April 5, 2013

DATELINES: FINEST HOUR 154, SPRING 2012

By Elliot S. Berke

Abstract:

‘Debate has become largely meaningless…The two great party machines are grinding up against each other…each party argues that it is the fault of the other…to prolong the process indefinitely is the loss of all.”

-WINSTON CHURCHILL, BROADCAST, LONDON, 17 MARCH 1951

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WINSTON IS (ALMOST) BACK

WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 19TH— The House of Representatives adopted a resolution, HR 497, calling for the installation of a Churchill bust in the Capitol building. The resolution was adopted on suspension, a legislative technique which limits debate on non-controversial issues but requires either a voice vote (as in this case) or a two-thirds recorded vote. No Senate action was required, since each side of the Capitol chooses its own artwork.

The resolution was sponsored by John Boehner (R-Oh.), a rare act for a Speaker of the House. Mr. Boehner told Finest Hour: “Winston Churchill was the best friend America ever had. I just felt it was time he found permanent residence in the Capitol the way he has found a permanent place in our common history.” In a similar vein, there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the London park across from Parliament.

Boehner timed the vote to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Churchill’s first address to Congress (Churchill would go on to address Congress in 1943 and 1952, the record holder for most addresses by a foreign leader). His December 1941 speech, three weeks after Pearl Harbor, had its own climacteric: “Now we are the masters of our fate…as long as we have faith in our cause and an unconquerable will-power, salvation will not be denied us.”

The cynical among us will see this as another belated retort to the return of the Epstein Churchill bust, on loan to former President George W. Bush, by President Obama in early 2009. The occasion produced a considerable press frenzy in the United States (see see FH 142:7). More recently, the former White House bust made a cameo appearance during the Republican presidential primary season. Governor Mitt Romney, when asked what he would bring to the White House, replied: “Winston Churchill used to have his bust in the Oval Office. And if I’m president of the United States, it’ll be there again.” You can’t keep a good bust down.

—Mr. Berke co-chairs the Political Law Group at McGuire Woods LLP and was formerly counsel to Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

CRUISE SHIP NON-QUOTE

JANUARY 20TH— All over the Internet is a false Churchill quote relating to the recent disaster of the fated cruise ship Costa Concordia. Churchill, cruising the Mediterranean on an Italian liner, is asked why he chose an Italian ship.

“There are three things I like about being on an Italian cruise ship,” Churchill supposedly says. “First, their cuisine is unsurpassed. Second, their service is superb. And then, in time of emergency, there is none of this nonsense about women and children first.”

We had fifty queries about this in the first month after it hit and had a bet we wouldn’t see the last until Easter. Amusing to some, anathema to others, including relatives of the Costa Concordia passengers and many embarrassed Italians, this is NOT by Winston Churchill. Some have attributed it to Noël Coward, but the Quote Investigator tracks it to travel writer Henry J. Allen in 1917. It did appear in a book of alleged Churchill quotes which—as invariably is the case when false quotes are published—provides neither authority nor attribution.

What is certain is that Churchill nowhere said this; nothing like it appears in his canon. Churchill’s words to his wife about the Titanic disaster, 100 years ago in April, serve to show how out of character would be his remarks now circulating the Internet:

“The strict observance of the great traditions of the sea towards women and children reflects nothing but honour upon our civilization….I cannot help feeling proud of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boat loads of women and children tossing on the sea—safe and sound—and the rest Silence. Honour to their memory.”

MINER’S FRIEND

ABERAVON, WALES, FEBRUARY 23RD — Collier John Williams met Churchill in the trenches of World War I, and in the late 1920s Churchill helped Williams find a job when he fell on hard times, the BBC revealed tonight. Williams’ grandson Peter recalled:
“My grandfather lost his work in the coal mine. He wrote to Churchill to ask for work….” Churchill, then touring California, replied, “I am extremely glad that you have obtained a post under the government as a result of my intervention. When I return to England in the middle of November, perhaps you will write again and let me know how you are getting on. Naturally, I would do anything I could, but I have—of course—no influence with the present [Labour] government.”

Churchill may have been out of office, Williams said, but he still had clout. His grandfather found a job in the Ministry of Labour. John Williams was so grateful that he named his son after WSC, calling him Robert Winston Spencer Williams.

