June 26, 2013

FINEST HOUR 132, AUTUMN 2006

ABSTRACTS BY ROBERT A. COURTS

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“Churchill’s Speech: A Lesson For The Present” by William Horsley, BBC News Online, 6th March 2006 n 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill was not Britain’s Prime Minister, but he still enjoyed a giant reputation: so much so that President Harry Truman travelled 1000 miles accompanying Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, where the old warrior gave a speech that became one of the most famous of the 20th century.

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Churchill had been mocked in the 1930s for warning his country about the menace of Nazi Germany, but had been proved right in the end. Now he came bearing similar warnings. After expressing his admiration for the Russian people and his “wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,”

Churchill delivered the phrase that was to define the Cold War: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”

It was vintage Churchill: grave, eloquent, and ruthlessly honest. It was also a plea to the world’s greatest superpower—America—to acknowledge the harsh reality about the Soviets, who were imposing totalitarian rule on all the countries in their military sway. America may have been reluctant to accept this conclusion, but by the following year, Truman decided on a policy of containment: a doctrine that was to bear his name.

Stalin was furious at the Fulton speech and banned its publication in the USSR. But Churchill’s words were prescient. He clearly foresaw the Cold War, which was to last until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and featured the great climacterics of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hungarian and Czech uprisings.

The sixtieth anniversary of the speech has brought many reflections on its relevance. Fulton reads like an example of true statesmanship, and perhaps the most memorable “wake-up call” in modern history. It not only displayed the genius with words that would bring Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature, but in an age of uncertainty, it spread Churchill’s iron certainty of purpose.

Churchill’s core beliefs were in the special bond between America and Britain, the need for the United Nations to be “a force for action and not merely a frothing of words,” and the duty of the Western democracies to stand up for freedom and against tyranny. Although sixty years later there are more democracies in the world than ever before, such moral certainty is rare. With Churchill’s authority, it is rarer still.

“CHURCHILL’S CHARTWELL” BY SIR PATRICK CORMACK. HERITAGE, MAY 2005

Few historians doubt that Churchill was one of the greatest wartime Prime Ministers that Britain has ever had, or even, as Roy Jenkins called him, the “greatest human being ever to occupy No. 10 Downing Street.” But the house that meant most to Churchill was the dilapidated farmhouse with glorious views which he bought in 1922 and transformed into a wonderfully comfortable family home.

It was from here—Chartwell— that Churchill poured forth the torrent of articles that sustained him, and, in the 1930s, warned of the threat from Nazi Germany. Here he honed some of his finest speeches and books that led him to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But he did not just work here: he laid out ponds, walls and a cottage, and “never had a dull moment from morning until night.”

No house in England is more closely associated with a great man. To go there is to understand, as nowhere else, the man who has been voted the Greatest Briton of all time.

Churchill was nearly fifty and already had a remarkable career behind him when he found Chartwell. He never looked back from that point, although his wife Clementine was aghast at the expense. His alterations made it a homely place, and he entertained streams of visitors. During the war, it was considered too easy a target for German attack and was all but closed down, but afterwards, albeit with a reduced staff, Chartwell once again became Churchill’s home.

Remembering what a grateful nation had done for Marlborough, and determined that Churchill’s dicey finances should never cost him his home, a group of friends bought Chartwell for the National Trust, with the proviso that Churchill should live there for the rest of his life, and that when he died, it should become a shrine to his memory. This greatly moved WSC, who left many items of memorabilia to the house. It was restored after his death, to the form it had taken in the 1930s. Visitors today therefore to find themselves in the setting where Churchill brooded and urged his compatriots in vain to face up to the realities of Nazi tyranny.

The most evocative rooms in the house are the library, Lady Churchill’s elegant bedroom, and the study. In the latter, his workshop of over forty years, Churchill worked on five national budgets, dictated hundreds of articles, rehearsed many speeches, and produced many of his great histories.

The house is synonymous with the extraordinary life that Churchill led. No visitor to Chartwell can fail to be inspired by thoughts of what he achieved here, in a beautiful setting which inspired some of the greatest words and deeds in British history.