Table of Contents, Glow-Worm #23, Third quarter 2014 Oscar

Table of Contents, Glow-Worm #23, Third quarter 2014
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Oscar Nemon’s bust of the late Mary Soames
Portrait of Violet Bonham Carter
Bookworm’s Corner
The editor’s review of Poy’s Churchill
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As First Lord of the Admiralty, 1912
The Cairo Conference , March 1921
Churchill’s article Cartoons and Cartoonists
On being given the Treasury (Chancellor of the Exchequer) in November
1926
The 1926 Budget
The 1927 Budget
Accent on the WIN
Professor Paul Addison’s review of David Reynolds’s In Command
of History
Bookworm’s Corner for young readers
Editorial Introduction
Kathryn Selbert WAR DOGS
David Dilks Sir Winston Churchill
Churchilliana
Churchill’s use of ‘Speech Form’
‘Speech Form’ in his books and articles
The True Glory of the Army of the Somme
Oscar Nemon’s bust of the late Mary Soames.
This photograph was taken in Mary’s home in London,
in 2007. (Copyrght: Aurelia Young, Nemon’s daughter)
“We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm”
Winston to the young Violet Asquith at a dinner in the early summer of
1906, in her book Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (page 16).
Winston was thirty-one at the time, Violet was nineteen .
De Laszlo’s portrait of Violet Bonham Carter
Bookworm’s Corner
Blackwell’s bookshop, Oxford, 1950,
by Sir Muirhead Bone (1876-1953)
Lexicographical note:
Samuel Johnson’s two definitions of the word ‘bookworm’ in his
Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755:
1. A worm or mite that eats holes in books, chiefly when damp
2. A student too closely given to books; a reader without judgment
However, the Oxford English Dictionary, while including Dr. Johnson’s
first definition, refers to a bookworm as
‘One who seems to find his chief sustenance in reading,
one who is always poring over books.’
This definiton is the one which has always been adopted in the pages
of Glow-Worm.
The editor’s review of Poy’s Churchill
This small collection (68 pages) of Poy’s cartoons of Churchill was
compiled posthumously by Poy’s nephew H. B. Fearon. It was published in
1954 as a tribute for Churchill’s eightieth birthday.
The book explains that Poy was the pseudonym for Percy Hutton
Fearon, who was born in Shanghai on September 6th, 1874, seven weeks
before Churchill’s birth. But the book does not explain how Percy Fearon
came to use the pseudonym ‘Poy’.
All is revealed in Mark Bryant’s excellent entry for Percy Hutton
Fearon (1874-1948) in volume 19 of the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. When Percy was two years old, the Fearon family moved to Staten
Island, New York, where his father took over the branch of the family
business on Wall Street.
Percy began to draw cartoons as a schoolboy. From December 14th,
1892 he studied at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan. It was here that
the local New York pronunciation of his name by fellow students gave rise
to his pseudonym, Poy.
In an article published many years later, in the Evening News on June
23 , 1913, Percy Fearon explained how it came about:
rd
‘The college boys called me ‘Poy-see’ with the accent strongly on
the first syllable. My brothers took that first syllable as a short
name for me.’
(Editorial note: ‘Poy’ pronounced as in the word ‘Toy’, with a
New York City accent)
Over the next 34 years of newspaper work, Poy drew about 10,000
cartoons, a record for a political cartoonist.
As First Lord of the Admiralty, 1912
(Editorial note: Churchill pinning three penny coins on an able seaman
After six years’ service, seamen in the Royal Navy were given an extra three
pence an hour…)
The Cairo Conference, March 1921
Churchill’s article Cartoons and Cartoonists
Extract:
I was sent out to Cairo as Colonial Secretary to settle the
fortunes of Palestine and Mesopotamia. (see also Martin Gilbert’s
Official Biography of Winston Churchill volume IV, page 556) I had
no sooner got to Cairo than the political situation in London,
which had seemed halcyon calm, broke up into a cyclone.
Mr. Bonar Law’s health and spirits collapsed and he resigned.
I had taken my paint-box to Cairo, and while the
Conference was working under my guidance I made some lovely
pictures of the Pyramids. Of course, I was neglected in all the
rearrangements which took place in London.
Lord Northcliffe [owner of the Daily Mail] was delighted
with this cartoon. He sent me the original. He was particularly
pleased with the little Arab newsvendor. He thought it splendid.
