December 12, 2016

Finest Hour 174, Autumn 2016

Page 04

By David Freeman, November 2016


Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic more times than most people did before the age of jet travel. His connections with North America spanned his whole life from his first visit at the age of twenty to his last visit more than sixty years later. Many of these trips involved stops in both Canada and the United States—for both nations were tremendously important in his worldview.

Terry Reardon outlines Churchill’s evolving views about the Great Dominion and how it insistently challenged his understanding about the relationship between Britain and an Empire that was becoming a Commonwealth. How Churchill first began to profit from his North American connections is explained by Bradley Tolppanen, while Elizabeth Churchill Snell traces the Churchills’ early family history, how it crossed the Atlantic—and how it returned.

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If Churchill’s imperial world remained largely centered on London, it still included room for imperial thought and strategy. Andrew Stewart explains that Churchill was the driving force behind the creation of the Imperial Defence College, or the Royal College of Defence Studies, as it has since become known.

Working the Anglo-American angle for financial gain could be dodgy. Lady Randolph Churchill’s mercurial literary effort as editor of the Anglo-Saxon Review may have failed, but, as Fred Glueckstein shows, it did bring together mother and son in a collaboration that published some of the biggest names on both sides of the Atlantic. Churchill had more luck with film. Although he often said that he made his living by his pen, it was the film rights to his writings that ultimately provided him financial security. David Lough examines how Hollywood made Churchill’s fortune, although Churchill never made much fortune for Hollywood—at least during his own lifetime.

Misunderstandings about Churchill’s career abound. One of the less important but persistently wrong impressions handed down through the years is that he was relentlessly hostile, even vindictive, towards the 1951 Festival of Britain. Iain Wilton explodes this myth by taking a good look at the record and finding the benign truth.

One indisputable fact about Churchill, however, is that he was easily moved to tears. This made him somewhat unusual for his time and class, but Andrew Roberts investigates this propensity to lachrymosity and finds it both moving and one of the sources of Churchill’s strength as a leader and humanitarian.

Finally, we are honored to present an original contribution from the present Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. The Rt. Hon. Eleanor Laing MP considers Churchill’s views of the House in more ways than one.

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