Summarizing the life of a man who accomplished so much and positively affected so many is an impossible task. Fortunately, he documented much of it himself — 726 blog posts remain as a testament to his passion for history, automobiles, and the enduring legacy of Sir Winston S. Churchill. His work extended beyond this site with dozens of books, written or edited, and hundreds of published magazine and journal articles. Fittingly, his final blog post was titled Life and Living — an apt reflection of a man who lived with purpose and determination.

Alas, I am unqualified to provide even the smallest biography. His contributions about classic English and American cars are too numerous, and his dedication to Churchill’s legacy defies summary. I can only gesture towards his 2005 speech at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, in which he discusses Churchill’s The Dream. That speech exemplifies his best traits: passion for his work, encyclopedic knowledge, and a sense of humor that usually landed. But beyond his work, he was a father, a husband, and a friend.

I will always remember my father in his true habitat: in an office, hunched over a keyboard, typing with profuse concentration and surrounded by the hundreds of books, magazines, and other memorabilia that inspired and helped define him. His office wasn’t messy, just crammed full of meticulously organized knowledge with every reference at his fingertips.

How I wish to see him at home and happy once again, whether feet up and cigar in hand on the deck of his house in Eleuthera, or feeling proud and exhausted after returning from another bike ride, or grinning triumphantly after a decisive roll in Settlers of Catan. I’ll forever retain my fond memories of the room-sized model train set we built in the barn, or the tall plumes of snow firing from his tractor as he cleared the driveway in New Hampshire winters, or biking with him through the hills of California’s wine country. I’ll sorely miss sharing a dram of Scotch, a hearty snack, and recalling a scene from one of our favorite movies.

I have been, and always shall be, your friend. Live long and prosper, Dad.

— Ian Langworth

Richard M. Langworth is survived by his wife, Barbara; his son, Ian (Emily); and his grandchildren, Michael and Aiden.

Edit: Kind words were also expressed at The Churchill Project by Hillsdale College and on the Antique Automobile Club of America forums.

Q: On life and living

If I want to understand Sir Winston Churchill’s philosophy of life and living, what books would you recommend? —B.A., via email

A: Lengthy sources

At first your question reminded us of the old fraternity initiation technique: asking pledges an unanswerable question. I remember mine personally: “Tell us your philosophy for living among men.” This was an intentional red herring. Whatever you answered, it obviously would never satisfy the questioner!

But in pondering the thought, there very definitely is a body of work that helps answer your query. Please use the Hillsdale Churchill Project’s online annotated bibliography for details and notes on books mentioned,  or to search for others in the same field. Search for key words like “philosophy.”

Churchill Style by Barry Singer

The book to start with is Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill. Author Barry Singer owns Chartwell Booksellers and will sell you an inscribed copy—along with copies of other books below, many of them inscribed by the authors.

Churchill Style expertly discusses Churchill’s philosophy of life and how he lived it. Mr. Singer has a unique approach. He considers nine facets of Churchill that were the essence of his style: autos, books, cigars, dining, fashion, friendships, home, imbibing and pastimes. (I”m glad he included cars—there are amusing stories there.)

The publisher, Harry Abrams, is well known for elegant productions, so Churchill Style is an heirloom, finely printed and bound and laden with full color illustrations, including rare first editions of Churchill’s books. It is a book readers will refer to often. Mr. Singer’s Hillsdale lecture on the subject is accessible here.

No More Champagne by David Lough

Churchill (or his friend F.E. Smith) was known to have declared, “Winston is a man of simple tastes. He is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.”

With no inherited wealth, WSC had to earn enough to finance his pleasures, remarking, “I lived from mouth to hand.” The standard work on his finances is David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money. Reviewing this book for Hillsdale, Michael McMenamin wrote:

Ploughing fresh ground, Lough offers a well-written, deeply researched text about Churchill’s finances, and how they affected his politics. As private as some may regard personal finances, the book does not detract from Churchill’s greatness or humanity. It is an absorbing story about an extraordinary man ensuring his financial survival with one hand, while warning about the danger to, and then leading the fight for, Western Civilization with the other. Uniquely, Churchill did both.

Churchill’s Bestiary by Piers Brendon

Animals were important in Churchill’s life. He was always surrounded by pets—or, at least, animals he thought of as pets. He was fiercely loyal to those he “knew personally,” and liked to use animal analogies in his speeches. Fortunately for students of his life, 2019 brought us a comprehensive book devoted to the subject: Piers Brendon’s Churchill’s Bestiary reviewed here. From my review:

This is an encyclopedic account of Churchill’s life with animals, starting with “Albatross” and ending in “Zoos.” That spans only a fraction of Piers Brendon’s comprehensive book. He avoids repeating material in previous accounts, and goes much deeper into the subject.

Most of the anecdotes have not appeared previously and are thus quite valuable. Mr. Brendon deeply investigates each species. The text is sprightly and readable, “unputdownable.” Anyone interested in this aspect of Churchill’s life owes it to themselves to buy a copy.

In his own words

For Sir Winston’s own comments on his philosophy of life, see the chapters “Personal Matters” and “Tastes and Favorites” in my book, Churchill by Himself aka Churchill in His Own Words. Here are quotations relating to Churchill personally: his character, habits and family, and his prescriptions for living life to the full, which he certainly did.

Many quotations speak to his political and personal characteristics, some with a high degree of frankness. Reactions to election results, and thoughts about his being variously a Conservative and a Liberal, are pithy and pointed. Of course his domestic existence always came second after politics. But family life was a rousing, warm affair, except for his occasionally tempestuous relationship with his son Randolph.

WSC’s comments to and about his wife Clementine, the best of which I trust are here, would make a perfect series of greeting cards for any husband wondering how to express himself. Their daughter Mary gave testimony to her father’s favourite maxim describing his marriage: “Here firm though all be drifting.”

What strikes me about these quotations as a group is what one of his secretaries said about Churchill: “He was so human, so funny—that always saved the day.” Marshal Tito, a most perceptive man, was once asked what most struck him about WSC. “His humanity,” Tito said immediately. “He is so human.”

Philosophy of politics

If your interest extends to political life there are three chapters in Churchill by Himself containing quotations on war and the two World Wars. Another chapter covers “Political Theory and Practice.” Also, there are at least two powerful scholarly studies of his political philosophy that should be part of the serious library.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill’s Political Philosophy (1981) is rare but worth seeking out. (Try bookfinder.com,) It is based on a Gilbert lecture which uniquely captured Churchill’s attitudes toward politics and government. WSC’s overriding doctrine, Gilbert says, can be summarized in five words: “His quarrel was with tyranny.”

Likewise excellent on political philosophy is Larry Arnn’s Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Survival of Free Government. As a bonus, this book contains WSC’s essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” From the book review by Justin D. Lyons:

Churchill studies reveal important lessons that remain powerfully relevant for the leaders and citizens of free societies. This notion is itself founded on the belief that though the threats to civilization may have altered since Churchill’s day, there is consistency between his challenges and ours—that he is a good guide to follow in the cause of defending freedom.

Such a belief must lie behind any conception of history as providing guidance. If these commonalities do not exist, neither Churchill’s story, nor history in general, has anything to say to us now. This is a unique and important work on Churchill’s political thought.

Addenda

These books focus closely on your question, though we could go on naming specialized studies. For example, who were the mentors who made Churchill what he was in life? For three such individuals, see Michael McMenamin’s “Churchill’s Mentors,” Part 1 of which is posted here, with links to two more parts.

Churchill’s life was long and occupies the authors of over 1200 books, not including the thirty-one volumes of Official Biography. Many contain exaggerations, and it is well to look out for them. For just one such example see “On Churchill’s ‘Sybaritic’ Lifestyle” (2016).

We hope this answers your question and provides at least a start on a complicated but intriguing subject.

“Blood, Sweat and Gears”: Churchill as Motorist

1: “Mors the Pity,” 1900s-1920s.

2: “Daimlers and Austins,” 1930s.

3: “There’s Safety in Humbers,” 1940s-1960s.

“Driving Miss Nancy: Nipped in the Astor Bar,” 2022.

”Winston could not possibly be an alcoholic. No alcoholic could drink that much.” —C.P. Snow

Alcoholic rambles

Updates from 2009-2010. A reader asks whether William Manchester was being factual or just cute when he wrote that Churchill was not an alcoholic, despite the quantities WSC is alleged to have consumed. Manchester wrote:

The legend that he is a heavy drinker is quite untrue. Churchill is a sensible if unorthodox drinker. There is always some alcohol in his bloodstream and it reaches its peak in the evening after he has had two or three scotches, several glasses of champagne, at least two brandies, and a highball.

Manchester was right in general but wrong in the details. Churchill had an impressive capacity for alcohol, but nobody saw him put that much away in one evening. Field Marshal Alanbrooke several times wrote that the boss was plastered—but Brookie wrote a lot of bad-tempered things in his diary late at night when he was tired and frustrated from arguing over strategy.

A dearth of proof

None of his family or friends ever saw Churchill the worse for drink. Only once do we have reliable testimony otherwise: Danny Mander, one of his bodyguards at Teheran, recalled escorting a well-lubricated Churchill and Anthony Eden home after a lengthy series of toasts with the Russians. Even then, Mander was careful to note: “They were not ‘falling down drunk,’ just singing songs and feeling good.”

Churchill’s alcoholic intake was exaggerated, not least by himself. Whatever the amount, it was not enough to affect him. He began young. Until age twenty-five, he wrote in My Early Life, he had found whisky repugnant.  Then in 1898, he joined the Malakand Field Force on India’s Northwest Frontier:

[T]here was nothing to drink, apart from tea, except either tepid water or tepid water with lime juice or tepid water with whisky. Faced with these alternatives I “grasped the larger hope.…” Wishing to fit myself for active-service conditions I overcame the ordinary weaknesses of the flesh. By the end of these five days I had completely overcome my repugnance to the taste of whisky.*

*WSC, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 140-41.

