October 3, 2013

FINEST HOUR 102, SPRING 1999

BY RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

ABSTRACT
An Address at the Boston Athenaeum, May 6th

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

2024 International Churchill Conference

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

More

Fifty years and five weeks ago tonight, Winston Churchill addressed a distinguished Boston symposium a few blocks away at M.I.T., where they had convened to consider the science and technology of the second half of the century. “I frankly confess that I feel somewhat overawed in addressing this vast scientific and learned audience,” Churchill said. “I have no technical and no university education, and have just had to pick up a few things as I went along.”¹

Without attempting any comparison, I rather feel as Churchill did, being invited to the distinguished Athenaeum to talk about books. But he went on unabashedly to lecture his learned audience on everything he thought they should know about technology. So I will follow his example and lecture you on everything you should know about his writings.

From the time Winston Churchill was a boy he wrote spontaneously, with a versatility fellow writers envy He was always ready to spin off a book he was writing into an article or a speech. (He once said, “I’m going to give a long speech tonight; I haven’t had time to prepare a short one.”² He wrote forty-two books in over sixty volumes, five thousand speeches and articles—in all roughly thirty million words. He never had writer’s block. When he went to work, usually late at night, he shut himself up in his study, banned loud noises, hired teams of stenographers, and arranged his papers at a stand-up desk. And there, padding up and down in his slippers, he reeled off prose in the small hours. “I write a book the way they built the Canadian Pacific Railway,” he said. “First I lay the track from coast to coast, and then I put in all the stations.”³ “Nearly 3000 words in the last two days!” he wrote his wife in 1928…”I do not conceal from you that it is a task. But it is not more than I can do.”⁴

Today Churchill is the leading candidate in Time magazine’s sweepstakes for Person of the Century—he was nominated in their May 10th issue by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.⁵ Yet his fame rests unduly on his leadership in World War II. Relatively few realize that he was elected to Parliament in 1900 and, except for two years when he was thrown out, dominated the political scene until he retired as Prime Minister in 1955—and continued to serve another nine years after that. When we consider that twenty years is a good run for any politician—that Franklin Roosevelt had only thirteen years at the summit of affairs—that eight Presidents and nine other Prime Ministers had completed their service when Time named Churchill “Man of the Half Century” in 1950⁶—only to see him serve again as Premier and publish seven more volumes of history after that—his record is all the more astonishing.

Yet Churchill’s career as a writer straddles even his six decades as a statesman. He began writing as a schoolboy and published The Island Race, his last book—well, the last in his lifetime—a few months before he died. For many of those years he was the highest paid journalist in the world, earning up to five dollars a word from the best publishers. In 1953 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature—not, as many suppose, for his war memoirs, but for the totality of his output: history, biography, autobiography, political theory, memoirs, speeches, newspaper reports and articles newspaper reports and articles, even a book about oil painting and an African travelogue.

He wrote about the most essential things—for throughout his life his quarrel was with tyranny—but also about everyday things: cartoons and cartoonists, daylight savings time, Moses, the Boy Scouts. He was extolling the role of “Women in War” as early as 1938. He wondered, “Are There Men on the Moon?” or what he might do “If I Lived My Life Again.” He traveled to America and wrote about “The Land of Corn and Lobsters” and the Civil War. And his work goes on, with continuous posthumous publication—notably his Complete Speeches (eight volumes, 9000 pages); his Collected Works (38 volumes, 19,000 pages), and most recently 700 pages of letters to and from his wife, expertly compiled by their daughter, Lady Soames. Perhaps uniquely, he was a statesman-writer: not only the sole person to hold high office in the two greatest cataclysms this century, but the only one to write about the experience—with a certain understandable personal bias.

