Keynote Speech, Churchill Society International Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 27 August 1988. From Proceedings of the International Churchill Society, 1988-1989 (published 1990).

Copyright © 1988 the Estate of Alistair Cooke

I think it is a happy thing that you are holding this anniversary meeting in New Hampshire, where, as you all know, Winston Churchill spent the last fifty years of his life.

I refer, of course, to the eminent novelist whose fame was so considerable that when the young Winston Spencer Churchill decided to publish a book, he wrote to Winston Churchill in New Hampshire saying he did not wish to trade on his fame or mislead the reading public. Thus the young, unknown, English author would henceforth publish his books under the byline, "Winston S. Churchill."

No doubt most of you knew that, but I thought it would interest the few who-out of praiseworthy but mistaken devotion-today, I'm told, made a pilgrimage to Cornish, New Hampshire, which was where Winston Churchill lived and died.

I must say I'm glad that Richard Langworth gave a boost to my credentials because a lot of you must have wondered what I'm doing here. When I look through the list of all the very eminent scholars and Churchillians who have spoken to you; and when I think that since the 1960s there have been over two hundred books on Winston Churchill, all of which you've devoured, I feel almost as intimidated as Churchill did himself when he appeared as the guest of honor at the American Association for the Advancement of Science at M.I.T., on March 22nd, 1949. (It requires no great feat of memory to recall the date, since it happened to be the day my daughter was born.)

He looked out at an audience of Nobel Prize winners, the cream of scientific expertise from universities in North America and Europe. And he "confessed" that they not only intimidated but frightened him. "I myself never had the privilege of going to a University. I simply-er-had to pick up-ah-a few things as I went along." Then he spent the next two hours instructing them in the future of science and all its applications in war and peace.

I can only say my main credential is that I was alive and sentient and interested in life, and politics, for the last forty to fifty years of Churchill's life. I also have a Churchill library, modest but substantial, which includes one treasure that (my vanity hopes) nobody here possesses. It is a physically beautiful book, an edition of Churchill's My Early Life. What makes it unique, I think, is that opposite the title page, in the scrawl of a very old lady, it says: "Inscribed by Clementine Churchill and presented to Alistair Cooke, whose broadcasts gave so much pleasure to the author."

What I should like to do is to retrace Churchill's reputation, his public reputation-not from the view of historians or insiders, but as it appeared at the time to the ordinary people who lived through those years. I hope this will serve to correct or to modify the picture that we have formed of Churchill from television documentaries, and especially from the new, insidious form of docu-drama. It's true also, I think, of many recent biographies, that suffer from the innate curse of the biographical form: which is to pretend that the subject was at the focal center of the world or of his country, and that all the life of the time swirled around him.

By David Freeman

Abstract: The 2008 International Churchill Conference in Boston had as its theme “Churchill and Ireland,” and numerous papers have been published in Finest Hour 142-145 under the rubric “Churchill Proceedings,” which are downloadable by registered users of this website.

One of the most important omissions from the printed pages was the following paper by Finest Hour contributing editor David Freeman, who delivered the original in person. The paper in its present form was substantially enlarged for a forthcoming book, The Churchills and Ireland: Connections and Controversies from the 1660s to the 1960s (Irish Academic Press). It is based on Dr. Freeman’s presentation at a conference of the same name in Belfast in June 2009 sponsored by the University of Ulster. Copyright © David Freeman, 2010.

Winston Churchill enjoyed a good joke. According to Dennis Kelly, one of Churchill’s former literary assistants, the following was one of his boss’s favorite stories, one that ‘he used to adore telling’: ‘British bomber over Berlin, caught in the searchlights, flak coming up, one engine on fire, rear-gunner wounded, Irish pilot mutters, “Thank God Dev kept us out of this bloody war.”’ⁱ

By Antoine Capet

Abstract: Contrary to much of the literature that depicts him first and foremost as a lifelong foe of communism, Winston Churchill was actually quite pragmatic regarding his opposition to various forms of totalitarianism, a worldview which explains his near-rabid anti-communism following the First World War and also his gradually softening change as he began to see fascist Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to a stable world order in the years before the Second World War.  It is this pragmatism and a basic hostility to tyranny, then, that best explains Churchill’s approach to all forms of totalitarianism.

Antoine Capet, FRHistS, is Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen (France).  He has edited a number of collections on Britain’s diplomatic and military policy in the 20th century, the latest being Britain, France and the Entente Cordiale since 1904 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He has been Editor of the “Britain since 1914” section of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography since 2001 and he sits on the International Board of Twentieth Century British History.

Last March, I was invited to deliver a keynote lecture on “Churchill, Fascism and the Fascists” at the University of Lille (France),1 and when Dr Michael Kandiah2 asked if I were interested in giving a paper at the Cold War Conference which he was organizing,3 I immediately thought of “Churchill and Bolshevism”4 as the obverse of the same coin.5

Churchill was particularly hostile to the concepts of redistribution of wealth, and felt that even small steps in these directions, taken at a moment of turmoil, could someday lead to the destruction of personal freedom. The key to protecting against this in America, Churchill believed, was to honor the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in times of tranquility and crisis alike. --Ted Hutchinson