“The Papa Cocktail”

Churchill nursed “a bit of whisky” daily and for hours. His daughter Mary once mixed for me what she called “The Papa Cocktail.” You cover the bottom of a tumbler with a thimbleful of scotch, then fill it with water. Not even any ice! I thought the result was quite disgusting. (She agreed.) 

Churchill’s private  secretary, Jock Colville, referred to this concoction as “scotch-flavoured mouthwash.” A glass of it was almost always at his elbow, sipped from time to time—giving outsiders the impression that he was addicted.

It is simply not so. In his autobiography, WSC is for once candid on his drinking: “I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk—except on very exceptional occasions and a few anniversaries.”

Exaggerations

Certainly Churchill liked to fan his high capacity. A frequent declaration was: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” Enemies from Labour politicians to Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels took this to suggest a red-nosed drunk. Churchill was occasionally wont to play the role.

“Prof!” he often exclaimed to his scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann over dinner. “Pray calculate the amount of champagne, whisky and other spirits I have consumed in my life and tell me how high it would reach in this room.”

The Prof would take out his slide rule and pretend to calculate: “I’m sorry Winston, it would only come up to a few inches.” On cue Churchill would reply: “How much to do—how little time remains!”

Some who exaggerate his drinking like to quote his famous encounter with Bessie Braddock MP. Accosting Churchill leaving the House of Commons, she claimed he was “disgustingly drunk.” Churchill retorted that Bessie was “disgustingly ugly….but tomorrow I shall be sober and you shall still be disgustingly ugly.”

His bodyguard at the time, Ronald Golding, told me this exchange actually took place. But, he added, “Mr. Churchill was not drunk, just tired and wobbly.” Nor was WSC’s response original. In the 1934 film It’s a Gift, the W. C. Fields character, when told he is drunk, responds: “Yeah, and you’re crazy. But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.”

A shunner of pipes?

A reader sent me a Daily Telegraph article stating that Churchill occasionally smoked a pipe as a break from cigars: “I can find no reference to him having ever smoked a pipe—can you?” I cannot.

I think the Telegraph story is a stretch. There is no testimony to Churchill ever smoking a pipe. There are indications that he deplored pipe smoking (though he tolerated it from Sir Arthur Tedder). Some believe this arose through his antipathy (which grew in the early 1930s) to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

By looking for Baldwin references, I found a key cigar-and-pipe standoff between Churchill and “SB” in 1924, when they were on better terms, in Martin Gilbert‘s Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, page 59 quoting Churchill (from an unpublished note) after the 1924 general election. Baldwin was forming his new Conservative government:

I was shown into the Prime Minister’s office. After a few commonplaces I asked him whether he minded the smoke of a cigar. He said “No,” and pulled out his famous pipe. Then he said “Are you willing to help us?” I replied guardedly, “Yes, if you really want me.”

I had no intention of joining the Government except in some great position, and I had no idea—nor had anyone else—what was in his mind. So when he said, “Will you be Chancellor of the Exchequer?” I was astonished. I had never dreamed my credit with him stood so high…. I should have liked to have answered, “Will the bloody duck swim?” but as it was a formal and important conversation I replied, “This fulfils my ambition….”

Undoubtedly at that point, Churchill would have happily smoked Baldwin’s pipe himself.

What about cigarettes?

There are indications that he deplored Virginia cigarettes, though he smoked stronger cigarettes early in his youth and at least once later. I was a proofreader for Paul Reid’s Defender of the Realm 1940-1965, the third volume of The Last Lion. In it I found the first reference to Churchill smoking cigarettes.

Paul cited a comment by Jock Colville from 1943, after WSC had met with Turkish President İnönü. Despite mutual cordiality, İnönü had refused to enter the war. Colville found WSC puffing a Turkish cigarette—the only time he’d ever been seen with with one. Gesticulating with it, Churchill said, “It’s the only thing I ever got from the Turks.”

Further reading

Michael McMenamin, “The Myth of Churchill and Alcohol: A Distortion of the Record,” 2018. This is the most comprehensive article I have encountered on the subject. Next to the Bengal Famine, it draws the most reader comment on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

“The Alcohol Question—Again,” 2011.

“Churchill the Drunk. Or: Fasten Seatbelts on Bar Stools,” 2022.

“Memo to Peggy Noonan: Churchill Was Not a Drunk,” 2019.

“Churchill’s Magnanimity: Stanley Baldwin,” 2021.

Q: Who coined the a half-breed insult?

Didn’t one or more of Churchill’s detractors use this slur to criticize him? Google is no help. Surely you know? —S.B., Cleveland

A: Rab Butler

My colleague Michael McMenamin summarizes the answer to your question:

In his controversial book, A Republic, Not an Empire, American news commentator Pat Buchanan joined with England’s John Charmley to argue that it would have been better for Britain to make an honorable peace with Germany in 1940….

Charmley…attributes it to Churchill’s rhetorical skills and concludes with negative references to WSC’s “theatricality” [by Alexander Cadogan] and his “disorderly mind” [by Lord Halifax]. He repeats “Rab” Butler’s view of Churchill as “the greatest adventurer of modern political history,” Lord Hankey’s description of him as “a rogue elephant,” and John Colville’s memorable “half-breed American.”

“Winston and his rabble”

John Colville was quoting Richard Austin “Rab” Butler, then on the Foreign Policy Committee. He initially shared Butler’s doubts. His view on 10 May 1940 is worth quoting in full, since many elite Conservatives shared it:

7.15 PM: Alec [Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass] and I went over to the Foreign Office to explain the position to Rab, and there, with Chips [Channon] we drank in champagne the health of “The King Over the Water” (not King Leopold, but Mr. Chamberlain).

Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed.

He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the “pass had been sold” by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type, American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.

A civil servant, Colville was then assigned to the new prime minister, though three days later his opinion hadn’t changed: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

Some opinion changed

Yet even then, Colville was beginning to soften. “It must be admitted,” he wrote in his diary, “that Winston’s administration, with all its faults, has drive; and men like Duff Cooper, Eden, Lord Lloyd and Herbert Morrison should be able to get things done.”

Churchill made Butler President of the Board of Education, his first cabinet-level position, on 20 July 1941—only to wax apoplectic when he found Butler had been in touch with the Swedes about a possible truce with Hitler. Historian Andrew Roberts believes it was Butler who kept Lord Halifax open to a compromise peace long after the Cabinet had backed Churchill’s determination to fight on. Yet he kept Butler on until 1945.

Churchill insiders tended to look upon Butler as an opportunist with no particular loyalties. Speaking in 1985, WSC’s last private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was typical. Relating Butler’s “half-breed” comment, he referred to Rab as someone “who was later to achieve great prominence in this country, but in my view no true fame.”

“The Respectable Tendency”

Michael McMenamin, in his and Curt Zoller’s seminal book on Churchill and Bourke Cockran, reflected again on Churchill’s reputation among what Andrew Roberts called “the Respectable Tendency” of the Conservative Party. The Tories who disdained Churchill were similar to those American aristocrats who disparaged Theodore Roosevelt:

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, explaining why her father disliked Churchill, takes on added significance: “Because they were so alike.” Which indeed they were: well-known writers before they were politicians, impulsive risk takers, soldiers and accomplished speakers. One was called a “cowboy” by his detractors, the other a “half-breed American.” Both eventually held their country’s highest office and each was a Nobel Prize winner—giants of their time.

“Mettle”

The historian Graham Stewart summarizes the High Tory attitude toward Churchill as he replaced Chamberlain—just in time, as it happened—in May 1940. Commenting on Butler, Dunglass and Channon drinking the health of the deposed Chamberlain, Stewart writes:

The cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had a better claim to being aristocratic than many of those who affected to look down on him. Dunglass would inherit an earldom, but Butler was primarily wealthy because he had married into the Courtauld family, the same path that Channon—a half-breed American—had taken into the Guinness family.

So it went for a few weeks after Churchill took over. The more fair-minded among the Respectable Tendency eventually changed their minds. Some of the others never quite did. The former saw in Churchill a quality he himself cited when asked for the most important characteristic of a statesman: “Mettle.”

Related reading

“The Respectable Tendency and the New PM, 1940-2019,” 2019.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Churchill’s Consistency: ‘Politics before Country,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“Barbara Leaming’s Churchill Defiant: Still the Best on Churchill Postwar,” 2022.

Ken Eberts gave us not only precise images of great cars, but pictures of their contemporary surroundings that tugged at our collective heartstrings. He came to The Packard Cormorant at a sad time, but it was the beginning of a long and fond association.

Ken had sent us a Packard Twelve cover painting our Summer 1991 issue when our mutual friend, Packard designer Dick Teague, passed away. Everything shifted to documentary mode as we hastily tore that issue apart to honor Dick’s memory. We kept the cover, knowing Dick, whose first great restoration was a 1904 Packard Model L, would appreciate it.

One item didn’t make that issue was Dick’s concept car, the “1992 Caribbean.” It applied all the traditional Packard hallmark designs to a modern gran turismo. Dick had been working on it for months, stricken by cancer, “functional,” his family said at the end, “only minutes a day.”

I’d given it up for lost when Ken Eberts surprised me by sending along the finished product: “Dick wanted you to have this. He asked me if I would do it for him and enclosed the drawing which I believe you two had agree to publish. Dick designed and drew it in its entirety. My part was just rendering it in color. I think it is his last design.” We ran it the following year.