He roared with merriment as he pointed out its beauties to me.
I accepted the gift with a stock grin. Of course, it was only a joke,
but there was quite enough truth in it for it to be more funny to
others than to oneself. (Reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures pages
16-17, Amid These Storms in America )
On being given the Treasury (Chancellor of the Exchequer) on
November 6th, 1924, Prime Minister Baldwin looking on.
The 1926 Budget:
The 1927 Budget:
Accent on the WIN
Professor Paul Addison’s review of David Reynolds’s In Command of History:
Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane,
2004)
At the end of the Second World War Churchill was hailed
as the saviour of his country and more widely as the saviour of
freedom and democracy. He basked in the applause, but long and
painful experience of the vicissitudes of politics had taught him
that memories were short and reputation a highly perishable
commodity. The lesson was reinforced by his defeat in the
general election of July 1945, but, as his wife predicted, it turned
out to be a blessing in disguise. Opposition set him free to fight a
battle that would ensure his place in history for decades to come:
the battle of the war memoirs. He embarked on a six-volume
history of the Second World War to which he brought all the
energy and vision, and the aggressive political skills, of his war
leadership. It was a literary campaign which ended with a decisive
victory for Churchill over his most deadly opponents, old age and
the clock. Exhaustive research has enabled David Reynolds to
reconstruct the story in a compelling narrative abounding with
fresh insights and evidence.
This is more than a book about a book. It is a portrait of its
author and his multifarious character. During the Second World
War Churchill was a patriotic public servant who drove himself
to the brink of exhaustion in pursuit of victory. This was the role
in which he wished to be remembered by posterity, but there
were earthier aspects of his personality on which Reynolds is very
illuminating. The Churchill of his pages was also a buccaneering
entrepreneur with an appetite for enormous sums of money, a
literary predator who exploited and appropriated other people’s
work, and a historical manipulator who suppressed or adapted
the evidence to suit his political purposes. In the hands of
Churchill’s detractors this would doubtless add up to a telling
indictment of a myth-making hypocrite. What Reynolds gives us
is a rounded and realistic picture of a great man with the defects
of his qualities.
Churchill would have agreed with Dr. Johnson that “no
man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” He had
always lived by his pen, driving hard bargains with publishers and
media magnates. Reynolds shows how he exploited his growing
fame during the war to raise extra cash from pre-war books and
speeches. There was, however, a major obstacle in the way of
Churchill’s resumption of an authorial career after the war —
penal rates of tax on high incomes. He was not prepared to pay
income and surtax at a marginal rate of 19s 6d in the pound to
the Inland Revenue, and it seems unlikely that he would have
written The Second World War but for an ingenious scheme
whereby he gave his papers to the Chartwell Trust, which then
sold the literary rights and employed the tax-free income
generated for the benefit of his children and grandchildren.
Reynolds implies that Churchill received no income from the
Trust, but according to the official biography he was entitled to
£20,000 a year, double the salary of the Prime Minister, to cover
his living and literary expenses.
In marketing the rights Churchill had no need to engage in
unseemly wrangling. He relied on the hard-nosed skills of his
unofficial literary agent, Emery Reves, and the friendship of Lord
Camrose, the owner of the Daily Telegraph. Reynolds computes
that the literary rights to The Second World War—published by
Cassell in Britain and Houghton Mifflin in the United States, with
serialisation in the Telegraph and Life magazine—were sold for a
figure worth somewhere between eighteen million and sixty
million dollars in today’s money, depending on the method
adopted for calculating inflation.
Churchill’s American publishers signing the deal of the
century in May 1947, from left to right: Henry Laughlin of
Houghton Mifflin, Julius Ochs Adler of The New York
Times, and Andrew Heiskell of Life. (In Command of History
— Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University).
Churchill was a law-abiding citizen who operated within the
rules, but the rules were frequently bent in his favour, and at his
request. His use of government documents was a case in point.
When he returned to office as First Lord of the Admiralty in
September 1939 he ordered that his minutes and telegrams
should be printed at regular intervals, an arrangement that
continued throughout his war premiership. It was suspected with
good reason in Whitehall that he intended to make use of the
documents when he came to write his memoirs after the war. But
were they his to dispose of? The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward
Bridges, wanted to enforce a rule adopted in 1934 whereby
ministers on leaving office were required to leave behind them all
official papers. His deputy, Norman Brook, warned that
Churchill would never accept this, and the War Cabinet agreed in
May 1945 that ministers could take away documents they had
written themselves, and would be free to publish them provided
they had the approval of the government of the day.