Writing and statesmanship went hand in hand, for Churchill lived politics, and writing furthered his political aims. The soaring oratory he made famous in World War II occurred because Britain was led by a professional writer. “This is not history,” he said of his war memoirs, “this is my case.”⁷ But he knew how influential his words would be: “…it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history,” he said in 1948—”especially as I propose to write that history myself.”⁸

His writing had a financial side too—the salaries of British politicians were and are low. To this day Members of Parliament share cramped, drafty offices, and the words “aide” or “intern” are unknown to them. Though born to an American society beauty and the son of a duke, Churchill inherited no family wealth. He would later claim, “I kept my family by my pen”…and: I lived “from mouth to hand.”⁹ His pen was kept busy because he had rarefied tastes. The manager of The Plaza in New York once telephoned his room to ask if he required anything special. Churchill, posing as his valet, replied: “Mr. Churchill’s tastes are quite simple; he is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.”¹⁰

The best included silk underwear (“I have a very sensitive cuticle,” he told his bill-shocked wife), a cigar bill running up to $200 a week in today’s money, and—though his drinking was vastly exaggerated, mostly by himself—vintage Champagne and brandy. Chartwell, his beloved home in Kent, was a money pit, with a farm almost always in the red. He once told his colleague Lloyd George, “I’m going to make it pay, whatever it costs.”¹¹

He was what the pros call a natural writer, a stylist. In his autobiography, My Early Life, he claimed to have developed his talent for English because he was too stupid to learn anything else. In fact he was near the top of his class in many subjects. Not even the son of Lord Randolph Churchill could have made it out of Harrow without mastering Latin, so we should not take My Early Life too literally. And it is true that Churchill emerged from school a craftsman writer. A Harrow historian found a piece he wrote in 1889 aged 15, about an imagined invasion of Russia—a remarkably accurate forecast of what actually happened twenty-five years later. Young Winston even set the date: 1914, the year World War I broke out in Europe.¹²

I propose to tell you about some but not all of his writing—that would take a semester. All are in books still readily available, all through the Athenaeum—or from me if you want to buy a copy. What I say is derived from my book, A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill,¹³ which I wrote in self-defense to answer the questions I am always asked about the content, value and desirability of the different editions. I wrote it in eight months, but it is the result of fifteen years as a Churchill specialist bookseller and many conversations with Sir Winston’s family and colleagues through my work with The Churchill Center.

The Churchill Center is the international focus of interest in Winston Churchill, sponsoring conferences, tours, symposia, books, a website, and a quarterly journal, Finest Hour. We are in the midst of a major endowment campaign to enable the Center permanently to operate its symposia, seminars, student scholarships, visiting professorships—that whole range of activity we call Churchill Studies. We welcome members, and I have brought plenty of applications for anyone who may wish to join.

THE RIVER WAR

With the help of his mother, Lady Randolph, and other influential friends, young Winston won early assignments as a war reporter. He had written five books by age 25, and four of them were based on his experience in India, the Sudan and South Africa. (The fifth was his only novel, Savrola, which he steadfastly urged his friends not to read. When it was republished over half a century later he wrote in a new foreword, “The intervening fifty-five years have somewhat dulled but certainly not changed my sentiments on this point.”)¹⁴

The aim of his early books was to catapult him into fame and Parliament. In 1900, after his sensational escape from a South African prison camp during the Anglo-Boer war, they did just that. But his grandest early work, which scholars have compared to that of Thucydides,¹⁵ is The River War, published one hundred years ago this year—a brilliant history of British involvement in the Sudan. Though a century old, it remains insightful to our own time. Combined with Churchill’s personal adventures, there are passages of deep reflection about how civilized governments should deal with more primitive ones.

Far from accepting uncritically the superiority of British civilization, Churchill shows his appreciation for the longing for liberty among the indigenous Sudanese; but he finds their native regime defective in its inadequate protection for the liberty of its subjects.

In 1885 the Sudan had been overrun by Dervish tribesmen under their religious leader, the Mahdi, culminating in the assassination of the British envoy, General Gordon, at the capital of Khartoum. Fourteen years later, London sent Lord Kitchener at the head of a combined British-Egyptian force (including Churchill) to reestablish Anglo-Egyptian sovereignty. Notwithstanding the superiority of British weapons and tactics, the obstacles presented by the Nile, the desert, the climate, cholera and a brave, fanatical Dervish army were formidable.

Churchill excitingly describes the British victory, but he doesn’t hesitate to criticize the actions of Kitchener, whose treatment of the dead Mahdi was barbaric and whose disdain for the fallen foe after the climactic Battle of Omdurman was shameful.

In 1902 for an abridged edition, Churchill excised one-fourth of his narrative, including his criticism of Kitchener. By then he had entered Parliament, and was wary of burning bridges. He also added material, so there are two texts: the original, and the one in print since 1902. James W. Muller of The Churchill Center has prepared a new and complete edition, containing both the original and 1902 texts. We hope to see this classic work back in print by the end of 2000.

