August 12, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 06

QUOTATION OF THE SEASON

“Now, However, we nave a new experience. We nave victory—a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets or our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts….Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning or the end. But it is, perhaps, the end or the beginning.”
—WSC on the desert victory, Mansion House, London, 10 November 1942

WE CHANGE OUR NAME (SLIGHTLY): IT’S NOW THE CHURCHILL CENTRE

“Why don’t the English learn to set a good example to people whose English is painful to your ears? The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears. There even are places where English completely disappears: In America they haven’t used it for years.” —PROF. HENRY HIGGINS IN “MY FAIR LADY”

2025 International Churchill Conference

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2025 International Churchill Conference

WASHINGTON, JANUARY 1ST— By unanimous vote of the Board of Governors, commencing in 2003, The Churchill Center has been renamed The Churchill Centre, and its bylaws and publications amended accordingly.

“The arguments in favor of doing this were substantial,” says CC President Bill Ives: “In the United States both spellings can be found, and Americans don’t seem to mind either. But in Great Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, it is always ‘Centre,’ and the word ‘Center’ immediately marks something as strictly American in nature. Since our scope is global, we decided that the international spelling was preferable.

“There is another factor: for some time the leadership of the UK Churchill Society, in particular, has advocated a closer integration of the Churchill organizations. This is a step toward that worthy and desirable goal.”

Readers will note from the above that Finest Hour remains bilingual. When a quotation or an article originates in the USA, it will be spelled (spelt) in “American.” When it originates outside the USA, it will be spelt (spelled) in “English-English.” But “Churchill Centre” will henceforth be our name in both languages.

M-G ON C-S

WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 2ND— The Cable network C-Span hosted a fascinating three-hour call-in interview program featuring Sir Martin Gilbert, possibly taped from an earlier live recording. I was impressed not only by Sir Martin’s broad familiarity with every aspect of Winston Churchill, but by the quality of the callers’ questions: all of them querying myths, rumors, and facts about Churchill’s life. I could not have imagined there was so much curiosity by so many people. The questions went on for three hours and Gilbert’s responses were brilliant, penetrating, sure and factual. In particular, his refutation of the myth of Churchill as an alcohol abuser was complete and convincing on every count. —ALEX M. WORTH, JR.

FAREWELL SIR CHRISTOPHER

WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 11TH— Executive Director Dan Myers represented The Churchill Centre at a farewell reception for the British Ambassador and his wife, Sir Christopher and Lady Meyer, organized by the English-Speaking Union, the British-American Business Association, and the Shakespeare Guild. Among many present to salute the Meyers were Senator John Warner, Susan Eisenhower of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, President John Andrews of the Shakespeare Guild, and Executive Director Alice Boyne of the ESU United States. Ms. Boyne expressed keen interest in joint activities between The Churchill Centre and the ESU in various venues around the United States. Sir Christopher and Lady Meyer are a friendly, gregarious couple who will be missed. In speeches, both Senator Warner and John Andrews mentioned Sir Winston, and Sir Christopher himself ended his response with a Churchill quotation.

HOVE HEAVES INTO PLAQUEDOM

HOVE, EAST SUSSEX, MARCH 2ND— After a disastrous experience at his first boarding school, whose sadistic headmaster took obvious satisfaction at the frequent flogging of his charges, Winston was sent to the Misses Thompson Preparatory School on Lansdowne Road. Here he resided from 1883 to 1885, when he left for Harrow. Mr. Alan Durban of Hove kindly sent us photos of the building, which proudly bears a blue historical plaque attesting to the famous association.

CIVIL LIST HISTORY

LONDON, JANUARY 2ND— Churchill wanted the public to understand why the Queen needed so much taxpayers’ money when she acceded to the throne in 1952, the Daily Telegraph stated. In comparing the Queen’s Civil List proposals with those of George VI, Churchill told his chancellor, Rab Butler, “…it is important that the fall in the purchasing power of money should be presented. This list looks bigger now but actually it is about the same in services and goods.” His note appears in a file on the 1952 Civil List released today by the Public Record Office. The figure was £465,000 a year, 15% of which was a contingency fund set aside to cope with “inflation during the reign.” Small peanuts fifty years later!

ARMIDO VALORI, R.I.P.

NORWICH, UK, FEBRUARY 8TH— Longtime ICS UK member Armido Valori, who died today, was a fish merchant and prominent caterer. Being a sea cadet, he volunteered for the Royal Navy at the age of 17 and served in the RN Patrol Service during World War II. After the war he joined the family firm, where he worked until he retired in 1995.

It was Armido who, at Blenheim Palace in 1998, came to us with an urgent entreaty: make sure the middle initial “S” was included in the name of the proposed new American destroyer. “After all, he always signed himself ‘Winston S. Churchill!'” His request was relayed to Ambassador Paul Robinson, who contacted the Secretary of the Navy…and the rest is history.