“I remember that Christmas Eve”

St. Johnsbury, Vermont, 24 December 1918— I remember that Christmas Eve. The Great War had ended on Armistice Day six weeks ago. Johnny Came Marching Home, and with him my Dad, who had commanded a platoon in the mud of Flanders.

The first thing Dad had done when he got back was to buy a car he’d dreamed about for fifteen years, since the first one seen chugged down Macon Street—a Packard. He couldn’t afford a new Twin Six. But the family doctor had ordered one, and Dad acquired his 3-38 Six—a handsome runabout painted emerald green and black. He cashed in every spare security he owned, added an old life insurance policy and a backlogged salary from General Pershing’s Army.

Doc’s old Six was still a beauty. With its gleaming paint set off by brass and nickel, buff-colored artillery wheels and pinstripes, it was symphony in motion. You’d see it coming a mile away: the big, black, ox-yoke radiator flanked by enormous headlights, with auxiliary lights built in underneath, and an elegant brass “6” riding the radiator cap…. —From my piece accompanying Ken’s painting, Autumn 1993.

How Eberts art jogged our memories

In the world of automotive artists, Eberts ranked with the best. His amazing eye for detail focused on artfully researched, nostalgic scenes, placing vintage motorcars in their original settings. It was easy to conjure up words to go with his work.

A co-founder of the Automotive Fine Arts Society in 1983, Ken’s work adorned the prestigious Pebble Beach and Meadow Brook concours posters. His painstaking style can be found in scores of works shown by established galleries from coast to coast.

Over the years we had the fun of publishing Ken’s Packard visions, for the marque that had special appeal to him. Back in 1991, we quoted a thoughtful summary of his artistry by William Jeanes, former editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver. In Ken’s memory it is appropriate to quote those words again:

“His work has a deja vu quality that may make you say to yourself, ‘I’ve been there before.’ The places are real, the cars are real, and the details of his settings are painstakingly accurate. Yet the moments never actually happened. Or did they?”

They happened, all right. Ken was a dear man whose work was inimitable. No one dies as long as they are remembered. Ken’s noble art assures that he lives on in our hearts.

Related articles

“Facing Disaster with a Smile: The Dick Teague I Knew,” 2024.

“The Packard: The Ne Plus Ultra aof Automotive House Organs,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“One Brief Shining Moment: Packard’s 1929-30 Speedster,” 2023.

“Packard Tales and Memories of Bud Juneau,”  2021.

“Why Packard Failed: The Patrician and Its Relatives,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2022.

Q: Origins of the Lalique rooster

Many visitors to Chartwell admire the René Lalique crystal cockerel, which resides in the drawing room. It belonged to Clementine Churchill from the 1940s.

The story of its provenance is very strong, since it was a personal gift from Charles de Gaulle, likely in the Second World War era. What little we know is based on Celia Sandys’ description (in Churchill’s Little Redhead). There doesn’t appear as yet to be any textual record in the Cambridge Archives, and I’ve not yet found it mentioned elsewhere in print. Were there any other mentions? —Eugene McConlough, England (Mr. McConlough is a Chartwell docent)

A: De Gaulle’s apologia

René Jules Lalique (1860-1945) was a French jeweler known for his crystal and glass art, from diminutive perfume bottles to chandeliers. Uniquely, Lalique glass sculpture also served as motorcar bonnet mascots (hood ornaments).

As an automotive writer in another life, I am familiar with Lalique’s work on classic luxury cars of the Twenties and Thirties. Of course in that application, it usually comprises only the rooster’s head. The Lalique cockerel at Chartwell is the whole bird—large, complete, and unusually posed with his feathers folded.

The cockerel is the symbol of France—thus often Lalique’s subject. There is no doubt, as you say, that Chartwell’s was a gift to Clementine Churchill from Charles de Gaulle. Katherine Carter, the National Trust administrator, kindly provided the photo above, showing its location in the drawing room.

Celia Sandys, and the guidebook Churchill at Chartwell by Robin Fedden, both mention the Lalique bird. But there another important reference that sheds light on the loyalty and character of Clementine Churchill.

Clementine Churchill, 1979

According to Lady Churchill’s daughter and biographer, the Lalique cockerel symbolized Gaulle’s regard for Clementine. This blossomed after a wartime argument. At Winston Churchill’s personal decision, Britain destroyed large elements of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir. The object was to prevent their falling into German hands. Mary Soames writes:

On 3rd July [1940],  the Royal Navy opened fire on the French Fleet; three battleships were destroyed, with the loss of 1300 lives, and the remaining French ships at Oran and in other North African ports were either destroyed or immobilised.

It must have been just at the time of these searing events—the painfulness of which no one felt more keenly than Winston himself—that General de Gaulle lunched at Downing Street. The conversation turned to the future of the French Fleet, and Clementine said how ardently she hoped that many of its ships and crews would carry on the fight with us.

To this the General curtly replied that, in his view, what would really give the French Fleet satisfaction would be to turn their guns “On you!” (meaning the British).

Clementine from the first had liked and respected this dour man, but she found this remark too much to bear and, rounding on him, she rebuked him soundly, in her perfect, rather formal French, for uttering words and sentiments that ill became either an ally or a guest in this country.

“Certain things a woman can say…”

From the other side of the table Winston sensed that something had gone amiss and, in a conciliatory tone, said to the General: “You must forgive my wife. Elle parle trop bien le français [She speaks French too well].”

Clementine interrupted him, and said in French: “No, Winston, it is because there are certain things that a woman can say to a man which a man cannot say, and I am saying them to you—General de Gaulle!”

After this verbal fracas, the General was much upset, and apologised profusely; and the next day he sent a huge basket of flowers for Clementine. Later on in the war he was to give her a beautiful Lalique cock—the emblem of France—which she greatly treasured.

“The Constable of France”

Surely whenever Churchill looked upon the glass bird, he must have remembered his many ups and downs with the great Frenchman. Yet their mutual respect survived. WSC wrote memorably in his war memoirs:

On the afternoon of June 16 [1940] M. Monnet and General de Gaulle visited me in the Cabinet Room…. [Monnet] turned to our sending all our remaining fighter air squadrons to share in the final battle in France, which was of course already over…. But I could not do anything to oblige him in this field.

My two French visitors then got up and moved towards the door, Monnet leading. As they reached it, de Gaulle, who had hitherto scarcely uttered a single word, turned back, and, taking two or three paces towards me, said in English: “I think you are quite right.”

Under an impassive, imperturbable demeanour he seemed to me to have a remarkable capacity for feeling pain. I preserved the impression, in contact with this very tall, phlegmatic man: “Here is the Constable of France.”

Related articles

Diana Cooper, “Duckling, Wormwood and the War,” 2024.

“Dieu Protège La France,” 2015.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

”Casablanca, Admiral Darlan, and Rick’s Letters of Transit,” 2021.

“Churchill on Joan of Arc: Agent of Brexit? Maybe Not,” 2020.

“Origins of the de Gaulle Quote, “I’ll Kiss Him on All Four Cheeks,” 2019.

We are all bemused by the machinations of AI (Artificial Intelligence). As Hilaire Belloc said about the intelligence of women: Men come to look upon it “first with reverence, then with stupour, and finally with terror.”

Anyway! Last week I updated the AI version of Churchill’s comments on bananas. And wondered, since I first provided what he actually said, whether ChatGPT had picked it up. Evidently not! But ChatGPT now offers something he never said.

Nevertheless, AI continues to progress, offering an amusing pastime. Take your favorite remark by anybody. The only requirement is that it be an exact, well-known quotation. Send it to ChatGPT. Ask them to reproduce it as a scene in a Shakespeare play. I promise you will be amused.

Drunk and ugly: the actual encounter

First, here is the original transcript of the famous confrontation, confirmed by an eye-witness. The venue was the House of Commons, the year 1946. The speakers were Winston Churchill and the Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, Bessie Braddock.  From my book, Churchill by Himself, page 573:

Braddock: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more, you are disgustingly drunk.”

Churchill “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

This famous exchange was confirmed to me by Ronald Golding, Churchill’s Scotland Yard detective. He was on the spot to observe it—no better witness. Churchill was leaving the House of Commons after a long, late evening debate.

Lady Soames, who said her father was always gallant to women, doubted the story, but Golding explained that WSC was not drunk, just tired and wobbly, which caused him to fire the full arsenal. Churchill was, however, relying on his photographic memory. In the 1934 movie It’s a Gift, W.C. Fields’s character, told he is drunk, responds, “Yeah, and you’re crazy. But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.” So Churchill was really paraphrasing W.C. Fields.

The AI Shakespeare version

We fed this transcript into ChatGPT and asked for an AI version as a scene from Shakespeare. The result took only seconds:

Characters:

• Sir Winstonus Churchillius, a stout, witty statesman, full of jests and gravitas.
• Lady Bessica Braddockia, a fiery noblewoman with a sharp tongue.

Setting: A grand hall in Westminster. Tapestries hang from the walls, and the faint clink of goblets echoes through the air.

Enter:  Sir Winstonus Churchillius, goblet in hand. Lady Bessica Braddockia approaches, fanning herself dramatically.

Lady Bessica:
Hail, Sir Winstonus, thou art returned
From feasting, drinking, or some sport absurd?
Thy face is flushed, and eyes like moons do glow;
Dost thou drown England’s cares in wine’s deep flow?

Sir Winstonus:
Lady Bessica, sharp of wit and tongue,
Thy voice dost pierce like arrows deftly flung.
Yet in thy charge, some truth may yet reside,
Forsooth, my goblet’s brim hath oft been plied.