Producer Euros Wyn could not resist adding his opinion that all this was very ironic, since, during the 1910 Tonypandy riots, “Churchill sent troops onto the streets to support the police against the miners”—a canard uttered by Richard Burton, but repeatedly exploded by historians for the past forty years.

FRIEND OF MINERS

LONDON, FEBRUARY 1ST— The descendants of photographer Arthur Knight have offered for auction an allegedly unknown photo of Churchill in South Africa just after his escape from the Boer prison camp at Pretoria. But as military historian Douglas Russell advises us, this is quite an old chestnut, having appeared in R.G. Grant’s Winston Churchill (London: Bison, 1989), 37 In the photo, WSC is mounted on horseback and surrounded by troops of the South African Light Horse, where he was attached as a war correspondent.

His hair-raising escape story was told in his London to Ladysmith (1900), more fully in his autobiography My Early Life (1930), and with new research in Celia Sandys’s Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive (2000).

FOILED AT TEHERAN?

MOSCOW, JANUARY 10TH— Gevork Vartanian, who claimed to have foiled a German plot to assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, died at 87; he was buried in his native Armenia. Vartanian, a Soviet operative from 1940 through the early 1990s, was 19 in autumn 1943, when Hitler approved Operation Long Jump, an assassination plot headed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Vartanian’s group of youthful agents, known as the “light cavalry” for their fast deployment (often on bicycles), located six German radio operators in the holy city of Qum, 40 miles south of Teheran, who were communicating with Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. When the six were arrested, the agents allowed one to pass the news to Berlin. According to Vartanian, this made the Germans decide the mission was too compromised to continue.

Finest Hour asked Roosevelt-Churchill scholar Warren Kimball to confirm the story. “The Soviets long claimed that they had foiled such a plot,” he writes. “I recall mentioning the claim in my volumes of Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence (1984). More details have come out in the last decade or so. I’m no expert on those details but it’s not likely the Russians have put out scholarly assessments. They are still reluctant (as is our CIA) to declassify documents.”

NOT A ZIONIST?

TEL AVIV, JANUARY 9TH— The Churchill Society of Israel, a Churchill Centre affiliate supported by Sir Martin Gilbert, will serve Israelis with an interest in Sir Winston, according to Russell Rothstein, an American immigrant behind the plans: “Churchill’s long- standing support of Zionism and friendship with the Jewish people make it particularly appropriate that the modern state of Israel have a local organisation devoted to his memory and to preserving his thoughts, words and deeds for future generations.”

Sir Martin Gilbert writes: “Churchill was very familiar with the Old Testament. He wrote about the Children of Israel who understood and adopted ideas which even ancient Greece and Rome, for all their power, failed to comprehend. He was familiar with the Zionist ideal and supported the idea of a Jewish state.”

But Israeli Professor Eli Shaltiel, who claims to be a Churchill scholar, disputes Churchill’s credentials: “He was no stranger to the latent anti-semitism of his generation and class….he lost interest in Zionism after his close friend Lord Moyne was assassinated by Stern Gang extremists in Cairo in November 1944.” —TIM WALKER IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

• FH’s opinion: Churchill, who had many close Jewish friends throughout life, was a Zionist from the time he represented the heavily Jewish constituency of Manchester North West in 1908. As Colonial Secretary in 1921 he strove for a Jewish homeland in Palestine (which few remember was 6/7ths Arab, consisting of modern Jordan as well as Israel). In the 1930s he stridently spoke against Hitler’s pogroms and the British government’s anti-Semitic Palestine White Paper. His speeches from 1948 to 1955 were replete with pro-Israel sentiments. Ever the optimist, he hoped for reconciliation between Arabs and Jews.

But Churchill was not an uncritical friend. Outraged when his friend Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), Minister Resident in Cairo, was shot with his driver by members of the terrorist Stern Gang on 5 November 1944, Churchill suggested the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, should impress upon Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that the Jewish Agency “do all in their power to suppress these terrorist activities.” Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill, volume 7, records his speech to the Commons at that time: “If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease, and those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch.”

The Israeli e-zine Haaretz further quotes Shaltiel as saying “Churchill made a number of anti-Semitic statements.” Which statements, and when? It is hard to reply to this sort of unattributed, unspecific, unsubstantiated er, mishegas.

On his 75th birthday Churchill received a message from David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: “Your words and your deeds are indelibly engraved in the annals of humanity. Happy the people that has produced such a son.”

