May 31, 2013

Finest Hour 116, Autumn 2002

Page 10

The receiver running Chester Barrie, the Savile Row tailor best known for designing Winston Churchill’s “siren suits,” was given ten days to make a firm offer or the company would be closed, The Times reported on June 8th. Fire sale, anyone?

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On July 5th Janet Conant, granddaughter of the great Harvard president James Conant who hosted Churchill when he delivered his famous 1943 speech on Anglo-American Unity, was interviewed on National Public Radio. She has a new book, Tuxedo Park, about Loomis and the development of radar. Ms. Conant did her credibility little good when she explained that in 1940, while Roosevelt was sending beleaguered Britain supplies, they were being destroyed by “U-2 submarines.” Ewe too should know that the U-2 was a postwar spy-aircraft.

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Eliot Cohen’s new book, Supreme Command (reviewed this issue) carries a curious reference: “The existence of an International Churchill Society (complete with annual conferences, a glossy magazine, and a souvenir shop selling Action This Day’ stickers) embodies the kind of hero worship that most historians instinctively reject—this is all the more upsetting in view of Churchill’s indubitably checkered career.” We’ve been told this refers to other historians, not Cohen. But Supreme Command winds up extolling Churchill’s “ability to touch the hearts of men and women…strengths as a war leader…skill at questioning and challenging professional subordinates…courage that is nothing less than magnificent… indomitable spirit… the greatest war statesman of the century.” This is not hero-worship, mind you, just scholarly historical analysis.

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Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, President-for-Life Robert Mugabe has scrubbed the Queen and Churchill from local institutions and replaced them with the name of Hitler and assorted henchmen. Winston Churchill High School in Harare (Salisbury) will now be named for Josiah Tongorare, Mugabe’s 1970s guerrilla commander; and Queen Elizabeth Girls’ High will be Sally Mugabe Girl’s High, named for the President’s first wife. Although former Southern Rhodesia prime minister Sir Gerald Todd (at 93 still among the whites Mugabe hasn’t expelled) is being honored with a school in his name, Zimbabwe’s most notorious thugs are feted. Another school is named for Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi, the klansman who led the invasion of white-owned farms.

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On May 7th Christopher Hitchens observed on “Imus in the Morning” that King George and Queen Elizabeth supported Neville Chamberlain in 1939-40, and that none of the tributes to the late Queen Mum managed to mention that she and the King threw a big reception for Chamberlain when he returned from Munich bearing Peace in Our Time (ours did; see FH 114:5); that she never had to open a door for herself; and that he too could manage a few smiles and waves if that were his lot in life. Although she and the King did spend an afternoon visiting the blitzed East End, when the King said, “They bombed my house, too,” the question Cockneys asked him was, “Which one?” As in Hitchens’s Atlantic Monthly piece on Churchill, there are grains of truth scattered amongst the class envy.

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The controversial 80th birthday portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland was so painful to Sir Winston that Lady Churchill destroyed it after his death. But in 1954, according to a cutting sent by news editor John Frost, the problem bothering Britons was that it had no feet! Churchill, said one London source, “seems to be thinking of something and about to spring out of his chair to do something strenuous about it…but no feet.” Sutherland told newsmen that the feet once were there, but he thought they destroyed the balance of head and hands so he painted them out, ending vaguely at the trouser cuffs. Lady Churchill took care of the rest in 1965.