Lady Bessica:
O, gallant knight, though words like honey flow,
Thy gait doth tell what sober truth may show.
Thou reek’st of vintner’s wares! Thy steps betray
A man whose goblet oft doth go astray.

Sir Winstonus (with a wry smile):
And thou, fair dame, art not of angels born,
Thy tongue’s keen edge doth all who cross thee warn.
Yet in thy zeal to strike with jest and jeer,
Thou dost forget the mirror drawing near.

*

Lady Bessica (pointing dramatically):
Thou speak’st of mirrors? Look upon thy girth!
A vessel vast, no ship of slender berth!
Thou art, Sir Winstonus, round as a barrel!
Dost thou compete with Bacchus in this quarrel?

Sir Winstonus (placing hand on his belly):
A barrel, say’st thou? O, cruel jest indeed!
But barrels hold the finest wine and mead.
Yet thou, good dame, art no delicate dove;
The pot and kettle may yet learn of love.

Lady Bessica (gasping in mock outrage):
Out, vile retort! Thy jest doth stab too deep.
Yet truth be told, I cannot silence keep.
Thy wit, though sharp, hides wisdom’s kindly balm;
A tempest fierce, yet ever seeks the calm.

*

Sir Winstonus (raising his goblet):
Lady Bessica, thou art a noble foe.
Thy fire doth warm where icy winds might blow.
Let us, then, toast, not bicker in this hall,
For England needs us both to stand, not fall.

Lady Bessica (taking a goblet from a passing servant):
To England, aye, and to the bonds we weave,
Though tempests rise, we shall not take our leave.
Forsooth, Sir Winstonus, thou art a rogue,
Yet one I’d fight beside, ‘gainst any vogue.

Both raise their goblets high and drink deeply….

Sir Winstonus:
A rogue, thou say’st? That title I shall wear!
Yet call me rogue, and not a bore, I swear.
Let history judge, when both are but a name,
Which spark burned brighter in Britannia’s flame.

Lady Bessica:
Then let us spark together, fiery bright,
And burn away the shadows of the night.

Exeunt, laughing and bantering, arm in arm.

“If we shadows have offended,
“Think but this, and all is mended:”

—Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Software engineer Ian W.D. Langworth explains how AI reproduces the famous encounter in Shakespearean form:

A large language model (LLM) focuses on a corpus of text, such as all of Wikipedia. Or an even larger corpus, such all of the scannable Internet. The training happens by feeding the model a large amount of text, asking it to predict the next word in the sequence. Doing this billions of times produces many levels of refinement. The model learns the patterns in the text, and can then use these patterns to generate new text.

The result is a specially formatted multi-gigabyte file which can be used to generate text. This is called a “model.” You can use this model to generate text by feeding it a prompt.

In this case, the model was trained on Wikipedia and the Internet. Obviously, it learned of the Braddock-Churchill exchange somewhere on the web—in addition to the works of Shakespeare.

Accuracy is irrelevant. The model doesn’t necessarily have a concept of “truth.” It’s just a statistical model that has learned the patterns in the text. It is not reasoning—just pattern matching. Given the model, the prompt, and a random number generator, it will generate text that matches the patterns it learned during training.

Related reading

“Update: AI Churchill Quotes- Yes, We Have No Bananas,” 2025.

“Mary Soames Centenary 1922-2022: A Remembrance by a Friend,” 2022.

“Drunk and Ugly: The Perennial Quotation Chase,” 2022.

“Churchill the Drunk. Or: Fasten Seatbelts on Bar Stools,” 2022.

“Jibes and Insults: Churchill Took as Good as He Gave,” 2024.

The following story was published in 2023. We wondered if Artificial Intelligence had picked it up since. Apparently not, but they have muddied the waters. Again we asked the question: “What did “Winston Churchill say about bananas?” Last time ChatGPT said “nothing.” Now it replies with a red herring:

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying: “Why a banana?” This remark was made during a discussion about the design of weapons, particularly regarding the choice of the “banana-shaped” Sten gun magazine. Churchill, known for his sharp wit and curiosity, reportedly questioned the ergonomic and practical considerations behind the design. The comment highlights his attention to detail and his interest in the functionality of military equipment, though it has since been taken humorously in various contexts.

ChatGPT (2023)

Many have heard of ChatGPT, a language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3. “It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.” Recently, users have asked ChatGPT for Churchill quotes or speeches on all manner of subjects—and even essays about Churchill—which are remarkably convincing.

Steve Forbes, who advocates a return to the Gold Standard, asked ChatGPT for a Churchill speech supporting it. (As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29, Churchill returned Britain to Gold, for which he received much criticism.)

ChatGPT provided Mr. Forbes with a convincing transcript that sounded just like Churchill, but contained nothing he ever uttered or wrote. ChatGPT is also able to cough up genuine Churchill quotes. Unfortunately they have also mistakenly scanned many things he never said, and occasionally disgorge those, too.

No bananas

My colleague John Plumpton records one case, however, where ChatGPT was stumped. A user asked the chatbot for Churchill quotes relating to bananas. Here is the reply. (John writes: “I trust you have not lost your sense of humour”…)

We’re sorry, but it doesn’t appear that Winston Churchill ever made any quotes specifically about bananas. However, we can provide some fictional quotes that use his style and references to bananas….

Their fictional quotes they supplied were hilarious, and show the range of ChatGPT’s scans of Churchill’s actual words:

Bananas are the fruit of victory.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender to a lack of bananas.

Never in the field of human consumption was so much owed by so many to so few bananas.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to eat a banana.

But yes, he had some bananas

The only problem with all this is that Churchill did say things about bananas…. Thanks to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project’s scans of his 20 million published words, we have ChatGPT right where we want them:

A man walking down the street is confronted by a costermonger’s barrow filled with bananas. (Laughter.) I think it a great achievement, reflecting the utmost honour and credit upon all who were concerned in it, that this fruit—I will say delicious fruit, although I am not myself partial to it—which contains so many valuable food and fuel constituents, which a few years ago was the curious luxury of the rich, has now become an article of frequent consumption amongst the masses of the people. (Hear, hear.)  —WSC, Adelphia Hotel, Liverpool, 5 May 1906 (Complete Speeches, 1974, 8 vols., I: 622.)

And…

Churchill also made several references to bananas in his 1908 African travelogue:

Kampala, the home of 60,000 persons, is permanently invisible. The whole town is buried under the leaves of innumerable banana plantations, which afford shade and food to its people, and amid which their huts are thickly scattered and absolutely concealed. —WSC, My African Journey (1908; Leo Cooper edition 1989, 69.)

And as Prime Minister three decades later, he hadn’t lost his regard, despite his personal distaste, for the staple fruit of the tropics:

I should be much obliged if you would let me know the reasons which have made it necessary to stop the import of bananas altogether.” —WSC to Lord Woolton (Minister of Food), 29 November 1940 (The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, Never Surrender, May-December 1940. 2011, 1159.)

“Let not the slothful chortle”

Ian Langworth, who plies the trade of software engineer in Silicon Valley, reminds us not to be too complacent about all this. ChatGPT has only been around for a few years. “Give them another half decade and they’ll probably have picked up every word Churchill wrote.” (And why not? More and more of it is falling into the public domain.)

Unfortunately, at least so far, they lack the discernment to reject all the things he never said that are attributed to him far and wide.

Before we lazily laugh at the tech boffins’ failure accurately to pinpoint the Great Man’s every word, we might stop to consider: They are just getting started.

As WSC was wont to say on occasion: “Let not the slothful chortle.”

Tune in in five days…

…as ChatGPT presents a famous Churchill encounter and riposte as a Shakespeare play. (I am not making this up.)

I was honored to be invited to join Lord Roberts, author of Walking with Destiny at Secrets of Statecraft. It was fun to chat with the author of the foremost one-volume life of Churchill, about where Sir Winston stands on his 150th birthday. We mutually concluded that he stands as tall as ever.

Mistakes real and imagined

Andrew Roberts: “It’s sort of classic, isn’t it, that the more you look into Churchill’s actual actions, the less the detractors really have to say? They’ve a few lines that they can come out with, especially obviously, on social media. But when you actually dig into the truth, there’s less and less behind it. Would you say that’s fair, historically?”

Richard Langworth: “Yes, I think so. Of course there are many cases where he made mistakes, serious ones. They never seem to come up. Instead we always get these long trails of red herrings.”

AR: “Let’s go into some of them.”

And we did: all criticisms are here: the real, the  imagined, the preposterous. We covered the gamut, from women’s suffrage to the Bengal Famine.

Churchill today

AR: “Now tell me why you think that 150 years after his birth, we should still be interested in Churchill, what he has to teach us today.”

RL: “That’s a tall order, Andrew.”

AR: “Sorry, old boy, that’s why you’re on.”

RL: “First, I like what you said at the end of the Netflix documentary. Who else could still make people laugh sixty years after his death? I mean, we will say that about Groucho Marx. But a politician? Can you think of another one?

“Beyond that, we need to remember him because he spoke everlasting truths about the relations between peoples, about governance, about the value of liberty. Those are as relevant as ever today.

“I was alive and sentient in 1959, which was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. And I don’t remember anything like as much attention paid to him as we do to Churchill today. Of course, we live in a different era, an age of 24/7 saturation media. But he does seem to be permanently on everyone’s mind.

“As to what appeals about him: Sir John Gielgud said ‘Churchill was as ordinary as any of us and as extraordinary as any of us can hope to be.’

“But of all answers to that question, I always come back to Sir Martin Gilbert‘s. He was asked to explain Churchill in just one sentence. Sir Martin didn’t hesitate:  ‘He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.’”

