May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 10

The Special Relationship – The Power of Words and Machines

In the 21st century Churchill’s hope, as expressed at Harvard in 1943 and at M.I.T. in 1949, has the potential to be realized by technology he never knew, but knew would come.

By Allen Packwood

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Mr. Packwood is Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge and Executive Director of The Churchill Centre United Kingdom. A longtime contributor to Finest Hour, he is chairman of the October 2011 International Churchill Conference in London.


Sir Winston Churchill is justly celebrated as a master of the written and spoken word. His own career was launched and sustained by his pen, which gave him an incredible freedom and power. As early as 17 February 1908, addressing the Author’s Club of London, he chose to emphasise the freedom of the writer: “He is the sovereign of an Empire, self-supporting, self contained. No-one can sequestrate his estates. No-one can deprive him of his stock in trade; no-one can force him to exercise his faculty against his will; no-one can prevent him exercising it as he chooses. The pen is the great liberator of men and nations.”

What is generally less well known is that he was also passionate about the potential of science and technology. He lived in an age of great technological change, and he embraced it. As a young man, he not only learnt to drive, but even took flying lessons, taking to the cockpit at a time when to do so was both pioneering and dangerous. In his early political life he helped to develop the Royal Naval Air Service, pushed through the modernisation of the British Fleet and its conversion from coal to oil, and sponsored research into the land battleships that would become the tank. Once convinced of the value of a particular project, he would often assume the role of its most passionate advocate.

On 31 March 1949, he spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on “The 20th Century: Its Promise and Its Realization.” The theme of his speech was the contrast between the promise of scientific discoveries and the terrible weapons and wars they had actually delivered. Yet even after the carnage of two world wars, and when faced with the horrors of atomic annihilation, he refused to be too pessimistic, seeing science as the servant of man rather than man as the servant of science, and advocating stronger Anglo-American relations within the new United Nations as the best way of securing the benefits of scientific progress and guaranteeing peace.

He predicted that the Soviet regime would be unable to sustain its grip on its people forever, and that while “Science no doubt could if sufficiently perverted exterminate us all,…it is not in the power of material forces in any period which the youngest here tonight may take into practical account, to alter the main elements in human nature or restrict the infinite variety of forms in which the soul and the genius of the human race can and will express itself.” This was a message of hope, a statement of belief in the possibility of progress through technological advance.

We cannot presume to know how Churchill would respond to the world today, but we can be confident that he would want his words to be heard, and the lessons of his era to be studied, and that he would look to new technology as a means of reaching the widest possible audience. This after all is the man who said, upon accepting his Honorary Degree at Harvard University in September 1943: “It would certainly be a grand convenience for us all to be able to move freely about the worldโ€”as we shall be able to move more freely than ever before as the science of the world develops…and be able to find everywhere a medium, albeit primitive, of intercourse and understanding.”

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the 21st century, Churchill’s hope has the potential to be realised through the development of the Internet, which uses English as its main language and allows truly global communications. I am not crediting Churchill with foreseeing the World Wide Web, but he did end this section of his Harvard speech with the observation that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

The challenge facing The Churchill Centre, and the Churchill museums, archives and foundations with which it works, is to harness new technology to ensure that Churchill’s words and actions are presented to the next generation in a form relevant to them. There will always be a place for conferences and lectures, for the cut and thrust of debate; there will always be magic in seeing treasures like the final page of the “finest hour” speech; the actual sheet Churchill had in his hand in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940, annotated with his own last-minute changes. Yet now there is also the ability to capture and present such Churchill exhibitions, events and resources to a huge potential audience, over a longer timescale, using the Internet.

To do this properly will not be cheap or easy. It will require professional partnerships, with educators who know how to tailor and present the content for use by students, and with digital designers and publishers who know how to develop and present online resources. It will require networking, branding, marketing, publicity and constant innovation to make sure that the right Churchill sites are accessible and visible, and able to act as beacons in a jungle of information. But we should take our lead from Sir Winston, the Victorian cavalry officer who embraced new technology, and like him we should use the power of both words and machines.

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