May 12, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 4

Despatch Box

Winston 1940-2010

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Thanks so much for the FH 147 cover stories on Winston. Your remembrance was moving, with such lovely memories, and Martin Gilbert was exactly right. Winston had such admiration for all the work done by you and Barbara and everybody else involved with the Churchill Society. He always looked forward to receiving FH.
Minnie Churchill. Lyme Regis, Dorset

Thank you for the magnificent tributes and your personal words, which struck exactly the right chord. How proud he was in upholding the memory of his grandfather, and standing up for causes he believed in. The back cover epitomises the best of my father in action as a staunch supporter of our armed services, when we had a government that was so spineless as to deny them the proper resources to fight two major conflicts. You also described his drive and energy that got results in so many ways little and large—no bureaucratic hurdle was too big to overcome. Sir Martin’s tribute and all the others were most generous and naturally with some family tales, “one must never let the truth get in the way of a good story”! Thanks for all you and Barbara have done to uphold the memory and legacy of my great grandfather. I continue to be staggered by the range and breadth of the questions you field so ably.
Randolph Churchill, Crockham Hill, Kent

Your tribute was heartfelt and formed the centerpiece to FH‘s dignified appreciations. We met in Palm Beach in 2004 while I was writing a short feature story on his fund-raising for the Churchill Museum. We chatted for close to three hours and shared several subsequent lunches. I told him of my partnership with William Manchester on volume three of The Last Lion, and he generously supplied several addresses and phone numbers of Sir Winston’s old colleagues. He didn’t have to do that. That simple gesture spoke to his character.

He told me one of his earliest memories was of the great Christmas fir raised at Chequers, perhaps 1943. The household staff, wary of the tree catching fire, purloined the Prime Minister’s bath sponges, keeping them ready in nearby buckets of water. Churchill, upon discovering his sponges missing, roamed the great house demanding their return. The staff returned them, only to grab them again when the PM’s attention was distracted, and the whole scene was repeated. I put that tale in the book.
Paul Reid, Columbus, N.C.

On 8 May 1995, the 50th anniversary of VE-Day, we went to Buckingham Palace to see recreated the balcony scene fifty years earlier. Later, walking down Buckingham Palace Road, a man came out of the crowd and said to my friend Stan, “I see from your medals that you’re Canadian. My name is Winston Churchill and these are my sons, Randolph and Jack.” We chatted, eerily, for a moment.

That night in Hyde Park, The Queen lit a torch and Dame Vera Lynn sang “We’ll Meet Again,” bringing tears to the eyes of 200,000 watching and singing along. We sat next to East Londoners, hardly people who voted Tory, yet to them, Churchill was different. It was he who had visited their bombed out homes and shops with tears streaming down his face.

A hush settled when Robert Hardy delivered Churchill’s VE-Day speech: “In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.” In the silence that followed, one of the East End ladies beside me stood and shouted, “And we stood alone!”

A day or so later we went to the gravesite at Bladon. There was a bouquet from a Dutch couple with a note: “Thank you Mr. Churchill for saving our country.”
Rafe Muir, Lions Bay, B.C.

WSC Over the War

Have you ever considered what might have happened in 1940 had Churchill been President and Roosevelt Prime Minister? Had the situations been reversed, and Churchill had “got there on his own,” I think FDR would’ve lost Britain. Churchill would have been over in the U.S. pounding the podium, but with the lack of a parliamentary system, he’d have been stuck out of it. I suppose we should be happy things were the way they were.
Dean Karayanis, Via Email

• Them’s fightin’ words to some of our readers, I suspect! But it’s an interesting speculation. —Ed.

Thanks..

I treasure my copies from 1991. I’ve always said it’s the best association magazine I have ever read—more a journal that a magazine, a literary and historical work, a source of nostalgia.
Cyril Mazansky, Newton Center, Mass.

The “Drunken Officer”

Nicely done on Churchill’s reunification offer to de Valera (FH 147: 57). David Freeman’s exegesis of the works of Terry de Valera and Diarmaid Ferriter blows their allegations out of the water. I do find the PM’s inner circle defensive about his alcohol consumption, and there were others who commented on his being worse for the wear on occasion. It’s plausible that he was so exhilarated by the significance of the Japanese attack that he celebrated with an extra brandy or two. So what? (Nor would an extra brandy have made much difference.) His curious sense that Ireland was really “part of the family” was consistent, and his offer to de Valera was in character.
Warren F. Kimball, John Island, N.C.

Toyeing Around

On page 56, Richard Toye is quoted as quoting Churchill that the Hindus were “protected by their own pullulation.” I did not know that one. Do you know where it comes from?
Antoine Capet, University of Rouen

• The more we read of Toye’s opus the more we think we let it off lightly. The quotation is from the Colville Diaries in Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill VI: 1232, where Colville writes of a conversation on 22 February 1945:

“The PM was rather depressed, thinking of the possibilities of Russia one day turning against us….He had been struck by the action of the Government of India in not removing a ‘Quit India’ sign which had been placed in a prominent place in Delhi….He seemed half to admire and half to resent this attitude. The PM said the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’ and he wished Bert Harris [RAF Bomber Command] could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.”

Taken in context with Churchill’s sour mood that night, the statement is unextraordinary, and we can believe it was said (privately of course) with a smirk, since everyone knows Churchill never wished to wipe out the Hindus. Toye breathlessly quotes it as a kind of shocking revelation that WSC hated Indians—which is nonsense. —Ed.

From Our Patron

I have been greatly touched by Finest Hour 148 dedicating its cover to me to mark my 88th birthday. Thank you so much.
The Lady Soames LG DBE, London

Ambidextrous?

In FH 148: 34, Churchill is holding what appears to be a paint brush in his left hand. Since he was right-handed, was he ambidextrous, or was the picture printed the wrong way round?
Rodney Croft, England

• The picture is not “flopped,” and we asked David Coombs about this when we saw it. We concluded that either Churchill occasionally touched something up left-handed, or that the thing in his left hand was a steadying rod used as a support for his right hand when painting fine detail, which is sometimes seen in other photos of him at the easel. —Ed.

Churchill and Hitler

Manfred Weidhorn’s remarkable analysis (FH 148: 26-30) showing the numerous similarities of Hitler and Churchill—from being artists to not knowing how to surrender—linked together these shared traits in a way I have not seen before. There is one other similarity: Hitler like Churchill gained high office by democratic process. It wasn’t until Hindenburg retired that Nazism took full effect.
Richard C. Geschhke, Bristol, Conn.

• Professor Weidhorn replies: Good point, though to be precise, the Nazis never obtained a majority vote under the Weimar Republic (the maximum was 43.9% in the March 1933 election), while the Conservatives did. Hitler was head of the party and so automatically projected into power, while Churchill was on the margins and was only belatedly and grudgingly given power. There probably are other similarities I overlooked. I just tried to hit the big ones, as an exercise in life’s ironies. Thank you for your observation and for the kind words.

The Summer of ’41

After Hitler invaded Russia, Clementine Churchill sponsored the British Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. Aged 13, I assisted by running a local lending library, carrying a bag of books around on my bicycle and lending them to neighbours at one penny per week. Over a few months I lent 504 books and was able to contribute two guineas to the fund.

Little did I know that ten years later I would be taking the Prime Minister’s wife out to dinner at a local hostelry in my capacity as chairman of the Woodford constituency Young Conservatives. I still have Mrs. Churchill’s letters of thanks.
John R. Redfern, Epping and Woodford Branch, Churchill Centre UK