April 29, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 11

Riddles Mysteries Enigmas

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I was wondering if someone could tell me who was in the group that bought Churchill’s home, Chartwell, to save it for posterity and allow him to life out his life there.
—Tom Daniels on Churchillchat

Churchill purchased Chartwell in 1922 with the help of an unexpected legacy from a cousin. In 1938, when he seriously contemplated having to sell it, a banker friend, Sir Henry Strakosch, came to his rescue with a financial arrangement which enabled WSC to retain the property. In 1946 money was raised in order to buy the property from Churchill and present it to the National Trust, together with an endowment fund allowing Winston to live out his life there. Those involved were: Viscount Camrose (who led the fundraising campaign), Viscount Bearsted, Lord Bicester, Lord Catto, Sir Hugh Cunliffe-Owen Bt, Lord Glendyne, Lord Kenilworth, Sir James Laird, Lord Leathers, Sir James Lithgow Bt, Sir Edward Mountain Bt, Lord Nuffield, Sir Edward Peacock, Viscount Portal (a distant cousin of the wartime Chief of Air Staff ), James de Rothschild, J. Arthur Rank and Sir Frederick Stewart. Camrose subscribed £15,000 and the others £5000 each.

All but two of the above agreed within three minutes of being approached by Camrose, one of the other two following suit on the next day, and the last one very soon afterwards.

Their names are on a plaque on one of Chartwell’s walls.
—Paul Courtenay

I am thinking about a probably apocryphal Churchill story. It seems 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! If you really want to slam an author, this is one way.
—Jonathan Hayes on Churchillchat

We believe the writer was Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, not Lord London-derry. Sarah Churchill reports in her Thread in the Tapestry (41): “… my father received a note from a friend of royal lineage which said: ‘Dear Winston, Thank you for your book, I have put it on the shelf with the others.’ 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?'”

*In fact, Paul Courtenay reminds us, George III was never Duke of Gloucester, a title held by his father and then by one of his younger brothers. This did not prevent William Manchester from crediting the Duke of Gloucester with so writing to Churchill, in Last Lion vol. II (p18).

I have been told that once Churchill arrived late for a meeting with the Queen, expressing his regret by saying, “My sincere apologies madam, I started too late.” But I haven’t found any reference to this. Can you help?
—Anna Palmgren-Houel, Via Email

This famous late-show was not with the Queen but with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII (1901-10), in 1896. Robert Lewis Taylor, in Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness (New York Doubleday, 1952) writes on page 16:

“As a very young subaltern, he once kept the Prince of Wales and a dinner party of twelve waiting for nearly an hour. The prince, a grand eater and in the blackest kind of mood, refused to go in until the chancy number of thirteen was made fourteen by the dilatory guest. When Churchill arrived, he was asked the meaning of this unseemly breach of good manners. ‘Do you have an excuse, young man?’ inquired the prince, before a drawing room full of starved nobility. ‘Indeed I have, Sire,’ explained the unusual boy. ‘I started too late.'”

In fact he would not have addressed the Prince of Wales as “Sire” but rather as “Sir” or “Your Royal Highness.” Taylor wrote a fine book, but his lack of footnotes makes tracking his quotations difficult. Churchill himself confirms and dates this incident in his autobiography: “I realized that I must be upon my best behaviour: punctual, subdued, reserved, in short display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” Later he added: “I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.” —WSC, My Early Life (London: Butterworth, 1930, 107).

Churchill never quite succeeded in curing himself. As his wife once remarked: “Winston is a sporting man; he always likes to give the train a chance to get away.”

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