My favorite passage from The River War, sadly excised in 1902, concerns Churchill’s visit to the field of Omdurman three days after British artillery had done its deadly work. And consider as you listen to this how strange it must have sounded, coming from an ardent promoter of the British Empire at the height of its power.

If you want to know what war can be, even today with precision guided missiles, you have only to read this description:

The sight was appalling. The smell redoubled the horror….! have tried to gild war, and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world….But there was nothing duke et decorum about the Dervish dead; nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood; all was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was borne in on me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make….Three
days before I had seen them rise—eager, confident, resolved. The roar of their shouting had swelled like the surf on a rocky shore. They were confident in their strength, in the justice of their cause, in the support of their religion. Now only the heaps of corruption in the plain, and the fugitives dispersed and scattered in the wilderness, remained….Their end, however, only anticipates that of the victors; for Time, which laughs at science, as science laughs at valour, will in due course contemptuously brush both combatants away.

And, because Churchill was mainly an optimist, he concludes with a vision of some distant age, when a mighty system of irrigation has changed the desolate plain of Omdurman into a fertile garden, and the mud hovels of the town have given place to the houses, the schools, and the theatres of a great metropolis, [when] the husbandman, turning up a skull amid the luxuriant crop, will sapiendy remark, ‘There was aforetime a battle here.’ Thus the event will be remembered.¹⁶

That was Winston Churchill writing at age 25

THE WORLD CRISIS

In 1905 Churchill hired a man who was to become his chief literary assistant for thirty years—Edward Marsh, a classical scholar, a civil servant and an accomplished litterateur. From that time, Churchill stopped writing his books and speeches in longhand and began dictating to teams of secretaries, with Eddie Marsh to vet his drafts for Churchill’s final approval. They made a marvelous team and have left us with some captivating exchanges:

“Eddie: You are very free with your commas. I always reduce them to a minimum: and use ‘and’ or an ‘or’ as a substitute not as an addition. Let us argue it out. W.”

Marsh replies: “I look on myself as a bitter enemy of superfluous commas, and I think I could make a good case for any I have put in—but I won’t do it any more!” “Eddie: No, do continue. I am adopting provisionally. But I want to argue with you. W.”¹⁷

Once Marsh entered Churchill’s sanctum with a sore throat, unable to spar with him. “What’s this?” asked Churchill. “Is that resonant organ altogether extinct?”¹⁸ This marked the beginning of another long debate about hyphens. But I don’t mean to trivialize. Marsh appears more frequently than anyone else in the Chartwell Visitor’s Book. When he died in 1953 Churchill, who seemed to outlive everybody, wrote, “He was a master of literature and scholarship and a deeply instructed champion of the arts. All his long life was serene, and he left this world, I trust, without a pang, and I am sure without a fear.”¹⁹

Marsh helped Churchill write The World Crisis, his memoir of World War I, which Churchill began as First Lord of the Admiralty. He fell disastrously from power, commanded a battalion in Flanders, returned as Minister of Munitions, and attended the Versailles peace conference. Whenever I’m asked to recommend a “big book” by Churchill, I always name The World Crisis. Like all of his war books it is highly personal. One of his friends called this work “Winston’s brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the Universe.” And one of his enemies said, “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.”²⁰
Even if you don’t read war books you will be entranced by Churchill’s account of the awful, unfolding scene of World War I: the great power rivalries that caused the war; his failed effort to break the deadlock in Europe by forcing the Dardanelles, knocking Turkey out of the war and aiding the Russians; the carnage on the Western Front; how Germany almost won and then lost the war in 1918. One of his critics, Sir Robert Rhodes James, regards The World Crisis as Churchill’s masterpiece, though noting rightly that “one can never quite separate Churchill the orator from Churchill the writer.”²¹

One of his volumes, The Aftermath, chronicles the ten years after victory, including the Versailles settlement, the Irish Treaty, and the Cairo Conference of 1921—the year Churchill lost his mother, a 2-1/2-year old daughter and his brother-in-law, yet still managed to go to Cairo and draw up the boundaries of the modern Middle East.

