February 28, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 12


Q: The Italian newspaper Repubblica, reporting the auction of Churchill’s dentures, say that the prosthesis wasn’t perfect, in order to maintain his typical speech defect. Is this true? (2) Did Churchill ever drink beer? A video from the Cairo Conference shows him drinking from a glass filled with an amber liquid. Do you know what it was?
—PATRIZIO GIANGRECO, NAPLES

A: Churchill had a lisp which he turned into a feature of his oratory. He acquired dentures early, like most of his generation, but found that soft dentures would preserve the lisp, which he desired to keep! See Dentures, FH 138: 11-12.

(2) The amber liquid was probably his usual weak whisky and water (or soda). Sir John Colville said he would nurse a glass for hours, but with little whisky it was “like scotch-flavoured mouthwash.” But there w e r e occasions when he drank beer. Sometimes it was with troops or sailors.

His 1905-15 private secretary, Eddie Marsh, described a 1914 trip to Europe by Churchill and his wife: “On arrival in Venice they went sightseeing in a gondola. Some days later they visited the palace of Diocletian at Spoleto (Split), and drank beer under giant plane-trees at Ragusa (Dubrovnik).” Maurice Ashley, Churchill’s chief literary assistant in the 1930s, wrote that when they met, Churchill (then in his fifties), said he always drank beer for his lunch: “Beef and beer, once the British breakfast, were long his staples in the middle of the day.” It doesn’t seem that this lasted long, how- ever; most often he is had white wine or champagne at lunch.

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Q: At the Morgan Library’s “Power of Words” exhibition I was astounded to read the Abraham Lincoln comments that President Roosevelt gave Mr. Churchill on his 70th birthday. As I was not able to copy the words in the document, I hope you can point me to the full text and its history, because no catalog was available.
—MAXINE ARNSTEIN, VIA EMAIL

A: The original document at Chartwell was loaned to the exhibition. FDR’s 70th birthday present to Churchill, which now survives at Chartwell, is pictured below by courtesy of the National Trust:

Q: Please confirm what one of Churchill’s associates wrote sometime in 1943, at a friendly gathering: WSC said that whoever had been in power—Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, anyone you liked to mention—“the military position would now be exactly the same. Wars have their own rules, politicians don’t alter them, the armies would be in the same position to a mile.” Of course Churchill couldn’t have believed this; he wouldn’t have sacked so many generals if he didn’t think it made a difference. I suspect his “audience” was non-military, and he was playing the soldier’s card.
—ALLAN MALLINSON, VIA EMAIL

A: fter we and the Churchill Archives Centre came up -blank, Mr. Mallinson himself triumphantly unearthed this on the first page of Ronald Lewin’s Churchill as Warlord (New York: Stein & Day, 1973). The alleged remark was related by the novelist and sometime civil servant C.P. Snow to the civil servant Maurice Hankey, without quotemarks around it. Hankey (see “Action This Day…1937” FH 156: 41) had never been a fan of Churchill’s, and the quotation is at best double-hearsay, but it seems unlikely Churchill would have thought individuals made no difference. Lewin writes that Hankey was cashiered by Churchill in a letter that was “peremptory, brief, brutal and uncompromising.” That happens to be a very apt description of Hankey.

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