April 4, 2015

Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07

Page 36

By James Lancaster

Beside the Bulldog: The Intimate Memoirs of Churchill’s Bodyguard Walter Thompson, Tom Hickman, editor. London: Apollo, 144 pages, hardbound, $25.95. Member price $20.75.

Considerable confusion has attended the simultaneous appearance of Walter Thompson’s “authorized biography” (reviewed above) and this compilation of Thompson’s own memoirs, allegedly inspired from the selfsame cache of private papers discovered by Thompson’s great-niece, Linda Stoker, in an old suitcase.

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Unfortunately, while the “Authorised Biography” described opposite is a new work, Beside the Bulldog is what I would call a “bandwagon book”: it is nothing more than a reprint of Thompson’s small 1953 book Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill, with a few photographs, issued to take advantage of Hickman’s biography and the attendant publicity.

There is a short introduction by grand-niece Stoker, who writes that she spent six years researching Walter Thompson’s life. The result of six years’ research is an introduction so short that I read it in less than fifteen minutes—only twenty-two pages of text, set in double-spaced, large font: an old trick. And even this brief introduction is full of exaggerations, mushy prose and regurgitated untruths—that Norman Shelley read Churchill’s speeches, for example. Stoker has a few footnotes in the main text, but they are of little import.

Readers who do not have Sixty Minutes might be interested in buying Beside the Bulldog. They would have an illustrated Sixty Minutes. But this reviewer bought this book unaware that it was a reprint. Beware of publishers and covers.