglas Russell’s Orders, Decorations and Medals of Sir Winston Churchill; and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Boer Conspiracy, which is in its way a contribution to history.

Equally wonderful news is that Sir Martin Gilbert will deliver the first of ten new companion volumes of the official biography covering the years 1940-1965 this month, in accordance with the campaign by ICS to see into print these hitherto unscheduled volumes, which we funded thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Wendy Reves.

Among national organisations, ICS/Australia will host the 1991 conference in Melbourne. We hope to bring a dozen or more North Americans to Australia on a tour culminating in this meeting. ICS/Canada and John Plumpton have again engaged the services of schoolchildren to help prepare another fifty-year calendar for 1991, listing all the Churchill-related events of 1941. ICS/UK has launched a bi-monthly, Churchill Tales, and the first edition has been circulated.

ICS United States is now very close to launching a Centre for Churchill Studies, which aims to establish a professorial chair, develop curricula which relate the Churchill experience to modern teaching of history and political science, and work to further international understanding among the English-Speaking Democracies through seminars and symposia. Its physical headquarters will house a standard library of Churchill works and will develop a computer index to every word Churchill wrote and spoke.

We have much on our plate and the challenges are enormous. As Churchill told a British diplomat who wrote to ask how to handle the new dangers of 1941: “Continue to pester, nag and bite.”

Our great advantage is that the subject of all our work is the most quoted and revered person in history, religious figures excepted. He remains not merely a symbol of the war we waged together, but of culture, principle, faith, humor, optimism, pride in country—and by far not least, one of the great writers of this century. And in that century’s waning years no one—English, American, and certainly not Russian—can challenge his stature.

We are always amazed at the numbers of young people who join us, who have so soon come to know him either through his writings or by the endless stories about him. One of these, only 18 years old, told us recently what first got him interested. So many of these stories are apocryphal, but Lady Soames has confirmed this one.

A young boy [later identified as his grandson Nicholas Soames] surreptitiously darted upstairs at Chartwell and, eluding all barriers, found himself in WSC’s bedroom. The occupant was propped up, riffling through the morning papers and smoking an enormous cigar.

“My Papa says you’re the greatest man in the world,” offered the boy. Is it true?”

Sir Winston peered at him over his spectacles and said, “Of course—now buzz off.”

Now I am told that in fact he used a rather more earthy phrase than that. But in deference to our surroundings I have done a little editing.

He certainly was the greatest man in the world for the longest time, and his truth, in the words of the American hymn he loved, goes marching on. —RML

“WHAT KIND OF A PEOPLE DO THEY THINK WE ARE?”
Finest Hour 112,
September 11th, 2001

Dear Mr. President: The prayers of thousands of members of The Churchill Centre and Societies around the world are with you and your administration at this time. In your own speeches you said that “just as Churchill defined the moral issues of the 1930s and 1940s, he also defined the great moral challenge up to our own times.” It is our fervent wish that the words and actions of Sir Winston, whose bust observes your work in the Oval Office, will provide comfort and inspiration.

Commanders cannot know outcomes—only choices. But these words of Sir Winston provide a beacon for making those choices: “The price of greatness is responsibility….One cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies, and inspired by its causes….The soul of freedom is death deathless; it cannot and will not perish…..I have no fear of the future. Let us go forward into its mysteries, let us tear aside the veils which hide it from our eyes, and let us move onward with confidence and courage.”

Sir Winston Churchill was always confident that the great democracies would prevail in the fight against tyranny and terror, whatever the price might be. We share his confidence in offering our support and encouragement to you at this great moral challenge to our own times. —JOHN G. PLUMPTON

“BEHIND THE DISTANT MOUNTAINS IS THE PROMISE OF THE SUN”
Finest Hour 135,
Summer 2007

Our mandate to publish “all Churchill, all the time” offers us opportunities for more expansive treatment of Churchill’s relevance
today: not what he would do if he were alongside us (and he would be alongside us); but what his experience and reflections suggest might be done, in the face of dangers and challenges similar to those he fought and overcame.

Speaking in 2006 on this most critical mission of The Churchill Centre, Chairman Laurence Geller described a responsibility “to keep the lessons Churchill taught us alive. They are today never more vital in the endless fight against genocidal maniacs, racism, fundamentalism, hatred and bigotry. His example emboldens us to combat the wickedness of myriad self-serving fanatics. We are stronger when armed with Churchillian lessons.”

Many meetings at board, chapter and national level, in America and in Britain, have ratified his idea: a kind of think tank to promote the development of Churchillian responses to today’s challenges. Call it “Applied Churchill,” or whatever you like. Repeatedly Sir Winston implored us to “study history.” Certainly he would want us to derive the lessons his own story offers. As he said a century ago in 1908: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal?” Our aim is simple:

to encourage fresh thinking among Great Democracies he believed were “the hope of years to come.” —THE EDITORS

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