March 20, 2015

“Circulation sluggish”

During the spring the first volume of The Second World War, The Gathering Storm, was published (over 200,000 copies) and work began on the second, Their Finest Hour. Walter Graebner and Emery Reves helped Churchill with the former and William Deakin headed up the team of researchers for the latter. L~fr began publishing its excerpts in April. The book was also serialized in the Daily Telegraph, the Glasgow Herald and The New York Times.

John Colville visited Churchill, who took the opportunity to express his views about a couple of his wartime colleagues and allies. About Montgomery, Churchill spoke scathingly of Monty’s self-advertising stunts and said that “he presumed British soldiers would soon have to be called Monties instead of Tommies.” With regard to the issue of the Americans and the second front, Churchill said: “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt”

Lord Moran wrote: “When I examined Winston’s retinal arteries with my ophthalmoscope, I found definite hardening of the vessels, but not more than I one would expect after the stress of the war years. There is plenty of evidence that his circulation is sluggish”

Three of Churchill’s oils (Blenheim Tapestries, Goldfish pool, Chartwell and The Blue Sitting Room, Trent Park) were accepted by the Royal Academy and given prominent display. Churchill was also elected honorary Academician Extraordinary of the Royal Academy, the first Briton to receive this honour. He revealed that his magnificent moral for his war memoirs—”In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will”— was written for a monument in France, but had been rejected.

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He spoke at the Annual Conference of the Central Women’s Advisory Committee, at the Royal Albert Hall, London on “This Country Needs a New Parliament.”At a Pilgrims’ Dinner at the Savoy Hotel he paid tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt.

In a speech to the Congress of Europe at the Hague he said “We shall only save ourselves from the perils which draw near by forgetting the hatreds of the past, by letting national rancours and revenges die, by progressively effacing frontiers and barriers which aggravate and congeal our divisions, and by rejoicing together in that glorious treasure of literature, of romance, of ethics, of thought and toleration belonging to all, which is the true inheritance of Europe, the expression of its genius and honour, but which by our quarrels, our follies by our fearful wars and the cruel and awful deeds that spring from war and tyrants, we have almost cast away.” He later spoke in Amsterdam and Oslo.

Clementine was not well and was away from Chartwell recuperating when she received the following from her husband: “Darling: You did promise Sept 12, 1908 To Love, Honour and Obey. Nowherewith are Orders: 3:15 You come here to rest, 7:30 Dinner, 8:30 Journey to 28, 9:40 Bed and a read. given at Chartwell GHQ The Tyrant.”

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