Churchill, therefore, left office with a complete wartime set
of key documents which served as the backbone of his memoirs.
In theory the Attlee government could have prevented their
publication but as Reynolds explains, there was never any
question of this. On the contrary Norman Brook, who succeeded
Bridges as Cabinet Secretary, treated Churchill’s memoirs as
though they were virtually an official history, popularising
Britain’s contribution to victory and counteracting American (and
Russian?) claims to have won the war single-handedly. Churchill
and his research team enjoyed the assistance of the Cabinet
Office, including almost unlimited access to wartime files. In
return Churchill was the most co-operative of authors, submitting
drafts of the book to be vetted by the Cabinet Office, the Foreign
Office and the intelligence services. The overriding consideration
in Whitehall was the need to ensure that Churchill’s memoirs
were in harmony with the interests of Britain’s Cold-War defence
and foreign policies. The Second World War was therefore a semiofficial history and, with Attlee’s blessing, an exercise in post-war
consensus.
Churchill correcting proofs of his memoirs in his study at
Chartwell, in 1947 (In Command of History — Getty
Images)
To assist him in writing the book Churchill gathered
together a team of researchers, who became known as ‘the
Syndicate.’ The principal members were William Deakin, an
Oxford historian, General Pownall, who had been Mountbatten’s
Chief of Staff in Burma, and Commodore Allen, a senior naval
officer. Surprisingly, perhaps, the drafts and memoranda they
prepared, together with materials supplied by Brook, Ismay and
others, have been preserved in abundance in the Churchill
papers. Having gone through the materials with a fine toothcomb
Reynolds is able to show that Churchill’s advisers and assistants
wrote many parts of the book. The tone, structure and overall
interpretation were unmistakeably Churchillian and so too were
many of the set pieces and personal recollections, but it would
have come as a great surprise to readers at the time to learn that
the passages on the emergence of Hitler, the evacuation from
Dunkirk, the rise of Japan, the Dieppe raid, the war in Burma,
and numerous other topics, had been written by others.
Furthermore the ghost writers soon acquired the habit of writing
in the first person singular and imitating Churchill’s style. Seven
pages on the tensions between Churchill and Cripps over the
machinery of defence policy in the autumn of 1942 were actually
the work of Norman Brook. ‘My long experience in these
matters,’ Brook made Churchill say, ‘had taught me that a
Minister of Defence must work with and through responsible
advisers.’
Dennis Kelly and Gordon Allen, members of the
‘Syndicate’ of researchers, at Chartwell in August
1953. Rufus II next to Churchill. More about Rufus II
(In Command of History — Churchill Archives Centre)
In retrospect Churchill’s method of organising and leading a
collective project looks perfectly sensible, and Reynolds argues
that it does not diminish his standing as an author. But the
impact of the book has always owed a great deal to Churchill’s
apparent mastery of military history, and the illusion of a literary
genius composing every word. Though the book still ranks as one
of Churchill’s most remarkable achievements, Reynolds’s analysis
deals another blow to the Churchill myth of the forties and fifties.
“History will say that the Right Honourable Gentleman is
wrong in this matter,” Churchill is alleged to have said after an
argument with Baldwin in the House of Commons. “I know it
will, for I shall write the history.” He did indeed write the history
and more to the point he got his version in first. With Roosevelt
dead and Stalin keeping his secrets, he was the only one of the
allied war leaders in a position to give an authoritative account of
the ‘Grand Alliance.’ On the British side his only possible
competitors were Eden, who lagged behind in the race, and Alan
Brooke, who was spurred into action too late to halt the mighty
juggernaut in its tracks. Churchill stamped his interpretation of
the Second World War on the minds of a generation, and even
now British historians find it hard to know exactly what to make
of the Churchill version. Reynolds has given us, for the first time,
the technical and intellectual resources we need for a detached
historical assessment.
