April 5, 2013

WIT AND WISDOM: FINEST HOUR 154, SPRING 2012

==================

EMPIRE OR COMMONWEALTH?

A reader asks why Churchill tended to prefer “British Empire” to “British Commonwealth.” We found a 28 October 1948 House of Commons remark that may serve to explain:

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

For some years the tendency of Socialist and Left-Wing forces has been to gird at the word “Empire” and espouse the word “Commonwealth,” because Oliver Cromwell cut off King Charles’s head and all that. Also, I suppose, because the word “Commonwealth” seems to have in it some association with, or suggestion of, the abolition of private property and the communal ownership of all forms of wealth. This mood is encouraged by the race of degenerate intellectuals of whom our island has produced during several generations an unfailing succession— these very high intellectual persons who, when they wake up every morning have looked around upon the British inheritance, whatever it was, to see what they could find to demolish, to undermine, or cast away….One must notice…in other utterances on which Ministers have lately advised the King, the calculated omission of three words which have hitherto claimed many loyalties and much agreement…”Empire”… “Dominion”…”British”…Indeed, I wonder myself that the word “Commonwealth” should satisfy the requirements of Socialist statesmanship….That, at any rate, would achieve what appears to be the ideal of the Socialist Government in respect of the British Empire, of committing nobody
to anything at any time in any way.

“NOT BEING SCUPPERED”

Graham Farmelo writes: “I have read that WSC told Private Secretary Sir John Colville in 1951 that his new government’s priorities were ‘houses, red meat and not getting scuppered.’ But I can’t find it. Any ideas?”

It’s a wonderful quote but the verb is wrong; Churchill said, “…not being scuppered,” and it appears in Colville’s Fringes of Power (Hodder & Stoughton US edition 1985), 644. Martin Gilbert also has it on page 717 of his Volume 8.

“THE U-BOAT PERIL”

We are asked for the reference to a popular quotation in Churchill’s World War II memoirs: “…the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” The index to his second volume, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 528-29 is the place to look. It may throw readers off in that he actually wrote about this fright after the war:

The Admiralty had to be ready at many points and give protection to thousands of merchant vessels, and could give no guarantee except for troop convoys against occasional lamentable disasters. The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. Invasion, I thought, even before the air battle, would fail. After the air victory it was a good battle for us. We could drown and kill this horrible foe in circumstances favourable to us, and, as he evidently realised, bad for him. It was the kind of battle which, in the cruel conditions of war, one ought to be content to fight. But now our life-line, even across the broad oceans, and especially in the entrances to the Island, was endangered. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the “Battle of Britain.”

Although Churchill sometimes used the word “submarines,” when referring to German subs he almost always preferred to call the enemy craft “U-boat,” another example of his precise semantics. He was careful never to refer to British submarines as U-boats: the term was simply too associated with the enemy, and Britain’s survival hung on a successful campaign against them.

“There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot,” he told his director of Anti-Submarine Warfare in 1941. “You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.” Captain Talbot was later sacked.

In 1951 Churchill said that no one knew more about U-boats than the British Admiralty, “not because we are cleverer or braver than others, but because, in two wars, our existence has depended upon overcoming these perils. When you live for years on end with mortal danger at your throat, you learn in a hard school.”

At the same time he never failed to pay tribute to kindred allies who had provided critical aid in the U-boat war. On a May 1948 visit to the Royal Palace in Oslo he told the King of Norway:

We did not feel entirely alone because we had that invaluable help from Norway, given at great cost for many. Many a good ship was sunk, and I remember how your Prime Minister of those days said, ‘We feel as if they are our own children.’…the help which came from Norway was a very important factor in the victory over the U-boats [when] our existence depended on the lifeline across the Atlantic….It was this lifeline which we had to maintain, and the addition of many millions of tons of merchant shipping, manned by hardy and courageous men from Norway, played a very definite part in our existence.”

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.