May 2, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 10

Riddles Mysteries Enigmas


I have been waiting for Paul Reid’s third volume of The Last Lion, so I may go on dreaming of how I would create a lifestyle that allows me to bathe until noon, with a glass of scotch (only one), read all the newspapers and mail and then face the world. Please Mr. Reid, make haste!
Jon W., via email

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It might not be as much fun as you think. That glass was mainly water—”scotch-flavoured mouthwash,” as a staffer put it. He didn’t bathe all morning. He bathed around 11 after waking at 8am, breakfasting and working in bed, reading the papers (all of them, including the Daily Worker), and his mail. Then he went down to lunch, held forth extensively to guests, rambled around Chartwell, returned to his room, worked until around 6pm, bathed again, worked again, held dinner around 9pm, and a film afterward. Then he summoned a secretary and worked until as late as 3am. I have actually tried this, but my wife wouldn’t put up with it, and besides, it takes a staff of eleven.

In a symposium on quality and data measurement, the speaker casually mentioned that Churchill once said, “It takes me one hour to prepare twenty minutes and an eternity to create one sentence.” Can you please provide the actual statement about content, quality, and effectivenes, I have run internet searches to find this exact statement with absolutely no luck. The best I could find was “one hour of preparation for every minute of delivery,” but that falls rather short of the symposium speaker’s comment.
Liz Sammis, via emai

Evidently the time he spent varied directly with the importance of the speech. He did once tell his grandson that he spent “one hour of prep for each minute of delivery.” This is backed up by his doctor, Lord Moran, who quoted him about a brief speech to the National Federation of Building Trade Workers on 27 January 1955, a few weeks before he retired as Prime Minister. That speech occupies only two pages of text, and could not have required more than three or four minutes. “It took me three or four hours to prepare,” Sir Winston said, “but it went like hot cakes.”

It would be reasonable to assume this kind of preparation time referred mainly to his more important orations, not to routine speeches, of which he gave a great many. Oliver Lyttelton (Lord Chandos) wrote, for example, “I have known him to take six or eight or more hours to prepare a speech of forty minutes” (much shorter than his stem-winders). No speech, however, was impromptu. He wrote them all himself until very old age, and rehearsed them carefully.

A great many of Churchill’s comments on speech and writing content are in the fourth chapter (“Writer and Speaker) of Churchill By Himself (amzn.to/churchillquote): “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time.” (1919) See also his youthful article, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” Finest Hour 94 (http://bit.ly/uIBUvi).

WSC sent a copy of one of his books to his cousin, Lord Londonderry, and received the following reply: “My dear Winston, I have received the copy of your latest book. I have put it on the shelf beside the others.” Ouch! True?
Jonathan Hayes on Churchillchat

This occurred in the 1930s according to A Thread in the Tapestry by Sarah Churchill, who suggested that the writer was the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII and still later the Duke of Windsor:

“The family, on being told this by my mother, collapsed in laughter. It evoked for us the famous story of what George III, the then Duke of Gloucester, is supposed to have said to Mr. Gibbon: ‘Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?'” Note Sarah’s description: “a friend of royal lineage.”

[Paul Courtenay corrects Sarah: “Whatever the source, George III was never Duke of Gloucester, a title held by his father and then one of George III’s younger brothers.”]

William Manchester in his Last Lion, vol. 2, apparently mixed this up when he wrote (page18) that the letter was from the Duke of Gloucester.

It wasn’t meant as a conscious put-down, but Churchill, that gifted wordsmith, saw humor in it that the writer missed, and read it to his wife, who in turn read it to their family. In the end, he didn’t think much of “Mr. David Windsor.”

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