He takes us through The Second World War volume by
volume, explaining the circumstances in which each was written,
the ways in which Churchill interpreted and manipulated the
evidence, and his motives for doing so. We see the war Churchill
waged, in parallel with the war as he reconstructed it, and the war
as historians understand it today. Churchill, of course, was driven
by a desire to vindicate himself before history. ‘He was trying,’
Reynolds writes, ‘to shift perceptions of himself from the man of
words to the man of deeds.’ One of the most interesting of his
discoveries is the extent to which Churchill was plagued by
doubts that surfaced in early drafts but were subsequently
deleted. The first of his volumes, The Gathering Storm, gave a
highly distorted and partisan account of the 1930s which
reflected the prevalence of the ‘guilty men’ thesis, Churchill’s
bitterness at his exclusion from office, and the failure of Baldwin
and Chamberlain’s biographers to mount a robust defence of
their subjects. In one of the early drafts, however, Churchill
admitted his ‘incredible neglect’ of the tank in the 1930s: “In my
conscience I reproach myself for having allowed my
concentration upon the Air and the Navy to have absorbed all my
thought.” In the first draft of his account of the Norway
campaign of April 1940 he wrote: “It was a marvel—I really do
not know how—I survived and maintained my position in public
esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor
Mr. Chamberlain.” Also revealing are the wartime documents
Churchill omitted from the record, though the reasons why are
sometimes a puzzle. Why, for example, did he exclude his minute
about the bombing of Auschwitz? And was it from a sense of
guilt, or mere political expediency, that he gave so little space to
the strategic bombing offensive, and deleted references to ‘terror
bombing’?
In Command of History is a work as nuanced and complex as
the text it analyses, but lucid and fascinating throughout. Nothing
in the book conveys the complexities better than Reynolds’s
analysis of the Anglo-American dimensions, on which he writes
with exceptional authority. Churchill was a fervent believer in the
concept of the ‘special relationship’ and his book was intended to
demonstrate the need for closer Anglo-American co-operation in
the post-war world. But Anglo-American relations had been
troubled by a number of contentious issues including American
hostility to the British Empire. Churchill was also under attack in
the United States from writers who claimed that he had been
opposed to a cross-Channel invasion and had fought hard to
delay or prevent the opening of a Second Front. He was trying,
therefore, to defend himself against his American critics, but he
also had a case to make against Roosevelt, Truman and
Eisenhower. Writing as the Cold War intensified, he sought to
show that he had been more far-sighted about the Soviet threat
than American policy-makers, whom he blamed for allowing the
Red Army to enter Berlin, Prague and Vienna before the British
and the Americans. But Churchill could not afford to offend
Truman, who remained President until 1952, or his successor,
Eisenhower. It was a measure of Churchill’s skill in the handling
of so much dynamite that he managed in The Second World War to
assert his own claims while maintaining cordial relations with the
Washington Establishment—and marketing the book in the
United States. He could only achieve this, however, by practising
some economy with the truth. In particular his claims to have
been a consistent supporter of a cross-Channel invasion were
misleading. In October 1943, we learn, Churchill and the Chiefs
of Staff came close to abandoning operation Overlord. Churchill
even set out a dream-like scenario for a British strategy
independent of the Americans.
It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Churchill as
Reynolds, with his mastery of the sources and the historiography,
deconstructs chapter after chapter with a rigorous audit of the
great man’s errors, omissions and spin-doctoring techniques. I
had the impression at times that Churchill was always
manipulating the evidence or getting it wrong. Reynolds, for
example, comments that Churchill paid little attention to the
eastern front, neglecting the crucial role played by the Red Army
in the achievement of victory. But Churchill’s main theme,
following the thread of his minutes and telegrams, was the British
war effort. His mistake was to expand what were essentially his
war memoirs into a history of the war as a whole and to do so in
a half-hearted fashion in which the eastern front—like America’s
war in the Pacific—was dealt with in perfunctory fashion.
Reynolds does acknowledge that The Second World War
possessed substance as well as spin, but he could perhaps have
given the substance greater emphasis. Churchill’s book was
Anglo-centric, egocentric, and artfully constructed. Nevertheless
his six volumes, published at intervals between 1948 and 1954,
represented a quantum leap in historical knowledge. There was
much selection and editing of the documents, but Churchill also
published in complete and original form a wealth of primary
source materials that would otherwise never have been available
to historians until the 1970s. If Churchill commanded history, it
was partly because of this extraordinarily bold act which ran clean
contrary to Whitehall traditions of secrecy, and opened up his
record to critical scrutiny. Churchill has often been accused of
publishing his minutes and telegrams without publishing the
replies. Here Reynolds does come to his aid by pointing out that
Attlee discouraged Churchill from publishing documents written
by other officials, especially the Chiefs of Staff.
