September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 05

Wooing Maidens

Edwina Sandys asked us when her grandfather said something like, “I wooed Roosevelt more ardently than a young man woos a maiden.”

Sir Martin Gilbert writes, in the official biography, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1946-1965 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 416: “After dinner Churchill talked of the visit he and Colville had made to the Rhine in March 1945….Speaking of the AngloAmerican disputes over the question of a Second Front in the Cotentin in 1942, Winston said, ‘No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.’”

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Prof. Warren Kimball reminds us that after Pearl Harbor, Churchill commented that he no longer would speak to America in terms of courtship. Replying to a colleague who had urged a cautious approach to the newly belligerent U.S. he quipped: “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!” Alanbrooke’s diaries record this comment on 9 December 1941. See Arthur Bryant, ed., The Turn of the Tide 1939-1943 (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 231.

Incidentally, at Chequers in March 1943, Churchill also spoke of wooing the Maiden Stalin. From Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), 743:

“As he recovered from his pneumonia, Churchill was in reflective mood, telling the editor of The Times, Robin Barrington-Ward, who found him ‘pink, fresh in colour, hardly a wrinkle, voice firm, all his usual animation and emphasis.’” WSC said: “I shall come out of the war an old man. I shall be seventy. I have nothing more to ask.” Churchill’s thoughts then were on the future of a Europe dominated by Russia. “I have wooed Joe Stalin as a man might woo a maid,” he added. He would favour a postwar confederation of the smaller states of Europe, “I do not want to be left alone in Europe with the bear.”

Pat And Hitch

Mr. Joseph Clemmow asks: “Have you published any ‘Wit and Wisdom’ about the criticisms of Churchill and British participation in World War II by the American Pat Buchanan and the British Peter Hitchens? I had an online quarrel with the latter over his articles endorsing Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.”

When this question appeared on Churchillchat, Rafal Heydel-Mankoo mentioned  a recent American radio “Tom Woods Show,” which interviewed Buchanan. Personally I am fond of Pat. Sir Winston Churchill said, “I like a man who smiles when he fights.” Being an equal opportunity researcher, I even helped him check some points for his book. He sent me an inscribed copy, and I sent him one of mine. It wasn’t my fault, as I told him, that he chose to put the wrong spin on everything and quote Churchill out of context!

Our responses to Buchanan were the articles on pages 6 and 13-21 in Finest Hour 139, Summer 2008. The same issue also tackled Nicholas Baker’s melodrama, Human Smoke. You can read the pdf at: http://bit.ly/1ruJIhu.

Mr. Peter Hitchens used to be known as “the good Hitchens.” He is brother to the late Christopher, but comes at things from a different angle. There are three references to Peter on The Churchill Centre website: enter “peter hitchens” in the search box.

We also took on Mr. Christopher Hitchens when he wrote some silly stuff in The Atlantic. It was like shooting fish in a barrel: http://bit.ly/RQxY8G.

One cannot really get too upset about this sort of thing. There is a grain of truth to some of it, of course, since the war didn’t end in the brave new world Churchill, Roosevelt and the rest hoped it would. But iconoclasts operate using clear hindsight, are well paid to do so, and are good at keeping the pot bubbling. —RML