Incidentally, Churchill pushed hard at Cairo for a Kurdish homeland, “to protect the Kurds against some future bully in Iraq.” But London overruled him, saying that of course Iraq would never be a problem to the West.²²

Two brief excerpts from The World Crisis.The first is the favorite of Gen. Colin Powell, who asked us for the attribution. It summarizes what we now call the Powell Doctrine, which is not to go to war unless your interests are directly involved and you have overwhelming superiority—very relevant at the moment.

In 1911, the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir, Morocco, and almost went to war with France over it. Churchill is writing of the exchange of diplomatic telegrams that flew between Berlin, Paris and London as the Agadir Crisis deepened…

They sound so very cautious and correct, these deadly words. Soft, quiet voices purring, courteous, grave, exactly measured phrases in large peaceful rooms. But with less warning cannons had opened fire and nations had been struck down by this same Germany. So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century….No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all. ²³

Of course the mistakes were made, and the world plunged finally into war three years later, with Churchill running the Navy. In fact, his resolution over Agadir had convinced Prime Minister Asquith to place him at the head of the Admiralty. In August 1914 Churchill did a prescient thing. Britain’s Grand Fleet had assembled for a Naval Review just as the famous Austrian note to Serbia, which precipitated World War I, was sent. On his own authority Churchill ordered the Fleet not to disperse but to sail in darkness through the English Channel to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. This is Churchill’s description of the passage of the armada:

We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs….If war should come no one would know where to look for the British Fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands, cruising now this way, now that, shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization. Yet from the Admiralty building we could speak to them at any moment if need arose. The king’s ships were at sea.²⁴

MY EARLY LIFE

Enough of war books—let us turn now to our author’s most charming and captivating work, his autobiography, My Early Life: the book I always suggest people read first, especially young people.

It is now soundly established that Winston Churchill took liberties in My Early Life, which covers the years from his birth in 1874 to his early years in Parliament. For example, he was not nearly so ignored and abandoned by his parents as he implies. His nephew, Peregrine Churchill, showed me Lady Randolph Churchill’s diaries, which prove that she spent much time with Winston and his brother Jack before they left for school. Peregrine concluded: “Winston was a very naughty boy and his parents were much concerned about him.”²⁵

None of this affects the wonderful treat provided by this most approachable of Churchill’s books, which one reviewer likened to “a beaker of Champagne.²⁶ If you were drawn to Churchill by The Second World War, his autobiography will be a revelation. The war memoirs chronicle a public struggle against national extinction; the autobiography charts a young man’s private struggle to be heard. But the same style and pace is there, the same sense of adventure, the piquant humour, the ability to let the reader peer over our author’s shoulder as events unfold. As William Manchester writes in his excellent introduction to a recent edition of My Early Life:

…One must realize that [Churchill’s] youth was virtually ncomprehensible to most people then alive. He had been born into the English aristocracy at a time when British noblemen were considered (and certainly considered themselves) little less than god-like….The class into which he had been born [was master] of the greatest empire the globe has ever known, comprising one fourth of the earth’s surface and population, thrice the size of the Roman Empire at full flush. [It] also controlled Great Britain herself, to an extent that would be inconceivable in any civilized nation today. One percent of the country’s population—some 33,000 people—owned two-thirds of its wealth, and that wealth, before two world wars devoured it, was breathtaking.²⁷

Nevertheless, Churchill had little handed to him, once family influence had placed him where he wanted to be. He could not have embarked on those thrilling war junkets to Cuba, India and Africa without the influence of his mother and other notables; but once there, he was on his own, and he acquitted himself well. His autobiography records these adventures in words which will live as long as any twentieth century author is read.

Two excerpts demonstrate. The first is Churchill’s recollection of his examination in mathematics. It’s my personal favorite, because I had a similar experience…

We were arrived in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, at the portals of which stood ‘A Quadratic Equation.’ This with a strange grimace pointed the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full rigours of the Binomial Theorem. Further dim chambers lighted by sullen, sulphurous fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the ‘Differential Calculus.’ But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service Commissioners, who regulated this stage of Pilgrim’s heavy journey. We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountains, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially when multiplied by each other, or by themselves….There was a question in my third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after life….luckily I had seen its ugly face only a few days before and recognised it at first sight. I have never met any of these creatures since…²⁸

My second excerpt occurs as Churchill passes out of the Royal Military Academy and into the world, which “opened for me,” as he wrote, “like Aladdin’s Cave.” You may find this as good an exhortation for youth as any other, now nearly seventy years since he penned it:

Come on now all you young people, all over the world. You are needed more than ever now….You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in life’s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are….Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities….Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrives only by repeated subjugations.²⁹

ABUNDANT WILDERNESS

The 1930s are often called Churchill’s “Wilderness Years.” Out of office, he was soon isolated by insisting that Britain rearm in the face of Hitler. Churchill was not a politician who takes the public pulse daily and engages in a non-stop popularity contest. He never hesitated to tell people things they didn’t want to hear and—until his warnings were proved all too real—he was alienated from his party. Yet this period was anything but a Wilderness for Churchill the author.