“These six volumes,” wrote J.H. Plumb in 1969, “require
the most careful assessment, and one not yet made: soon,
however, the scholars must get to work, and what a task they will
have!” In spite of Plumb’s injunction, Churchill the writer and
historian has been comparatively neglected, while Churchill the
statesman has been intensively researched and debated. David
Reynolds has redressed the balance in a work of superb
scholarship which has now received the recognition it deserves
with the award of the Wolfson Prize.
This review first appeared in Cercles in 2005. The editor of Glow
Worm thanks Paul Addison and Cercles for their permission to
reprint it.
Bookworm’s Corner for young readers
Editorial Introduction
This new Glow-Worm column is aimed at young readers,
between the ages of 10 and 16. More than fifty books have been
identified as being of interest to young readers — books by
Winston Churchill, and books about Churchill. There will be a
mix of books for different ages, for girls and for boys. Many of
the books were specifically written for young readers; others have
been selected because the content — the mix of text, photos and
illustrations — make them suitable for young readers.
Most of the books to be reviewed in this new column can
be bought as affordable second-hand copies on the popular book
websites — such as Bookfinder.com, ABEbooks.com,
ABEbooks.co.uk etc. If some of the second-hand books are too
expensive, the young reader always has the option of asking
his/her local library to obtain a copy.
Kathryn Selbert WAR DOGS Churchill & Rufus
Kathryn Selbert is an author and illustrator of books for children.
She lives in Fairfield, Connecticut (as did the editor of Glow-Worm
in the early 1970s when he was working in NYC).
The title of her book WAR DOGS is about the bulldog Winston
Churchill and his miniature brown poodle Rufus during the
Second World War. Selbert’s paintings grace every page, along
with appropriate Churchill quotations ‘pinned’ to the page. For
example:
The ‘plan’ was the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The
quotation comes from Churchill’s speech in the House of
Commons on June 6th, 1944, announcing the invasion:
I have also to announce to the House that, during the night
and the early hours of this morning, the first of the series of
landings in force upon the European Continent has taken
place…
Source: The Dawn of Liberation, Churchill’s war speeches in
1944, page 105.
The story of the Bulldog and his miniature poodle in the Second
World War forms the body of this beautifully illustrated book.
But there is much more — in the second half of the book there
are explanatory pages of the greatest interest to young readers:
• A TIME LINE of the years 1939-1945. This has been
designed with great skill; it is of interest to all readers,
young and old.
• OF CHURCHILL AND POODLES. Selbert tells us about
Paprika (Rufus I) and about Winston’s love for animals,
from parakeets to horses. (Editorial note: After the first
Rufus died just after the end of the war, Houghton Mifflin
(Churchill’s American publishers of his 6 vol memoirs The
Second World War ) bought him a second brown miniature
poodle, who came to be known as Rufus II. Click here to
see a photo of Rufus II)
• THE MAN HIMSELF a one-page sketch of Churchill’s life
• BOOKS FOR YOUNG CHURCHILL FANS
• CHURCHILL AND WORLD WAR ii — RELATED
WEBSITES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• QUOTATION SOURCES for each of the fourteen
Churchill quotations cited in the book.
Selbert’s WAR DOGS was published in 2013 at $17.95. Many
second-hand copies in ‘as new’ condition are available on sites
such as Bookfinder.com and ABEbooks.com for $10-$12.
Professor David Dilks Sir Winston Churchill
David Dilks, for many years Professor of International
History at the University of Leeds, is best known by Churchillians
for his seminal book about Churchill and Canada The Great
Dominion 1900-1954 first published in 2005. More recently, in
2012, he wrote Churchill and Company, Allies and Rivals in War and
Peace — illuminating insights into Churchill’s relations with many
of his contemporaries: Roosevelt, Stalin, Mackenzie King, de
Gaulle, Eisenhower, to name only a few.