“KING’S SPEACH” NOW ON STAGE

GUILDFORD, SURREY, FEBRUARY 10TH— “At Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud theatre, playwright David Seidler had more room to explore the story’s historical background than the award-winning cinema version (FH 150:44) allowed,” writes Michael Billington in The Guardian.

Billington adds: “Seidler underplays Churchill’s machinations that would have seen him become leader of ‘a King’s Party’ that would have opposed Baldwin’s government and torn the country apart.”

The “King’s Party” notion is urban myth caused by loose reading of facts. Martin Gilbert’s document volumes to the official biography, containing Churchill’s communications at the time, make it clear that while WSC was happy to embarrass the Baldwin government, he was too smart a politician to think they could be dislodged by a third or fourth party.

Churchill’s main motivation was his misplaced loyalty to a Sovereign. Unlike most politicians, he later admitted that he had been wrong.

SAVING WAR HORSES

LONDON, DECEMBER 31ST— In a well-researched article in The Mail on Sunday, Chris Hastings offers a subtext for the new Spielberg film “War Horse“: the story of how Churchill helped save tens of thousands of stranded war horses in Europe after World War I, characteristic of WSC’s love of animals:

“British military chiefs were heavily dependent on horsepower to carry men, supplies and artillery, and spent more than £36 million during the war to buy up 1.1 million horses from Britain, Canada and the U.S. War Office documents found in the National Archives at Kew show that tens of thousands of the animals were at risk of disease, hunger and even death at the hands of French and Belgian butchers because bungling officials couldn’t get them home when hostilities drew to a close.

“Churchill, then aged 44 and Secretary of State for War, reacted with fury. In a strongly worded missive dated 13 February 1919, Churchill told Lieutenant-General Sir Travers Clarke, then the Army Quartermaster-General: ‘If it is so serious, what have you been doing about it? The letter of the Commander-In-Chief discloses a complete failure on the part of the Ministry of Shipping to meet its obligations and scores of thousands of horses will be left in France under extremely disadvantageous conditions.'”

Churchill’s intervention led to extra vessels being used for repatriation, and the number of horses being returned rose to 9000 a week. For the story see here.

OVERRATED!

LONDON, JANUARY 5TH— BBC History magazine decided to ask British historians to name the most overrated people in history. The answers: Charles Darwin, Spartacus, Malcolm X, Napoleon, Mary Queen of Scots—and Winston Churchill! This is new? People were calling Churchill overrated as early as 1915, and the cacophony has scarcely stopped since.

Former BBC journalist Christopher Lee joins the long line of people who think Churchill overrated: “If it had not been for the fact that he led Britain to victory in the Second World War, we would have scant memory of [him].”

This is like saying that if Lincoln hadn’t freed the slaves, he would be forgotten. Churchill’s problem is that what he did in 1940 so eclipsed everything else that people cannot grasp the rest of his career. Had Churchill’s urgings been followed, and what he called the “unnecessary war” avoided, he would still be in the history books as the early 20th century’s highest paid writer, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Marlborough and The World Crisis, an endlessly fascinating statesman and orator involved for good or ill in all the great reform movements from the Welfare State to Indian independence.

Ah, but never mind. Almost simultaneously, a poll for “the best English gentleman” found WSC topping the list, ahead of Prince William, Michael Caine and Roger Moore. (See “Around & About,”) RML

CASTAWAY ROBERT HARDY

LONDON, NOVEMBER 25TH— Honorary Member Robert Hardy took his turn selecting favorite music on “Desert Island Discs.” The BBC weekly programme, heard since 1942, asks a celebrity to imagine being a cast away on a desert isle and allowed only eight audio records, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and one luxury (excluding sailboats, yachts and rafts).

Beloved by us for his seven appearances as the consummate Churchill—as well as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films, Siegfried Farnon in the classic “All Creatures Great and Small,” and Shakespeare roles seriatim, Hardy chose Pearl Bailey’s “What Is a Friend For?“; Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in A Major (2nd Mvmt.); Enya’s “The Longships“; Hector Berlioz’s waltz from the “Symphonie Fantastique“; Francis Poulenc’s “Suite Française“; Sibelius’ 6th Symphony in D Minor (4th Mvmt.); and Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat (2nd Mvmt.)

Set aside an hour to listen to our friend’s dialogue on the programme. Particularly amusing is what the young Judi Dench told him happened when he kissed her years ago in “HenryV“—and how elegantly he expresses it. The video is here.