We thought there wasn’t much to this name change besides buying an extra letter “S” for the ship’s transom, but were later advised that it involved all new blueprints, labels, and signs. “In fact,” joked Scotsman Allen Cameron of Bath Iron Works, who built the ship, “Armido probably cost the American taxpayer a cool million.” It was always a pleasure to have a laugh with Armido over this at the many Churchill conferences he was able to attend. We are sorry we will not have any more opportunities. —RML

CAHN COLLECTION AT SOTHERBY’S

LONDON, DECEMBER 12TH—The legendary Churchill collection formed by Harry Cahn starting back before World War II was sold at auction today by order of the executors of the late Bart Watt of Toronto, and the auction room was packed, with at least six operators handling telephone bidders.

This sale was heavy on signed books and letters. The selection of thirty-two important signed letters was the best I have seen in years. The high for letters was $28,700 for an 1890 letter from schoolboy Winston at Harrow to his mother. Twenty-six letters were sold at an average of $7870 each; a further six were unsold despite bids of $4000-$ 14,000 because of high reserves. The best bargain of the day was a two-page autograph letter of 1911, where Churchill writes to his cousin Oswald Frewen defending his welfare programme, which sold for $3600.

Thirty-seven signed or inscribed books were offered and all but one sold, at an average of $5750 per signature. The highest price achieved was $12,430 for a beautifully bound set of The World Crisis, inscribed in vol. I to Churchill’s aunt, Lady Sarah Churchill. The lowest price was $1430 for a 1947 Odhams cheap edition of Step by Step. A good buy was a copy of Liberalism and the Social Problem signed by Churchill and bearing the bookplate of his lifelong friend, F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, at $6700. The bidding was intense for a signed Frontiers and Wars from 1962, finally going for $8,000 to a telephone bidder. This is the only signed copy of this work, published late in Churchill’s life, that I have ever seen.

The Cahn collection was reputed to have the most pamphlet works by Churchill ever assembled, and proved invaluable to Fred Woods when researching his famous bibliography. Unfortunately, some of the best items were creamed off by a library, but a good selection of early pamphlets made for a lively auction.

High mark of the day was $3060 for the single-page 1904 leaflet, The Aliens Bill (Woods A7), which was bought via telephone. A further Cahn Collection…six pamphlets from the Liberal era (1904-1912) averaged bids of $885 each. A bargain was a copy of Shall We Commit Suicide? from 1924, at $765.

Many first edition books were sold in groups, making results difficult to analyze. A telephone bidder acquired a sparkling set of The River War (1899) at a good price of $4600. I paid too much at $ 1150 for a jacketed American edition of The Unknown War, but it was the finest jacket I’d ever seen. A telephone bidder paid $725 for nice copy of the Sandhurst edition of The World Crisis. The two scarcest books on offer were a paper wraps binding of the Canadian London to Ladysmith, and the only known example of India in orange wraps with a 2s 6d price on the cover.

The estate of Oscar Nemon and others had consigned various items of Churchilliana. A large photograph of Churchill on V-E Day, signed on the mount, went for over $18,000. One of Churchill’s wartime “siren suits,” given by WSC to Nemon, sold for $47,800. (At Sotheby’s last December, a grey siren suit sold for a similar £30,000.) A 16.5-inch high bust of Churchill by Nemon sold at over $30,000.

This sale confirms without doubt that the market for quality Churchill material remains buoyant, despite the general economic woes. — MARK WEBER

LETTER ON MUNICH

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 3RD— When in 1946 the BBC engaged young Alistair Cooke to produce a weekly radio “Letter From America” for a thirteen week trial period, no one could have imagined that fifty-two years later its creator would still be going strong at age 93. You can find it on the internet, where it can be read it or, better yet, heard: http://news.bbc.co.uk..

Winston Churchill moves in and out of the “Letter” with regularity, as he did this edition. On the Iraq debate Mr. Cooke confessed to having heard the same arguments before, chillingly, in 1938—Hitler may have the weapons, but “he hasn’t used them”; Neville Chamberlain promising “peace for our time”; and Winston Churchill, “one unfamiliar old grumbler,” stridently objecting: “We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat.”

During recent weeks, Mr. Cooke continued, “a simple but startling thought occurred to me—every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So [Munich] will not have been remembered by most listeners….And so many of the arguments mounted against each other today, in the last fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons debates and read in the French press.

“The French especially urged, after every Hitler invasion, ‘negotiation, negotiation.’ They negotiated so successfully as to have their whole country defeated and occupied. But as one famous French leftist said: ‘We did anyway manage to make them declare Paris an open city—no bombs on us!’

“In Britain the general response to every Hitler advance was disarmament and collective security. Collective security meant to leave every crisis to the League of Nations….But after the Rhineland the maverick Churchill decided there was no collectivity in collective security and started a highly unpopular campaign for rearmament by Britain….A majority of Britons would do anything, absolutely anything, to get rid of Hitler except fight him.”

This last rang a chord. Indeed Mr. Cooke said almost the same thing about Churchill in the 1930s to 300 of us at the Bretton Woods International Conference in 1988. Then he looked up and said: “…and ladies and gentlemen, if you had been there, if you had been alive and sentient and British in the 1930s, not one in ten of you would have been with him.”

