October 17, 2008

Compiled and annotated by Douglas J. Hall

In declaring Winston Churchill an Honorary Citizen of the United States, President Kennedy said (quoting Ed Murrow), “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” The President was referring in particular to 1940, but Churchill’s stimulating use of his native language was constant throughout his long and distinguished life. Language has two forms, written and spoken. Churchill was a master of both. As a journalist, essayist, author, novelist, historian, biographer, editor, correspondent, communicator, conversationalist and speaker he had few equals in any one of those fields, much less all of them. He has been described as a law unto himself in his use of words, as in so many other matters.

In 1906, Churchill addressed the annual dinner of the Authors’ Club:

        Authors are the happy people in the world, whose work is pleasure. No one can set himself to the writing of a page of English composition without feeling a real pleasure in the medium in which he works, the flexibility and the profoundness of his noble mother tongue. The House of Commons may do what it likes, and so may the House of Lords; the American market may have its bottom knocked out, the heathen may rage in every part of the globe; Consuls may fall, and the suffragists rise, but the author is secure as almost no other man is secure. I have sometimes fortified myself amid the vexations, vicissitudes and uncertainties of political life by the reflection that I might find a secure line of retreat on the pleasant, peaceful and fertile country of the pen, where one need never be idle or dull.

Those spoken words, as written words, read just as well as they must have sounded to that gathering over ninety years ago.

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Churchill spoke and wrote with a rhythm which made it almost poetical. He arranged his notes for his speeches in a format closely resembling blank verse. Although he was never a prolific poet himself he greatly enjoyed poetry and had a remarkable capacity to commit to memory copious lines of verse which he loved to recall and recite at appropriate moments. In his writings and speeches he regularly quoted lines from Macaulay and was still able to recite long passages from memory well into extreme old age.

Winston Churchill was truly a poet at heart. A little book was published years ago with a similar title to this article, but contained nothing by him. This little collection, compiled with the help of his daughter, presents the poems he is known to have composed himself. They are taken from Churchill Canto, a larger work by this writer, as yet unpublished, containing a selection of verse with which Churchill was in some way associated.

“The Influenza” was written by the fifteen-year-old Churchill in 1890 when he was a pupil at Harrow School. For his effort he received a House Prize which went some way towards redeeming his position, both with his schoolmasters and his parents who had been less than impressed by his recent behaviour and scholastic achievement. The poem is remarkably accomplished for a fifteen-year-old and gives an early glimpse of Churchill’s command of language, his sense of history and his impish humour. It was published in The Harrovian, the Harrow School magazine, fifty years later on 10 December 1940, when the “Famous Old Harrovian” had become quite a celebrity. See Winston Churchill and Harrow by E. D. W Chaplin (Harrow School Bookshop, 1941).

Churchill’s term of endearment for his wife, Clementine, was Pussy Cat. He often embellished his letters to her with small drawings of cats. In April 1924 Winston, assisted by the children, moved into Chartwell. These lines were in a letter to Clementine who was in Dieppe. See Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (1998).

As a child Mary Churchill had a pet pug called “Punch.” One day Punch became desperately ill. Mary and her sister Sarah were disconsolate. Their father composed this ditty to comfort them and all three sang it together to the ailing dog. Lady Soames adds that the treatment worked! Published by permission of Lady Soames from Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (London: 1967).

Walter Graebner, Churchill’s Life editor, writing in My Dear Mr. Churchill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) related how, after dinner at Chartwell one evening he and his wife were discussing the use of sleeping pills with Winston and Clementine. Churchill, with an impish grin, addressed Mrs. Graebner with this impromptu piece of doggerel.  Not great poetry, but the kind of thing Churchill was very good at — and which pleased him hugely.

    
In Painting as a Pastime (London:Odhams 1948) Churchill used the rare, possibly unique, combination of French and verse to explain his preference for painting in oils rather than water-colours.

Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s Private Secretary 1952-65, quotes this example of WSC’s impromptu verse in Long Sunset (London: Cassell 1995, reprinted by kind permission). Mr. Montague Browne believes that this “schoolboy” verse may have been Churchill’s own composition. Such “high poetic flights,” he says, did not reflect enmity or contempt, but did not reflect much high esteem either!