Related articles

“No Cutlet Uncooked: Andrew Roberts’s Superb Churchill Biography,” 2018.

“Reviewing Netflix’s Churchill at War: The Things We Do For England,” 2024.

“Churchill at 150: ‘A Certain Splendid Memory,’” 2024.

“Get Ready for Churchill’s Anti-Sesquicentennial,” 2024.

“Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare,” 2020.

Churchill at War

A four-part Netflix documentary starring Christian McKay as Winston Churchill, premiered December 4th.

From Gaza to Ukraine, United Nations to United Europe, our legacy is the war that made us what we are. Winston Churchill had much to do with it, and Netflix now offers its version of his story. It is a one-dimensional portrait of a politician—not of  the humanitarian who thought profoundly about governance, life and liberty. Yet the warrior emerges approximately as he was.

There’s a way to derive a mostly correct picture of the man from this show: ignore Part 1. The other three parts also suffer from occasional forays into fiction. But they are far more accurate, with honest dialogue, well-chosen quotations and spectacular footage, much of it freshly colorized.

A creaky wind-up

Part 1, alas, is a palimpsest of counterfactuals. Were it not for Andrew Roberts, and several other scholars who have actually spent time studying Churchill, this introduction to him is light, frothy and tendentious. It bids fair to mislead the unwary viewer.

Sprinkling in celebrities and the odd hostile biographer doesn’t help. (The more hostile they are, the more they indulge in the familiarity “Winston.”) Among the celebrities is George W. Bush, who says Churchill grew up in a “dysfunctional family.” By Victorian standards it was more functional than the Bushes. Why Bush? Or Boris Johnson? Ask most politicians about Churchill and what you get are generalities: blood, toil, tears and sweat. But Netflix also consults more serious commentators, who commit greater errors….

• Churchill’s father’s career-ending 1886 resignation ​​comes when “his budget was rejected.” No, it was over a minor Army appropriation. Okay, no biggie.

​• In South Africa in 1899, young Churchill “takes over defense” of the famous armored train from ​Boer attackers. ​Poor Alymer Haldane, who actually defended it, spent half a century lamenting that “Winston got all the credit.” And now Netflix bites Aylmer again.

• We skid past Churchill’s climb to fame and Parliament, informed that he changed parties twice—not over principle, but as an opportunistic power​-grab. Not so. After his 1904 switch he waited two years to get power. The second time​, in 1924, he was handed power before he switched. Where do people get such stuff? Have they read anything?

Escaped scapegoat

Churchill’s vital efforts to prepare the fleet for war in 1914 are ignored as Netflix homes in on the Dardanelles operation, whose failure temporarily ruined him. Aside from confusing naval operations with the Gallipoli landings, which he had nothing to do with, the account is reasonably accurate. ​They assert incorrectly that he quit the Admiralty in 1915 in order to go fight in the trenches, but his service​ there (later) is ​accurately represented.

We witness his deep depression over Gallipoli, but Christian McKay, impersonating WSC, gets the diction wrong and looks more like his son-in-law Christopher Soames. By straining hard, we can just visualize McKay in the role. But he’s no match for Robert Hardy​ (The Wilderness Years) or Gary Oldman​ (Darkest Hour), who spent months studying their character “to find a way in.”

Part 1 ends as Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940. The accuracy improves as 1940 approaches. Despite earlier errors,  this is a fair presentation compared to popular mythology like Brian Cox in Churchill, but hardly rates a cigar, given the banal content.

Jon Meacham, who should know better, says WSC “got lots wrong, but among what he got right, WW2 ranks pretty high.” Duh! That’s as profound as we get, though to his credit, Meacham is more poignant later on. But after laboring through Part 1, I was beginning to think: “The things we do for England.”

A better pitch

The weakness of using celebrities or “historians” who are anything but Churchill specialists is still evident in the last three parts, but less disconcerting. Let’s get over the quibbles first.

• It’s true that the first bombing of London (August 1940) was accidental, prompting British retaliation on Berlin, leading to the London Blitz. But Netflix says Hitler and Churchill “egged each other on,” not acknowledging that bombing open cities had been the German practice since they leveled Warsaw in 1939.

• In July 1940 Churchill “sank the French navy.” (It wasn’t the whole navy.) In August 1941, he pleads with Roosevelt to declare war, and is instructed about the U.S. Constitution. (That never happened—he knew the Constitution as well as FDR.) U.S. entry into the war in December is dramatically portrayed, omitting that Hitler locked-in the “Germany first” strategy when he declared war four days after Pearl Harbor.

• The 1943-44 Bengal Famine is misrepresented by Kehinde Andrews. Churchill caused it—well, he refused to send Canadian grain. (Actually he sent more grain, via Australia.) Andrews claims Churchill saw his “main task” as “defending the Empire.” No, he saw his main task as defeating Hitler, and doing that helped lose the Empire. Mr. Andrews offers several other red herrings. (“I like the martial and commanding air with which the Rt. Hon. Gentleman treats facts,” Churchill once quipped. “He stands no nonsense from them.”)

• Churchill is condemned for the 1944 “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin. We are not told that he saw this as a wartime expedient, not a permanent arrangement—or that it saved Greece from communism.

Netflix gets lots right…

…about the war. It covers the quandary over bombing Auschwitz; concerns over invading Europe; D-Day (if nothing about how Churchill made D-Day possible). Here the dialogue is accurate, the war footage admirable, the commentary balanced.

They can’t help editing some great speeches, even though deleted words would use up only a second or two. They make up for this by getting many right (unlike the British Post Office on a recent commemorative stamp: “You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory.”)

Key quotations are deployed effectively, like Churchill’s warning to FDR of where the U.S. will be if Britain goes under. His classic speech at Harrow, clean and unedited, includes its often-ignored proviso: “Never give in—except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is all to the good. Every time a faux expert muddies facts, Roberts or another solid historian—Meacham, Allen Packwood, Catherine Gale Katz—makes up for it with truths. Even David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Minister, is thoughtful and doesn’t succumb to populist virtue-signaling. “The British people,” Lammy says, “saw in Churchill the image of themselves.”

After Part 1 I was expecting the worst, but on balance it’s a good show, and the finale is well done. Kudos to Lord Roberts and others for keeping it on track, and for his eloquent finale:

Physically brave, morally brave, full of insights and foresight, humorous to the point that he can still make people laugh sixty years after his death, Winston Churchill represented a resolute spirit that is very, very rarely seen in human history.

More film reviews

Robert Hardy in The Wilderness Years: Forty Years On and Still Number One, 2019.

”Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour: Then Out Spake Brave Horatius,” 2018.

“Darkest Hour Myth-Making: Don’t Mess with Marcus Peters,” 2018.

“Brian Cox as Churchill: An Interview with Charlie Rose,” 2017.

“Churchill Bio-Pics: The Trouble with the Movies,” 2017.

New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941

Somewhere east of Ottawa, a special train bore the Prime Minister of Great Britain toward Washington. He had been in Canada to address Parliament. His most memorable lines in that speech came as he spoke of the French in 1940:

When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! … Some neck.

A week earlier Churchill had won cheers from hardened American politicians in Congress, hurling defiance at the enemy:

They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking…. What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

A high sense of the moment

Few besides those alive and sentient at that time can understand the magnitude of the task as the New Year began. Hitler held Europe from the Channel almost to Moscow. Nazi U-boats prowled the Atlantic, strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing toward Suez. Stalin’s Red Army was desperately hanging on. America had received a heavy blow at Pearl Harbor. Japan ran amok in China, British and Dutch East Asia and the Pacific.

Churchill saw only opportunity. “I was lucky in the timing of these speeches in Washington and Ottawa,” he wrote….

They came at the moment when we could all rejoice at the creation of the Grand Alliance, with its overwhelming potential force, and before the cataract of ruin fell upon us from the long, marvelously prepared assault of Japan.

Even while I spoke in confident tones I could feel in anticipation the lashes which were soon to score our naked flesh. Fearful forfeits had to be paid not only by Britain and Holland but by the United States, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in all the Asiatic lands and islands they lap with their waves. An indefinite period of military disaster lay certainly before us. Many dark and weary months of defeat and loss must be endured before the light would come again.

It didn’t matter. Churchill would make fighting speeches everywhere, to audiences large and small, to listeners grand and ordinary, time and again, until the end. One of his later bodyguards was flying Hurricanes in 1942. He said to me: “After one of those speeches, it didn’t matter that we were outnumbered and outgunned. We wanted the Germans to come.”

Here’s to the New Year

The train rushed on as the last minutes of 1941 ticked away. Soon it was steaming southward on New York Central’s broad tracks along the Hudson. Appropriately close to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, the Prime Minister called staff and reporters to the dining car. He wished, in a few words, to “cast some forward light upon the dark, inscrutable mysteries of the future.”

Of course he voiced confidence in the certainty of victory. He did not minimize the challenges, nor forecast when deliverance might come. That would depend “on our exertions, upon our achievements, and on the hazardous and uncertain course of the war.”

He entered the dining car amid cheers and applause, raising his glass to the company. “It was with no illusions,” he wrote, “that I wished them all a glorious New Year”:

“Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.”

“Churchill’s Christmas” is excerpted from a two-part article for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete text with footnotes, please click here. To Churchillian colleagues, and those who have encouraged and supported our Churchill work at Hillsdale College so many years: thank-you for being our friends.

Washington, 24 December 1941

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter… Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world. And so, in God’s mercy, a Happy Christmas to you all.”  —WSC

“My juvenile friends…”

Churchill’s ninety Christmases saw family joy interspersed with loneliness and separation, owed to a stern sense of duty. The festival was not always a joyous time, but it always illustrated Churchill’s sensitive, caring nature.