• Trivia question: Who was the first castaway on “Desert Island Discs“? Sarah Churchill’s husband, musician-comedian Vic Oliver, on 27 January 1942, according to Alex Hudson in BBC News for January 27th.

TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR

LONDON, NOVEMBER 23RD— A press kerfuffle attended the sale at Christie’s, by one of the Colville family, of a Churchill photograph inscribed for Stalin in 1944.

The message was called “embarrassingly fulsome, written as it was during the month of the Warsaw Rising; and unless we are to convict WSC of unalloyed insincerity, it follows that he was still labouring under very substantial delusions about Stalin….”

FROM HIS FRIEND WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, SEPTEMBER 1944 TO MARSHAL & PREMIER STALIN WHO AT THE HEAD OF THE RUSSIAN ARMIES & OF THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT BROKE THE MAIN STRENGTH OF THE GERMAN MILITARY MACHINE & HELPED US ALL TO OPEN PATHS TO PEACE, JUSTICE & FREEDOM

Aside from the fact that the message was mainly true, one wonders what WSC should have said instead? “To his enemy Marshal Stalin, who, by withholding aid in their valiant fight for their native soil, massacred the Poles at Warsaw”? Churchill’s pleas to FDR for support to the Poles are on record.

Officialdom is always sending each other bouquets—Olmert to Abbas, Hilary Clinton to Qaddafi, Reagan to Gorbachev, Obama to Netanyahu, von Ribbentrop to Stalin—while wishing privately that the other would just die. We really can’t muster more than a yawn to manufactured controversies

ONE-WOMAN CSC PLAY

HERTFORD, HERTS., FEBRUARY 3RD— There have been several one-man Churchill performances, but to our knowledge never a one-woman Clementine show, until this stage production, “My Darling Clemmie,” at the Hertford Theatre. Rohan McCullough, who played an excellent Clementine in “The Gathering Storm” is in the title role. Hugh Whitemore directed both.

Through the memories of an older Clementine, the audience is taken on a journey of the couple’s emotional and political harmony in their early years together and how their relationship becomes increasingly fraught owing to wider political forces, Churchill’s rise to power and the changes in his manner as events develop. —HERTFORDSHIRE MERCURY

VIDEO TROVE AVAILABLE

LONDON, FEBRUARY 17TH— Pathé News, one of the world’s oldest and largest repositories of vintage news footage, unveiled 3500 new hours (half a year of 24/7 viewing) of video prominently featuring Winston Churchill.

The site brings up hundreds of fascinating Churchill items, including speeches, appearances and tours, such as the following: Army maneuvers, 1927; WSC atop the Empire State Building as a guest of former New York Governor Al Smith, 1932; Randolph Churchill’s wedding to Pamela Digby, 1939; Churchill in Ottawa, 1941; WSC’s visit to the Mideast, 1943; WSC with Stalin, Eden and Molotov in Moscow for the “Tolstoy” talks, 1944; and WSC’s election statement, 1945. One of the earliest items, dated 1924, is headlined, “Winston Loses by 45 Votes.”

The films can be viewed online at no charge and permanent downloads can be purchased. Still photos are included and each film is accompanied by notes identifying the date, place and featured personalities.

British Pathé began producing its biweekly newsreels in 1910 and accumulated over 90,000 items by the time production came to an end in 1970. Its material has been used around the world in television programs, advertisements, corporate productions and, most recently, in web publishing.

THE NEW CHURCHILL?

NEW YORK, JANUARY 5TH— No sooner did President Obama get through comparing himself with Lincoln, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, than a candidate to replace him, Newt Gingrich, began to be compared to Churchill by pundits trying to explain his rise in the polls. The idea is that Gingrich like Churchill was a failed politician who only became viable when his nation was in extremis. And now another candidate, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, declared that while he “wouldn’t even say my name in the same breath,” he really was like Churchill because he never gave in: “…they did run me out of town in Pennsylvania….

[I was] saying words like Churchill back then but they didn’t want to hear it….” Will politicians kindly stop pretending to be someone else and just concentrate on being who they are?