Less well-known is a most enjoyable small book for young
readers Sir Winston Churchill, published in 1965, the year Churchill
died. As early as the second page of the book Dilks paints a
picture of ‘a mischievous, restless and naughty boy’ whom any
young reader can identify with:
It was indeed surprising that Winston Churchill ever
went on to Harrow School at all, for when he sat the
entrance examination he discovered that he could not
answer a single question in the Latin paper. At the top of
the sheet he wrote his name, and in the margin the figure 1.
After much thought, he put brackets around the figure 1
and then for two hours looked at the otherwise blank paper.
When he handed it in, a few blots of ink had appeared from
nowhere. However, he was in.
Dilks took this story from the second chapter of Churchill’s
book, My Early Life (first published in 1930, a book which all
Churchill readers, young and old, enjoy.) In My Early Life
Winston tells how he was placed in the bottom form. Since he
entered Harrow as Spencer-Churchill he found that he was also
near the bottom of the alphabetical School List.
I was in fact only two from the bottom of the whole
school; and these two, I regret to say, disappeared almost
immediately through illness or some other cause.
Of his unhappy years at Harrow Dilks writes:
The one great advantage which he did derive from his years
at Harrow was a deep knowledge of the English language.
He was taught to break each sentence up into its parts, and
thus got into his bones the essential structure of the
ordinary English sentence. For this benefit he would be
extremely grateful.
Dilks quotes a tribute to Churchill made by General Alan Brooke,
Churchill’s chief military adviser:
He is quite the most wonderful man I have ever met, and it
is a source of never-ending interest studying him and getting
to realize that occasionally such human beings make their
appearance on this earth — human beings who stand out
head and shoulders above all others.
Dilks mentions a meeting in Moscow when, after Churchill had
banged his fist on the table while explaining passionately
everything Britain had done in the war thus far, Stalin had said:
“I do not understand what you are saying but, by God, I like
your spirit.”
Appropriately, one of the last entries in Sir Winston Churchill is
Churchill’s brief ‘This is your Victory’ speech from the balcony of
the Ministry of Health building in Whitehall on VE-Day May 8th,
1945 [VE= Victory in Europe]:
God bless you all. This is your victory! (Editorial note: the
crowd roared back: “No — it is yours”). It is the victory of
the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history
we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man
or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither
the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the
enemy, have in any way weakened the independent resolve
of the British nation. God bless you all.
Sir Winston Churchill is a short book, only 94 pages; the Dilks style
is lucid, easy to read. For example, he explains the complicated
and controversial Dardanelles operation in the First World War
in a few well-written paragraphs.
In addition, his choice of photos is excellent — 1) a photo of
Churchill at the Central Flying School in 1914, 2) inspecting the
ruins of the House of Commons in May 1941, and 3) Churchill
crossing the Rhine in March 1945:
Mr. Churchill crosses the Rhine, March 25th, 1945.
Behind him are Generals Simpson, Alan Brooke and Monty.
Churchilliana
Churchill’s use of ‘Speech Form’
When dictating important speeches and broadcasts, Churchill’s
secretaries knew that, in most instances, they had to type them doublespaced in ‘Speech Form’ — ‘blank verse’. One of his secretaries
Elizabeth Nel (née Layton) explained Churchill’s use of Speech Form
in her book Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, published in 1958:
I learned how Mr. Churchill liked his Minutes typed, always in
double-spacing… I learned how to do Speech Form, the way he
liked his speeches and broadcasts typed out — a special method
he had evolved through the years, with various recognised
abbreviations, and the lines arranged in phrases so that the
finished product looked rather like hymn sheets (Mr. Churchill’s
Secretary pages 29-30)…Speech Form would look like this:
We cannot yet see how deliverance will come
or when it will come,
but nothing is more certain
than tt every trace of Hitler’s footsteps,
every stain of his infected
and corroding fingers,
will be sponged and purged
and, if need be, blasted
fr the surface of the earth
This extract in Speech Form, (from Mr. Churchill’s Secretary page 52)
is from Churchill’s Speech to a Conference of Dominion High
Commissioners and Allied countries’ Ministers at St. James’s Palace,
London, June 12th, 1941 (Source: The second volume of Churchill’s
War Speeches The Unrelenting Struggle, Cassell edition, page 171, and
page 163 in the Little, Brown and Company American edition).
Almost all of Churchill’s speeches and broadcasts appeared as
normal text rather than Speech Form when printed.
