April 17, 2013

DESPATCH BOX: FINEST HOUR 152, AUTUMN 2011

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FH 151 COVER

Mr. A.J.J. Delehanty writes: “Did the Admiralty actually issue this Christmas card? On Christmas Day 1941, HMS Prince of Wales was on the bottom of the sea.” Fair point, but the Admiralty Christmas card was printed and in use before the sinking. At right, the inscription on the inside of the card, which we probably should have run in the previous issue.

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QUOTATIONS: PM TO PM

In Australia the Labour minority government is staying in power by acceding to demands by the Green Party, which has a handful of seats. At the last election the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, promised not to introduce a carbon tax but has now done so in an attempt to maintain the government (her popularity has dropped to 27%). She has been trying to justify her change in mind by misquoting Churchill. My letter below was published in July. Gillard was, in fact, misquoting J.M. Keynes, who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

• Editor, Sydney Morning Herald: Like many who would associate themselves vicariously with Sir Winston, Ms. Gillard has sought to justify her “change of mind” with a false quote from the great man. She said, “I think it was Winston Churchill who said if the circumstances change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

She would have helped herself much more if she had repeated his statement in the House of Commons on 24 October 1935. In discussing the international situation he remarked: “We live in such a febrile and sensational age that even a month or two is enough to make people not merely change their views, but forget the views and feelings they entertained before.”
ALFRED JAMES, WAHROONGA, N.S.W.

Editor’s response: Churchill was not quite free of the vice you document. Accused in 1952 of having changed his position he replied: “My views are a harmonious process which keeps them in relation to the current movements of events.”

“IRON CURTAIN”

In “Datelines” in FH 150, David Freeman writes: “Churchill also coined the ‘iron curtain’ phrase.” Well, he immortalized it, rather. But Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels used the same phrase a year before Churchill included it in his 1946 Fulton speech. Goebbels wrote in Das Reich: “If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.”
—SIDNEY ALLINSON, VICTORIA, B.C.

Editor’s response: It was not David Freeman but his student who made that statement (in an essay asserting that WSC received help in World War II from “Dr. Who”). However, Churchill did “coin” the phrase as applied to the postwar world. He first used it nine months before Fulton, though it was then already twenty-five years old! A letter from Prof. Russell Jones at Westminster College, Fulton (FH 69, Fourth Quarter, 1990) explained:

“In ‘A New Look at Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech‘ (The Historical Journal 22:4, 1979, page 897) Henry B. Ryan states that Ethel Snowden used the phrase on a 1920 visit to the USSR (see her book, Through Bolshevik Russia, London: 1920, page 32); and that Goebbels used the phrase twice in 1945. Churchill, as you know, first used it in two telegrams to Truman on 12 May and 4 June 1945.”