Friday, January 24th marked the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill. Following a state funeral in London at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the body was taken by rail to Oxfordshire, where it was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Martin’s, Bladon. The small village is located directly behind the grounds of Blenheim Palace, where Churchill had been born in 1874. Read More >
Sixty years ago, Sir Winston Churchill was preparing to make his fourth cruise aboard the Christina, the private yacht of Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. The vessel departed Tangier on 10 March 1960 and crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where various port calls were made in the West Indies from Trinidad to Puerto Rico before Churchill flew home on 2 April. Read More >
February 4–11 this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the hotly debated Yalta Conference, the second and last wartime meeting between Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, where the Big Three attempted to lay the grounds for peace in the postwar world. By the end of the following summer, however, much had changed: Roosevelt was dead, Churchill had been voted out of office, and the world had entered the nuclear age. Read More >
The most recent issue of Finest Hour focused on the theme “Churchill’s Cold War” and included text from the famous “Iron Curtain” speech that Winston Churchill delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. This heavy paper tag was issued to allow the bearer entry onto campus but not necessarily the speech itself. It would have been worn suspended from a button hole. Many such tags were saved, but what makes this one rare is that it was issued to a student, Frank M. Holt. Westminster College only had 212 students in 1946. Read More >
In the spring of 1882, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill gave up their house at 29 St. James place in preparation for a trip to the United States—without their children. In the absence of their parents, Winston, age seven, and his brother Jack, age two, lived with their grandparents, the seventh Duke and Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, where Winston had been born in 1874. Read More >