Young Winston wrote his first letter in January 1882. He was seven, celebrating Christmas at Blenheim, minus his parents: “My dear Mamma, I hope you are quite well. I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice it was so kind of you and dear Papa I send you my love and a great many kisses.”

When he was home, he was a handful. Reports of his mother’s disinterest are exaggerated. Lady Randolph was often absorbed in the lives of her two sons, if sometimes exasperated. In 1891 his parents planned to send him to France to polish his French over the holidays. Winston erupted: “I am forced to go to people who bore me excessively…. I should like to know if Papa was asked to ‘give up his holidays’ when he was at Eton.”

His mother angrily returned his letter unread, only to reap the whirlwind: Never, he replied, would he write her a letter of any length, “as in my letter’s length I can perceive a reason for your not reading it….I expect you were too busy with your parties and arrangements for Christmas.”

“Are gentlemen all fox hunting?”

Childhood frustrations were forgotten after his father’s untimely death in 1895. Now his mother was his ardent facilitator. As she aged her feelings deepened, along with her desire to have her sons with her at Christmas. Many times this was not to be. Winston was a soldier and war correspondent now, consumed by duty and ambition.

In 1899 in South Africa, he escaped from a Boer prison camp. He spent Christmas Eve at British Commander General Buller’s headquarters in Chieveley. He awoke Christmas day in a hut a few hundred yards from where he had been captured. His thoughts were not of good will toward men.

Cabling a column to the Morning Post, he urged the dispatch of more troops to the Boer War: “More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all fox hunting? Why not an English Light Horse? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war.”

This was not received with pleasure back home. He recalled later that a London acquaintance cabled: “Best friends here hope you won’t go making further ass of yourself.”

But two years later, on an extensive lecture tour of North America, his situation had improved:  “I have promised to eat Christmas dinner with Lord Minto, Governor General of Canada, at Ottawa.”

“There’s a European in the bath”

Winston did like to move around. At Christmas 1907, now Undersecretary for the Colonies, he was in Khartoum, where he had charged with the 21st Lancers nine years earlier. Now he was making an inspection tour of African colonies. His secretary Eddie Marsh dispatched a servant to prepare him a tub. The man reported, “there’s a European in the bath.” [7] Churchill had got there first. He usually did.

He stayed home more after he married Clementine Hozier in 1908, but never at the expense of official responsibilities, which mushroomed during the First World War. From his post at the front after the Dardanelles debacle in 1915, he managed to secure leave, returning on Christmas Eve.

Christmas as Chartwell

Churchill enjoyed more conventional Christmases in the 1920s, after the war ended. The first venue was Blenheim. After his cousin “Sunny,” the 9th Duke of Marlborough had divorced, the scene shifted to Chartwell, the Churchill home from 1922.

Clementine Churchill, a marvelous hostess, was inevitably the director of events. With the births of Sarah (1918) and Mary (1922) it was a crowded household, and guests were restricted to close family: Winston’s brother Jack and Lady Gwendoline (affectionately nicknamed “Goonie”), their children Johnny and Peregrine and baby Clarissa (who would later marry Anthony Eden).

Sometimes they were joined by Clementine’s sister, the widowed Nellie Romilly, with her two “tiny monsters,” Esmond and Giles. One of the few outsiders was Winston’s scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann, who would bring along fine cigars and a case of champagne, even though he himself was a teetotaler.

Those were wonderful times, Sarah Churchill remembered. Maryott Whyte, a cousin and Mary’s beloved nanny, played Father Christmas and decorated the Christmas tree: “One day in full array she leant to put one tiny thing right and was nearly burnt to death…. The smaller children, which included me, were not told and somehow Nana as Father Christmas still appeared.”

“Associate and fraternal bottles”

Jack’s son Johnny recalled how his Uncle Winston adored children and gift-giving:

Charades, with its secrecy, dressing up and acting, particularly appealed to him. He was a generous uncle, and we in return always gave him the best presents we could afford, though choosing a gift for someone who already had everything he needed was a worry. I solved it by asking the advice of his butler or his valet….

Some of the presents, such as a pair of braces or a toothbrush, struck me as most dull, but at least I felt they were needed. The wonderful part about it is that my uncle loved, and always has loved, receiving presents. No matter how small and humble the gift, he accepted it with surprise and pleasure. “For me?” he would ask, his eyes lighting up. “How very kind!”

Johnny’s brother Peregrine remembered Christmas 1932, when their uncle created his famous still life, “Bottlescape.” Churchill had received as a present “a huge bottle of brandy, and decided to paint it, accompanied by lesser bottles.

“He sent us children scurrying around Chartwell to find them: ‘Fetch me Associate and Fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container.’”

“This sad crepuscule”

For a man who underwent civilization’s greatest storms, engineering a special Christmas was no problem. One useful prop was his outdoor heated swimming pool.

Lady Diana Cooper referred to “this sad crepuscule” as “Winston’s delightful toy.” Taking her turn in a wintery pool, Lady Diana remembered Churchill summoning Inches the butler:

“Tell Allen to heave a lot more coal on. I want the thing full blast.” Inches returned to say that Allen was out for the day. “Then tell Arthur I want it full blast,” but it was Arthur’s day out as well, so the darling old schoolboy went surreptitiously and stoked it himself for half an hour, coming in on the verge of apoplexy. Again all had to bathe in the afternoon.

More separate Christmases superseded those halcyon days. In 1934, his wife was en route to the South Seas on a voyage with their friends the Moynes; the next two holidays would also be spent apart.

In 1935, Churchill repaired for painting and sunshine to Majorca, remembering to invite Lindemann: “It would be very nice if you could come out…. Clemmie and I will have everything ready for you on the 19th. I am not sure whether she is staying for Christmas or not.” Alas she was not.

Christmas apart

In 1936 Churchill faced his ever-present money problems. “There is no less than £6,000 to pay in income and super tax during 1937,” he wrote his wife. He would sail to America on December 18th for a series of lucrative lectures. “I am disappointed not to be with you all at Christmas: and I don’t know how I shall spend my poor Christmas day [but] I feel that this particular toil is a measure of prudence.”

It didn’t work out. Instead Churchill spent a bleak holiday in the wake of the Abdication of King Edward VIII and mounting European dangers. He pleaded in vain on the King’s behalf; the House hooted him down. Temporarily he lost all the credibility he had gained in the rearmament debate.

Christmas amidst war

Nineteen thirty-nine found Britain at war. The family gathered for the last Christmas of a dying era. Now that he was again First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill’s sense of duty prevailed. “In view of the danger of surprise attacks at a time when the enemy may expect to find us off our guard, there must be no break or holiday period at Christmas or the New Year,” he minuted.

The war clamped many a lid on Christmas celebrations. When Eric Seal, his principal private secretary, asked to arrange a week’s leave for the private office, Churchill replied: “Your minute about Christmas holidays surprises me. No holidays can be given at Christmas, but every endeavour should be made to allow members of the staff to attend Divine Service on Christmas Day, either in the morning or afternoon. My own plans will be to work either here (Chequers) or in London continuously.”

He set off from Downing Street wishing the staff he left behind “a happy Christmas and a frantic New Year.” Private Secretary John Martin wrote:

We had a festive family Christmas…. For lunch we had the largest turkey I have ever seen…. Afterwards we listened to the King’s speech and Vic Oliver, Sarah Churchill’s actor husband, played the piano and Sarah sang. It was the same after dinner.

“Up to the neck”

December 1941 found the United States in the war, “up to the neck and in to the death,” as Churchill put it—and found him, quite naturally, in Washington, for the memorable remarks above.

By the end of 1942 things began to improve. Christmas at Chequers found Churchill in “a grand temper,” secretary Elizabeth Nel remembered. He “left us in peace most of the time and just sat up in bed reading a book and looking like a benevolent old cherub.”

To President Roosevelt he telegraphed: “I passed a happy Christmas in your home and now I send my heartfelt wishes to you and all around you on this brighter day than we have yet seen.” Roosevelt replied, “The old team-work is grand.”

Churchill nearly died of pneumonia in North Africa following the Teheran Conference in late 1943; his wife and doctor rushed to his side in Carthage. His doctor Lord Moran spoke of his emotion when told she was coming. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “he’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.”

Sure enough, by Christmas Day he was back on whisky and cigars, enjoying an epic plum pudding, and meeting with General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. General Alexander, Air Marshal Tedder and Admiral Cunningham were also there to discuss the coming invasion of Europe.

“This brand I snatched on Christmas Day”

The following year drew him away again, without protest from the stalwart Clementine. The family had gathered at Chequers with a huge Christmas tree, the gift of President Roosevelt. Suddenly, telegrams brought news of a civil war in Greece. Churchill immediately left for Athens, to negotiate a truce between communists and royalists that saved Greece.

Nine months later he remarked that the “Bolshevisation of the Balkans” was almost complete. All “the cabinets of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are in Soviet control, excepting only Athens. This brand I snatched from the burning on Christmas Day.”

At Chartwell on Christmas 1946, Churchill’s presents included honey from Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Service throughout his premiership. Two bottles of port arrived from Duncan and Diana Sandys. Sir Stafford Cripps, perhaps in jest, sent a bottle of turpentine.

Despite political opposition the Churchills remained good friends with the Clement Attlees. Replying to their Christmas greeting, he mentioned struggling with his war memoirs. “It is a colossal undertaking…. However, it is a good thing to get a certain amount of material together which, if not history, will still at least be a contribution thereto.”

