June 28, 2013

FINEST HOUR 132, AUTUMN 2006

BY JAMES LANCASTER

ABSTRACT
CHURCHILL’S PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY is everywhere evident in his writings and speeches. In searching for the origins of this phrase from My Early Life, we find a typical example of Churchill capturing a line he appreciated and storing it away for use later—sometimes years later.

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In the process of proofreading all past Churchilltrivia questions, preparing to relieve Curt Zoller, I came across question 214 back in Finest Hour 67:

“The quotation used by Churchill ‘If there be any who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due’ refers to whom?”

Answer: His nanny, Mrs. Everest.

Unusually, Barbara Langworth, the then-editor, does not give her source for this quotation, so I tried to track it down. I came across one reference in Winston Churchill: The Era and the Man by Virginia Cowles (page 41 in the Hamish Hamilton edition):

He [WSC] attended her funeral and when she was lowered into her grave he wept as he had never wept for his own father. Several years later, in India, he came across the passage Gibbon had written about his nurse:

‘If there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due.’

It is clear that Cowles was quoting from My Early Life, but she did not give a page reference. Churchill’s words are to be found on page 109 of my Odhams Press edition:

So pleased was I with Decline and Fall that I began at once to read Gibbon’s Autobiography… .When I read his reference to his old nurse: ‘If there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due,’ I thought of Mrs Everest; and it shall be her epitaph.

The next step was to check Gibbon’s autobiography, published as The Memoirs of Edward Gibbon. In my 1891 Routledge edition on page 52 I found the passage I was looking for:

The maternal office was supplied by my aunt, Mrs Catherine Porten.. ..A life of celibacy transferred her vacant affection to her sister’s first child: my weakness excited her pity; her attachment was fortified by labour and success; and if there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman they must hold themselves indebted. Many anxious and solitary days did she consume in the patient trial of every mode of relief and amusement. Many wakeful nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation that each hour would be my last.

Note that Churchill slightly misquotes the Gibbonian sentence—”their gratitude is due” instead of “they must hold themselves indebted”—and also refers to Gibbon’s nurse instead of his aunt. But this shows that, when writing My Early Life in 1930, he was using his phenomenal memory, and that he did not consult the Memoirs. It also demonstrates both his appreciation of a finely tuned sentence, and his deep gratitude for everything Mrs Everest did for him.

It is interesting to think that Churchill might have been inspired as much by Gibbon’s life as by his literary style. This is not unimportant. Gibbon almost died at a very early age, as did Churchill. In reading Gibbon’s Memoirs on sultry afternoons in India,Churchill realised that Gibbon was entirely self-educated—had spent only fourteen months at Oxford in 1752 before his father sent him to Switzerland, because he discovered that young Edward had turned to Rome (which he renounced a few years later).

Of his Oxford days Gibbon remarked: To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. The reader will pronounce between the school and the scholar.

Since Churchill did not go to university himself, it must have given him great comfort to know that this need be no handicap. All one needed was a good library. The story is memorably recounted in My Early Life in the chapter, “Education in Bangalore.”