DRIVING MISS NANCY

MODBURY, DEVON, JANUARY 1ST— The Daily Mail reports restoration of a 1923 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost “once used by Sir Winston Churchill” by Devon restorer Charlie Tope: “The vintage motor is said to have served the former British Prime Minister when he used it to give driving lessons to the first female MP, Lady Astor, on a Kent estate.” Indeed! Churchill, a notoriously impatient and fairly scary driver who would sometimes take to the pavement (sidewalk) when halted in traffic jams, mainly stopped driving himself in the 1920s, when he was last seen navigating London streets in a lowly Wolseley. The idea of Churchill in this big Rolls, teaching technique to Nancy Astor (with whom he barely shared a civil word), strains the imagination, though it does conjure up some amusing images.

SLOOP WC REMEMBERED

SYDNEY, JANUARY 5TH— The 15-meter sloop Winston Churchill is one of several Churchill namesake vessels to have carried a heroic crew. The venerable sailboat, the oldest vessel named for Sir Winston, sank during the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in 1998, but all hands were rescued. The heroism of her crew matches that of the USS Winston S. Churchill, the most famous bearer of the name now afloat.

The story of their survival, writes Paul Kalina in the Sydney Morning Herald, is part of a new film by Graham McNeice on Australians who defied narrow brushes with death, aired on Australia’s Foxtel Bio Channel. Originally a yawl, the Winston Churchill was built of huon pine by Percy Coverdale of Hobart, Tasmania in 1942. Restored at the cost of A$360,000 by Richard Winning, she was sloop-rigged with a new aluminum mainmast. Mr. Winning was not interested in winning: he sailed for “a bit of recreation—gentleman’s ocean racing,” when he began entering the Churchill in races. We covered his effort in Finest Hour 100:6 under the title, “We’re Only Here for the Beer.”

POLISH PROTEST

SOUTH RUISLIP, MIDDLESEX, JANUARY 12TH— One Paul Bonowicz protested at the A40 roundabout, saying he was against “the lies which were put in British books about Churchill….I am Polish and we know he betrayed Polish people….He knew about the Holocaust, he knew Jewish people were dying, but he didn’t help. After the war there was a deal between Churchill and Stalin, and the price was Poland. Part of my country was sold to the Soviets. It was Churchill who decided which part….”

• FH’s opinion: Churchill did know about the Holocaust, did try to do something about it—and was the only allied leader who did. See Leading Churchill Myths and Sir Martin Gilbert’s 1993 Holocaust lecture, “The Possible and the Impossible”.

In 1938 as a result of Munich the Teschen District of Czechoslovakia was “sold to the Poles,” who happily took it. At the close of World War II Churchill first protested, then acquiesced, and ultimately agonized over shifting of Poland to the west: “I think a mistake has been made, in which the Provisional (Communist) Government of Poland have been an ardent partner,” he told the Commons on 16 August 1945.

With the Red Army occupying all of Poland by 1945, there was little Churchill could do except hope (forlornly) that Stalin would make good his promise of free elections. Of Poland Churchill sadly observed in August 1945: “There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess—and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.”

CHURCHILLIAN FRANK

LONDON, JANUARY 23RD— Frank Sinatra was a Churchillophile, according to Paul Sexton, who produced a BBC documentary on Sinatra’s only album recorded outside America, “Frank Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain,” featuring composers like Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. Sinatra asked that WSC paint a portrait for the album’s cover: When this was denied, “he made do with a silhouette of Big Ben.”

This jibes with the late bodyguard Sgt. Edmund Murray’s account of intervening with an admirer at Monte Carlo in the late Fifties: “…I recognized him immediately but I had already begun to ask him, very politely, if I could help him. ‘That’s okay,’ he said, ‘I’m just going to say hello to my friend Sir Winston.’ The voice was very American. ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I’m from Scotland Yard and as you can see, Sir Winston is engaged in conversation at the present moment and cannot be disturbed. Could I have your name, please?’ If looks could kill, I would have been dead immediately, as the man glared at me, then turned and walked out of the Casino. It was Frank Sinatra.”

ERRATA

Finest Hour 152: On page 15, column 2, it is not certain that Churchill spoke about “being hanged” to a reporter at a press conference; in footnote 16, reference should be McGowan’s first edition (London: Souvenir Press, 1958), not the Pan Books 1959 edition.

Finest Hour 153: On page 39, column 1, top, Winant was born in 1889 not 1899 and his biographer was not John Bellushi but Bernard Bellush. On page 45, column 2, top, the reference to “America’s Churchill Museum” in Fulton is incorrect and should read “the National Churchill Museum,” a title granted by the U.S. Congress.