“I lived mainly at Chartwell,” he recalled, “where I had much to amuse me.”³⁰ Indeed he did, because as always, Chartwell was a drain, requiring him to work feverishly. The lights burned late as Churchill labored on hundreds of articles, and some of his most compelling books: his eclectic set of essays, Thoughts and Adventures; his character studies of the great personages of his age, Great Contemporaries; his History of the English-Speaking Peoples; and his finest biography, the life of his ancestor, John first Duke of Marlborough. No less a scholar than Leo Strauss called Marlborough “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.”

Maurice Ashley, Churchill’s leading assistant on Marlborough, wrote that his boss held Courage and Honour as the chief virtues—which could at times eclipse all other considerations. “He could be obstinate, and though he might yield to persuasion, he was hard to persuade,” Ashley wrote. “That…is Churchill’s main weakness as a historical writer….History had at first been a pleasant method of making money and in the end it was a means of self-justification. He never had either the time or inclination to absorb himself in it completely, or to revise his work in detail.³¹

“But,” Ashley continues, “there is no doubt whatever that Churchill possessed a powerful sense of history….And as Isaiah Berlin has written, Churchill’s central, organizing principle was ‘an historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multi-coloured past.”³²

CONCLUSION

In the last few years of his life Churchill gave in to the pessimism he had always dodged before (for despite reports he was never much bothered by depression, which he referred to as his “Black Dog.”) In the late Fifties he told his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, “Yes, I have worked very hard and accomplished a great many things—only to accomplish nothing in the end.” Mr. Montague Browne told me he thought Churchill was referring to his failure to cement the “special relationship” with America, which wavered after Suez and never developed as he hoped; and to reach what he called “a final settlement” with the Soviet Union—although in 1949 he had predicted that Communism would one day expire in the blink of an eye.³³

His biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, who has written eight million words about Churchill, was asked if he could summarize his subject in one sentence. He thought for a moment and then said: “He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction, rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.”³⁴

That’s hard to improve on—except perhaps to add that it was Churchill’s lasting regret that his father never lived to see what he had accomplished. And that leads to one final story:

THE DREAM

At dinner one evening in 1946, his daughter Sarah pointed to an empty chair: “If you had the power to put someone in that chair, whom would you choose?” She expected him to say Caesar, Napoleon, Marlborough—but he took only a moment to consider. “Oh,” he said, “my father of course.”

Churchill then went on to write what he called a “private article,” never published in his lifetime, about a winter night in his studio, where he is attempting to copy a portrait of his father. He suddenly feels an odd sensation, and there, sitting in his red leather armchair, is Lord Randolph Churchill, with his jaunty waxed moustache and his cigarette poised to light—just as Winston remembered him in his prime.³⁵

“What are you doing, Winston?” his father says. Winston explains he is trying to copy the portrait. “I only do it as a hobby.” “Yes, I’m sure you could never earn your living that way,” his father observes. “How do you get your living?” Winston replies, “I write books and articles for the press.”

Unimpressed, Lord Randolph asks what year it is. “1947,” Winston says. “So more than fifty years have passed. A lot must have happened. Tell me about it.”

So Winston, aged 73, recites to his 40-year-old father everything that has happened since his father died in 1895, without ever revealing—and this is the supreme irony of the piece—the role Winston himself played. He shocks his father by informing him that women have the vote, the Socialists are in power, and India is independent. His father groans…

“What about Ireland? Did they get Home Rule?”

“The South got it, but Ulster stayed with us.”

“Are the South a republic?”

“No one knows what they are. They are neither in nor out of the Empire.”

Winston mentions that there have been wars. Lord Randolph looks up with a start. “War do you say?” “Yes indeed, Papa. We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge.” “Did we win?” “Yes, we won all our wars. All our enemies were beaten down.”