On Iraq Alistair Cooke added this caveat: “I have to say I have written elsewhere with much conviction that most historical analogies are false because, however strikingly similar a new situation may be to an old one, there’s usually one element that is different and it turns out to be the crucial one. It may well be so here. All I know is that all the voices of the Thirties are echoing through 2003.”

• Editor’s note: Later in this issue, Alistair Cooke reviews the new edition of Lord Moran’s Diaries, Churchill at War 1940-45.

CHURCHILL BOOK CLUB: HERR HAFFNER HELPS US DECIDE

NEW HAMPSHIRE, FEBRUARY 23RD— The Churchill Centre Book Club was shut down this winter for its transition to Washington, where it will be combined with Churchill Stores—but a change is in the making. We will no longer offer every book on Churchill as published.

The sheer volume of new titles—over a dozen in the past twelve months, possibly another dozen in the next twelve—is part of the problem. With that kind of output quality suffers, and some of the books reviewed recently would have been better left unpublished. Many are either far-out revisionist histories based on urban myths, or poorly researched hagiographies.

A possible contender in the former category is the English edition of Sebastian Haffner’s Churchill (Haus Publishing, £8.99, 192 pp.), first published in German and Dutch as Winston Churchill: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten in 1967. Haffner is one of the great journalists of the 20th century, and his book about growing up in the Weimar Republic is outstanding. This one isn’t. Historian Andrew Roberts, reviewing the book for the Daily Telegraph, astonished us by quoting some of Haffner’s assertions: that the young Winston “was no stranger to the ladies who frequented the promenade of London’s Empire Theater”; that “the Churchill of the 1920s was really a fascist”; that WSC wanted to “unleash civil war” during the General Strike; that by 1942 Churchill should have been replaced as PM by (wait for it!) Stafford Cripps; and that the Bolshevik Revolution “blew away Churchill’s radicalism like thistledown, and he reacted like some baroque prince confronted by a peasant insurrection.” Dear oh dear…Roberts remarks: “Given Stalinism, Churchill’s reaction was the sanest in the Lloyd George government.”

From Berlin we heard from Joerg Wolf, a student who read Haffner in the original German: “Andrew Roberts has picked up Haffner’s most extreme sentences, which is fair enough for a reviewer. I, however, had the impression that Haffner’s biography is a bit softer on Churchill than Roberts suggests. For instance, in discussing Churchill’s radical-Liberal period, Haffner seems more right than wrong when he declares that Churchill was never really a left radical, but was a) compassionate, b) happy to annoy his upper-class colleagues, and c) never averse to political opportunity. Still, Haffner’s book is too brief to get a decent overview about Churchill’s life and his character.”

At any rate, we see no reason to offer every last book simply to be able to say we offer everything. We shall not shun controversial and critical works. But you’ll have to excuse us for getting a little weary with words that have been said before in much the same way, or biographies that fail to do justice—or do injustice—to the subject.

WSC IN KOREA

SEOUL, FEBRUARY 2001— A reader sends proof that Churchill is still remembered in Korea, although “the sign marks a karaoke bar in which scantily clad young ladies assist tired businessmen to relax to the accompaniment of popular music. Quite why portraits of Sir Winston adorn this den of iniquity (or din of inequity) remain unclear.” Could any reader lighten our darkness?

LOCAL AND NATIONAL EVENTS

Events are also now covered by our sister publication, the Chartwell Bulletin.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP CONSIDERED

BOSTON, JANUARY 23RD— New England Churchillians were invited by Anthony Polito of the New England Club for a dinner discussion of the timeless and timely subject of Anglo-American relations. Principal speaker George Fergusson, HM Consul-General, Boston, surveyed the essentially common outlook on critical world issues and strong trade and investment links that characterize the partnership. One important role Britain plays as a friend of America, he noted, is to offer counsel and the perspective of other countries. NEC’s Joseph Hern spoke about the signal contribution of Winston Churchill to the “special relationship.” He showed how Churchill, the self-described “English Speaking Union” of a British father and American mother, fostered these ties through decades of travel, publication, and speeches in America. He quoted Churchill’s 1943 words at Harvard: “If we are together, nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail. I therefore preach continually the doctrine of fraternal association of our two peoples.” Geoffrey Hall of the British Officers Association of Boston spoke about the BOA and gave a tour of its club room at the Union Club.

SPECIAL INSULATION PROMOTED

LONDON, ONTARIO— Ontario readers may want to pay a visit to Novacks on King Street, who are advertising silk underwear, with obvious reference to its most famous wearer, at attractive prices. In their historical reference Novacks are not wrong.

After their marriage, Clementine Churchill was surprised by her husband’s taste for silk underwear, bought from military stores but nevertheless extremely expensive. According to what we’ve read his preference was lifelong, and when his wife confronted him with the bills Churchill replied: “I have a very sensitive cuticle.”