“Whirl me round the floor once, Mule”

An aging Churchill was now less able to cope with England’s damp, cold winters. Christmas 1947 found him in Marrakesh, where he came to paint and write. At the Mamounia Hotel he hosted a party for staffers who had given up their holiday to accompany him. “There was a 25-foot Christmas tree, windows hung with orange branches, and daubs of white paint on the window panes made it seem that a blizzard was blowing outside,” wrote his daughter Sarah. “Everyone was ‘dolled up’….When midnight struck they raised their classes and clapped—and ‘Vive Churchill’ and ‘Bravo’ echoed round the room.”

The band played It’s a Long Way to Tipperary as a Christmas pudding was brought in. Much moved, Churchill bowed to them all.

Suddenly he stood. Sarah thought it was time to go. Instead he turned to her. “Whirl me round the floor once, Mule—I think I can manage it.” They took the floor for a waltz amidst a roar of applause. Then Churchill danced with all his secretaries.

“You are the Christmas Fairy”

Suddenly he noticed “a good-looking fair lady” seated by herself. Sarah remembered him asking, “Why is she alone? Dance me around the floor.” They stopped before this proud but forlorn looking woman. Churchill said: “You are the Christmas Fairy. May I have a dance?”

Sarah had no idea what they said, but “he never liked to see a beautiful woman alone. When their turn at dancing was done, he left her at her place. Meanwhile, the detectives were wondering if she had been imported as a spy.” A telegram arrived later:

YOU WILL NEVER KNOW MY NAME BUT I AM PROUD TO HAVE DANCED WITH WINSTON CHURCHILL.

“Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations….’ Or: ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect.’ Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conversational.” —Winston S. Churchill “to my colleagues and their staffs,” 9 August 1940.

Canceling Clichés

Commentator Bill O’Reilly proposes a new Cancel Culture for a collection of jargon that Churchill would define as “grimaces.” A cliché, he says, is “a phrase or opinion that is overused and lacks original thought.” Good on Bill, and we applaud his nominations for grimaces we never need to hear again. He forgot “issues,” but it’s not a bad list….

“Circle back”: A banal term often used in presidential briefings

“Here’s the deal”: President Biden’s favorite.

“Deep Dive” (used interchangeably with “From 30,000 feet”): Supposed to refer to your detailed opinion (from the worm’s eye, or from on high). Often encountered in the media—always painful.

“Perfect Storm”: Description of the 2024 U.S. election.

“At the end of the day”: O’Reilly: “What day? Thursday? Stop it! Athletes in particular.”

“It is what it is.” Dreadful.

“Give a listen.” Used in absence of an intro. Beloved by Brett Baier on Fox. [I added that one.]

“I’ll be honest”: This implies that most of the time you’re not honest.

“Sorry, not sorry”:  O’Reilly: “Sorry, you are a moron.”

“Game changer”: All-purpose slough off.

“We’ll see”: When you don’t know what you’ll see.

“The new normal”: Means you don’t know what is normal.

“Slam dunk”: “The most over-used phrase in the language.”

“By the way”: “What way? Where? Stop!”

Why has this jargon so permeated the media? One of the culprits, O’Reilly suggests, “is the collapsing public education system. In New York City, taxpayers spend $31,000 per student per year and many students cannot speak proper English.”

 Some issues over “issues”

O’Reilly is targeting brief phrases or single words. Somewhat longer “wooly phrases” have also been creeping into our language—for a long time. For decades now, we have substituted politically correct fad-phrases for long-understood words in everyday language.

My pet favorite is the word “issues,” as substituted for “problems” or “difficulties.” The idea is that we must not be judgmental (another popular favorite) about our troubles, because our troubles may be right. After all, a mugger with a knife is only expressing his issues.

No. Issues are subjects on which there are different points of view. Most of the time, when we say we have “issues,” we mean to say we have ”problems.” But we want to be nice.

This word-substitution is subconsciously catching, because we all want to use hip forms of speech. If editors don’t watch out, even we fall for it. I recently had to stop myself from saying that I had “issues” with certain fanatics who are trying to kill us. What I had, of course, are “problems,” if not “violent objections.”

“Reaching out”

Then there is “reaching out.” One doesn’t contact someone any more. One “reaches out.” The theology behind that is that “contact” suggests you are “demanding” something. Like the courtesy of a reply, which might be “offensive.” By “reaching out,” you become a supplicant, making a tentative plea that will not offend anyone. Your contact doesn’t really have to answer. (And have you noticed? Quite a few of them don’t.)

One might expect anyone familiar with the life of Winston Churchill to tilt toward traditional language, and one would be right. I don’t care what you think about the wars in Ukraine or Syria or Gaza, economic policy, immigration, religion, global warming, or the leaders of countries. All those are legitimate, er, issues, over which reasonable people may disagree.

Real issues

Issues (in the legitimate meaning of the word) came up at a scholarly panel over the “percentages” agreement. That was the “spheres of influence” agreement in eastern Europe, between Churchill and Stalin at the “Tolstoy” conference in October 1944. That, it was said at the time, proved that Churchill and Britain were no different than Stalin and Russia. Both sides had identical objectives, i.e., their own national interests. But British interests in Greece involved things like the ouzo concession for Harrods, or maybe Greek support for British Mediterranean policy. Soviet interest in Romania were everything Romania had or could produce.

There are those who would have us believe that the Western democracies are no better than Nazis, Soviets, or Islamofascists. We hear the line quite often nowadays. A High Personage will suggest that the displacement of Palestinians after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was morally equivalent to the Holocaust.

Right, that’s an issue. Why then are there no “issues” over other forced migrations since 1945? Such as sixteen million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in India; 800,000 Jews from Arabia; Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars “relocated” by Stalin; Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin islanders; or Italians in Istria? What about three million ethnic Germans in Silesia and the Sudetenland? Or, more recently, the Greeks of Turkey and Cyprus and the Vietnamese boat people?

“Many of these refugees built new lives and a higher standard of living than in the lands they left,” wrote Andrew Roberts. “None are today actively demanding the right to murder people who have now lived in their former lands for over seven decades.” Sorry. I digress.

A shade of difference

Celebrate Mr. O’Reilly’s modest proposal: Avoid fashionable filters and fad-words in language. “Short words are best,” Churchill said, “and the old words, when short, are best of all.” His thoughts and deeds, however antique they may sound today, still represent concepts we can understand. No issues there.

Related reading

“Churchill on Jargon: The Language as We Mangle It,” 2019.

“Churchill on Jargon: “Let Us Have an End to This Grimace,” 2024.

“Athens, 1944: Some Lighter Moments in a Serious Situation,” 2020.

“Churchill, Orwell and 1984.” 2022.

“Churchill’s War Memoirs: Aside from the Story, Simply Great Writing,” 2023.

Virgil Exner

(From Part 1….) Motorcar designers rarely become household names. Yet every kid in late-Fifties America knew of Virgil Exner. Through them, their parents knew of him, and bought his cars. To become as famous as Ex was by, say, 1958, a designer has to create something singular—something that heralds a new epoch. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Ex did just that. He was the “father of the tailfin.” And the tailfin (copyright Chrysler Corporation, 1956) was as recognized a symbol of late Fifties America as Elvis Presley.

Ex at Chrysler

Virgil, his son  recalled, “wasn’t exactly the most welcome person who ever showed up at Chrysler Corporation:

Predecessor stylists viewed him as a usurper. Dad set up a small studio and began working on his own, without a definite production goal but relatively free to come up with some good workouts. With these he hoped to point Chrysler in what he felt was the right direction.

Certainly past directions had been doubtful:

Dad called the Chrysler Town & Country a “lumber wagon.” He looked upon it as a car that “hadn’t been uncrated.” He liked woodies, but was very much a believer in the all-steel station wagon [pioneered by Plymouth in 1949]. Of course he thought the boxy 1949 Chrysler body styles were just awful. [Chief body engineer] Henry King was a good designer, but really his talents were kind of wasted through that era.

Changing the image

Exner’s first projects were a remarkable line of show cars, designed to prefigure production car styling. President Keller and Tex Colbert, who replaced Keller when K.T. became Chairman in late 1950, had always liked Chrysler’s clean-lined prewar idea cars, the Thunderbolt and Newport. They wanted more of them. “Old K.T.” is often blamed for Chrysler’s boxy look in the early 1950s. In fact, he was acutely aware of, and meant to change, this styling disadvantage.

In 1949, Keller had asked Pininfarina to explore future styling directions with a trim four-door sedan on a New Yorker wheelbase. Later, in 1951, Ghia in Turin produced the Plymouth XX500 special. Virgil, Jr. told this writer that the XX500 “was brought over by Ghia to show Chrysler their ability and craftsmanship. It was pretty dumpy, but it started the whole idea in Dad’s mind that they could build real experimental cars, as opposed to mock-ups.”

Chrysler engineer Fred Zeder, a fan of Exner’s, remarked: “We like to see just how these ideas work out in an actual, operating automobile.” Rival companies “build dream cars which quite obviously couldn’t be produced on an assembly line.” Exner chose Ghia over Pininfarina because Ghia could produce one-offs at modest cost. His first Ghia special, the K310, cost only $10,000, an astonishingly low figure, even then.

The Ghia-Chryslers

A classic car enthusiast and a student of world industrial design, Exner brought a sophisticated approach to Chrysler styling. He admired what he called the “Italian Simplistic School.” Italian designs “were thoroughly modern, with subtly rounded shapes and sharp accents indicative of genuine character.”

While Exner’s show cars were influenced and built by Ghia, most of them began life on his own drawing board. The K310 (K for Keller, 310 for its supposed horsepower) seriously influenced production design, notably the 1955 Imperial–as did its convertible counterpart, the C200.