However, the notes for his ‘The Fall of France’ speech, during a
Secret Session in the House of Commons on June 20th 1940, were
never converted from Speech Form to normal text. The actual words
of this Secret Session speech were not recorded at the time — they are
not in Hansard, nor were they printed in the first volume of
Churchill’s War Speeches Into Battle, nor in Robert Rhodes James’s
Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches. When compiling his book
Secret Session Speeches (Cassell, 1946) the editor Charles Eade chose to
reprint the notes for the speech in the original Speech Form. Here are
three pages from that book:
Secret Session Speeches, page 10
Secret Session Speeches, page 14
Secret Session Speeches, page 16, the closing remarks.
Speech Form in his books and articles.
Churchill’s concept of Speech Form applies not only to his key speeches
and broadcasts, but also to his books and articles. By way of example,
here is the last paragraph in Chapter VII The Battle of the Somme, in the
third volume of The World Crisis (1916-1918 Part 1):
The True glory of the British Army of the Somme
A young army, but the finest we have ever marshalled; improvised
at the sound of the cannonade, every man a volunteer, inspired not
only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human
freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny, they grudged
no sacrifice, however unfruitful, and shrank from no ordeal, however
destructive. Struggling forward though the mire and filth of the
trenches, across the corpse-strewn crater fields, amid the flaring,
crashing, blasting barrages and murderous machine-gun fire, conscious
of their race, proud of their cause, they seized the most formidable
soldiery in Europe by the throat, slew them, and hurled them
unceasingly backward. If two lives or ten lives were required by their
commanders to kill one German, no word of complaint ever rose from
the fighting troops. No attack, however forlorn, however fatal, found
them without ardour. No slaughter, however desolating, prevented
them from returning to the charge. No physical conditions, however
severe, deprived their commanders of their obedience and loyalty.
Martyrs not less than soldiers, they fulfilled the high purpose of duty
with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the
graveyards of Kitchener’s army. The flower of that generous manhood
which quitted peaceful civilian life in every kind of workaday
occupation, which came at the call of Britain, and, as we may still
hope, at the call of humanity, and came from the most remote parts of
her Empire, was shorn away for ever in 1916. Unconquerable except
by death, which they had conquered, they have set up a monument of
native virtue, which will command the wonder, the reverence and the
gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among
men.
The editor’s transcription of the above paragraph to Speech Form:
A young army,
but the finest we have ever marshalled;
improvised at the sound of the cannonade,
every man a volunteer,
inspired not only by love of country
but by a widespread conviction
that human freedom was challenged
by military and Imperial tyranny.
They grudged no sacrifice,
however unfruitful,
and shrank from no ordeal,
however destructive.
Struggling forward
through the mire and filth of the trenches,
across the corpse-strewn crater fields,
amid the flaring, crashing, blasting barrages
and murderous machine-gun fire,
conscious of their race,
proud of their cause,
they seized the most formidable soldiery in
Europe
by the throat,
slew them, and hurled them
unceasingly backward.
If two lives or ten lives were required
by their commanders to kill one German,
No word of complaint ever rose
from the fighting troops.
No attack, however forlorn, however fatal,
found them without ardour.
No slaughter, however desolating,
prevented them from returning to the
charge.
No physical conditions, however severe,
deprived their commanders of their obedience and
loyalty.
Martyrs not less than soldiers,
they fulfilled the high purpose of duty
with which they were imbued.
The battlefields of the Somme
were the graveyards of Kitchener’s army.
The flower of that generous manhood
which quitted peaceful civilian life
in every kind of workaday occupation,
which came at the call of Britain,
and, as we may still hope,
at the call of humanity,
and came from the most remote parts of her
Empire,
was shorn away for ever in 1916.
Unconquerable except by death,
which they had conquered,
they have set up a monument of native virtue,
which will command the wonder,
the reverence and the gratitude
of our island people
as long as we endure as a nation among men.
The village of Mametz, captured by the 7th Division on July 1st, 1916,
published in the George Newnes illustrated edition The Great War,
volume II, page 912. Mametz was retaken by the Germans in the
March 1918 offensive, being again occupied by the British in the
autumn of that year.
This entry about VE-Day in May 1945 is the last item in
this Third Quarter 2014 issue of Glow-Worm.
Click here to return to the Table of Contents
The editor of Glow-Worm is Jim Lancaster — jimlydtom@gmail.com