“But wars like these must have cost a million lives.”

“Papa, in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one, seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands. They are Communists now, you know—Karl Marx and all that. It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near….Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order.”

Lord Randolph is stunned. “Winston,” he says, “you have told me a terrible tale. I would never have believed that such things could happen. I am glad I did not live to see them. As I listened to you unfolding these fearful facts you seemed to know a great deal about them. I never expected that you would develop so far and so fully. Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.”

His father strikes a match to light his cigarette. There is a tiny flash and he vanishes. The chair is empty. Winston writes: “I rubbed my brush again in my paint, and turned to finish the moustache. But so vivid had my fancy been that I felt too tired to go on. Also my cigar had gone out, and the ash had fallen among all the paints.”

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

ENDNOTES

1 Churchill, In the Balance, Speeches 1949 & 1950. London: Cassell 1951, p. 41.

2 Tom McCarthy to the author: “With his capacious memory, WSC may have ‘borrowed’ the idea from Blaise Pascal who, several hundred years earlier, wrote in a 1656 letter to a friend: ‘I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to made it shorter.'”

3 Celia Sandys, “The Young Churchill,” speech to the Churchill Society, Calgary, Alberta, 23 Sep ’94.

4 Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of the Churchills, London: Doubleday 1998, p. 326.

5 Time, Person of the Century opinions, 10 May 1999.

6 Time, “Man of the Half-Century,” 2 January 1950.

7 Denis Kelly, conversation with the author, 1986.

8 Commons, 23 Jan 1948. Czarnomski, The Wisdom of Winston Churchill, London: Allen & Unwin 1956, p. 174.

9 Lady Soames to the author. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1948, p. 79.

10 Reliably attributed but not documented to date.

11 Kay Halle, Irrepressible Churchill, Cleveland: World Publishing Inc. 1966, p. 261.

12 Jim Golland, Not William, Just Winston. Harrow: Herga Press 1988, pp. 13-18.

13 Published at $39.95 by Brasseys, 1998. Available from Churchill Center New Book Service for $28 + shipping, PO Box 385, Contoocook NH 03229.

14 Churchill, Savrola. New foreword to the Second American Edition, New York: Random House, 1956.

15 Paul Rahe, “Why Read The River War? An Appreciation,” Finest Hour No. 85, Winter 1994-95, pp. 12-13.

16 Churchill, The River War. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1899 (2 Vols.); Vol. II, Chapter 21.

17 Hassall, Christopher, Edward Marsh: A Biography. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1959, p. 548.

18 Hassall, ibid., pp. 541-42.

19 Hassall, ibid., p. 680.

20 The speakers respectively were Arthur Balfour and Sir Samuel Hoare. See for example John Charmley, Churchill: End of Glory. London: Hodder & Stoughton 1993, p. 191 (who confuses the attribution).

21 Sir Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939. London: Hodder & Stoughton 1970, pp. 309-10.

22 Sir Martin Gilbert, speech to the International Churchill Society, Richmond, Va. 1991.

23 Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. I 1911-1914. London: Thornton Butterworth 1923, pp. 48-49.

24 Ibid., pp. 212-13.

25 Peregrine Churchill, conversation with the author, 1992.

26 Harold Nicolson, 1930, quoted in Richard Langworth, A Connoisseurs Guide, op. cit.

27 William Manchester, new foreword to My Early Life. New York: Simon & Schuster 1996, pp. ix-x.

28 My Early Life, op. cit., p. 40.

29 Ibid., p. 74.

30 The Gathering Storm, op. cit., p. 79.

31 Maurice Ashley, Churchill As Historian. London: Seeker & Warburg 1968, p. 231.

32 Quoted by Ashley, op. cit., p. 231. Berlin’s essay published as Mr. Churchill in 1940. London: John Murray 1964.

33 Anthony Montague Browne to the author, 1985. Churchill quoted by Martin Gilbert in Proceedings of the International Churchill Societies 1990-1991, published 1993, p. 69.

34 Quoted in “Around and About,” Finest Hour No. 101, Winter 1998-99, p. 9.

35 Churchill, The Dream. ICS, 1987; reprinted by The Churchill Center 1996, $15 ppd. from Churchill Stores, PO Box 96, Contoocook NH 03229.