Successor models were the Ghia Special, GS1 and d’Elegance. Here Exner introduced bold, squared-off grilles and combination bumper-grilles that were later seen in production cars. (Incidentally, the GS1 was evolved by Ghia into the VW Karmann Ghia—independent of Exner, of course, downsized, and minus GS1’s huge egg-crate grille).

Shown at Chrysler dealerships nationwide, the K310 and its successors sparked new interest in Chrysler design. Exner then began to contribute to production car styling. His influence on the restyled 1953-54s was slight, though he did spark more shapely, rounded forms than those of 1949-52.

The show cars that directly led to Exner’s glory years were the Parade Phaetons. Three 1952 Crown Imperials with production front clips were mounted on extended, 147 1/2-inch wheelbase chassis. Later they were updated with 1955-56 styling. Based on clay models from Exner’s studio, they featured a strong character moulding along the beltline, a rear fender “kick-up,” and big, open wheel wells. Even Exner didn’t anticipate the influence these cars would have–owing in part to events beyond his control.

Salvaging Chrysler

Chrysler Corporate sales in 1953-54 were grim. Four years of dull styling, coupled with a production blitz and heavy dealer discounting by GM and Ford, left Chrysler in a slump. By 1952, Ford had regained second place in American car production for the first time since the 1930s. In early 1953, Keller asked Exner’s opinion about the 1955 models then aborning. Exner had a look and replied in one word: “Lousy.”

“K.T. Keller kind of liked that,” Virgil, Jr. remembered, “since he was quite a strong character. So he said to my Dad: ‘Okay, you put it together—you have eighteen months.’ Dad swiped stuff off the parade phaetons and did manage to put the ‘55 line together in time. He did it with a tiny group of only seventeen people, including the modelers and four or five designers.”

(Virgil, Jr. refers here to the Imperial, Chrysler and DeSoto. The 1955 Dodge and Plymouth, although new, were not based on the Parade Phaetons, but designed separately by Henry King and Exner associate Maury Baldwin. Exner signed off on them too, of course. He had now become chief of Chrysler design.)

The “Forward Look”

The outcome of all this was the dramatically restyled 1955 model line. Almost overnight, they altered Chrysler history.

The most obvious descendant of the Parade Phaetons was the 1955 Imperial, one of the classic designs of the Fifties: uncluttered and understated, except for the gaudy ornaments on hood and deck, and the “gunsight” taillights, a throwback to the K310.

Chryslers had their own look, with huge “Twin Tower” taillights and smaller grilles surmounting a horizontal bar up front. DeSoto kept its established toothy grille, topped by an ornate bonnet badge. Its most radical feature was a “gullwing” dashboard, housing instruments and controls under the steering wheel and a glovebox/radio speaker at right.

Taking the lead

The 1955 Dodge and Plymouth also saw remarkable improvement, with longer, cleaner lines and curved body sides. Vastly altered, they didn’t seem related to their predecessors. Both enjoyed enormous buyer approval. All five makes were successful: Chrysler Corporation recorded the highest dollar volume and unit sales in its history, with a seventeen percent slice of ‘55 output compared to only thirteen in 1954.

In retrospect, there’s no doubt that the 1955 “Forward Look” Chrysler products were among the best American designs of their decade. Without the garish two- and three-tone paint jobs so many fashionably wore, they still look clean and well balanced today.

These were the cars which began to wrest the design leadership that had belonged to General Motors since the late 1920s. By 1957, Chrysler held one-fifth of the market and GM was hastening to keep pace. So was everybody else. It must have galled Raymond Loewy to see his famous coupes, now called Studebaker Hawks, sprout tailfins in a hasty attempt to ape Exner.

Birth of the tailfin

Virgil Exner had become a vice president, with a design staff of over 300 and a name known nationwide. His interest in the tailfin, the feature for which he was best known, became evident on the 1956 models. His son thought he was inspired by the Ghia Gilda, a dramatic fastback which was mainly one long fin. Also influential were the Alfa Romeo BAT and Chrysler’s own Dart show car.

“He was a staunch believer in fins,” Virgil Jr. continued:

The idea was to get some poise at the rear of the car–to get off of soft, rounded back ends, to get some lightness to the car. Fins were a way to do it aesthetically, and were genuinely functional. They ran tests at Chrysler and without trying to rationalize, they did work. They moved the centre of air pressure back, a little closer to the centre of gravity, provided more inherent directional stability. True, the effects weren’t much evident below 80 mph! It wasn’t a pure style, but it was functional. Dad always tried to make his tailfins as simple as possible, as opposed, say, to the 1959 “batwing” Chevrolet.”

Flite-Sweep styling

The best of Exner’s finned creations were the first “Flite-Sweep” models of 1957-58, particularly the simple, dramatic Chryslers. The most important thing about them was their revolutionary lowness, which was no accident. Exner had demanded that they stand five inches lower than the ‘56s. This was a huge reduction.

Chrysler engineers said it couldn’t be done. They did it anyway, with the help of such space saving innovations as 14-inch wheels, thin-section air cleaners, pre-formed headliners and (importantly) torsion bar front suspension.

With acres of glass, low beltlines and slim roof pillars, Flite-Sweeps were unchallenged by any rival and prefigured the shape of American cars for the next half decade. Coupled with such innovations as “Torsion-Aire” ride, TorqueFlite automatic and potent V-8 engines, they represented a pinnacle, a company reborn. They were Virgil Exner’s finest hour.

But time is always running. In mid-1956, as the Flite-Sweeps were about to be introduced, forty-seven-year-old Virgil Exner suffered a massive heart attack. Colbert brought in Bill Schmidt, late of Studebaker-Packard, as his temporary replacement. Ex recovered and returned to work a year later. But his post-1958 designs lacked the chiselled smoothness and drama of their predecessors, and sometimes just looked odd.

Tailfins grew higher, clumsier and less functional; Ex’s penchant for classic era features led to “toilet seat” spare tires on rear decks and “freestanding” headlamps, which on cars like the Imperial only looked bizarre. He did win a design award for his 1960 Plymouth Valiant and its clone, the ‘61 Dodge Lancer—Chrysler’s first compacts. But after all, he had always preferred light cars.

“Plucked chickens”

The last line of full-size Chrysler products designed completely under Exner came in 1962. It was a very mixed bag. The Chryslers were basically ‘61 models shorn of fins—Ex called them “plucked chickens.” Dodges and Plymouths emphasized his long bonnet/short deck concepts, but they were prematurely downsized, stubby in appearance. Sales dropped, overcome by full-size competition from GM and Ford.

Meanwhile Chrysler Corporation was suffering political upheavals and financial scandals. Shortly after the ascension of President Lynn Townsend in mid-1961, Elwood Engel replaced Exner as vice president of styling. By the early Sixties, GM styling was again pacing the industry.

Exner, who closely influenced the, chunky, chiselled 1963-64 models, remained a styling consultant through 1964. But it was clear that his Chrysler career was winding down.

Trail’s end

In 1961 Virgil joined his son in a private design firm, Virgil M. Exner Inc., in Birmingham, Michigan. Here he produced artwork for an Esquire project: three classic revivals, the Duesenberg II, Stutz Blackhawk and Mercer Cobra. Exner Inc. also engaged in automotive projects for U.S. Steel and Dow Chemical. Ghia’s Selene II, the Renault Caravelle and Bugatti Type 101 bore traces of his hand.

Virgil Max Exner died in 1973, leaving a legacy of imagination and innovation. Not only was he one of the few car stylists known broadly in America. He was the first to topple General Motors as Detroit’s styling leader. In a very real sense, too, Ex had saved Chrysler in the mid-Fifties. His cars were among the last that could trace their shape to a single gifted individual.

Bibliography

Richard M. Langworth: Chrysler and Imperial: The Postwar Years, 1976; Studebaker: The Postwar Years, 1979; Encyclopedia of American Cars 1930-1980, 1984. With Jan P. Norbye The Complete History of Chrysler Corporation: 1924-1985, 1985. Michael Lamm and David Holls: A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design, 1996. Author’s interviews: Maury Baldwin, Robert E. Bourke, Gordon M. Buehrig, Virgil M. Exner, Virgil Exner Jr., Eugene Hardig, Raymond Loewy, John Reinhart.

The great designers

“Virgil Exner, Part 1,  Studebaker: How Ex Marked His Spot,” 2024.

“Brooks Stevens: The Seer Who Made Milwaukee Famous,” 2022.

“The Greatness of Alex Tremulis,” Part 1 of a three-part article, 2020.

“‘All the Luck’—Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017.

“Indie Auto: Did Detroit Give Us the Dinosaurs?” 2023.

“Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” 2019.

The Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011 and is back in the news. The hitherto unsuccessful rebels have now taken over. (Whether they offer any better prospects for Syrians than the Assad regime is unclear.) So it is not entirely irrelevant to update this note about Syria from 2013.

In September that year, the political satirist Will Durst, “Pied Piper of the Potomac,” wrote in Summit Daily:

Everyone pretends not to be knee-deep in the icky, tricky, sticky Syria situation. You might say Washington is in a Semi-Syrious mode right now. And a Semi-Not-So-Syrious mode. Simultaneously. Because this whole affair is riddled with enigmas and mysteries enough to make Winston Churchill spin his conundrums right off. And rumor has it, he harbored huge conundrums.

I don’t know if Mr. Durst is a Churchillian, but he certainly has Churchill’s knack for coining words. “Syrious” ranks with Churchill’s “purblind worldlings”—the kind of people he often wished to “destrigulate.”* A lot of them are in Washington.

Forget the WW2 comparisons

The late, great  Churchillian Charles Krauthammer joined the Syria debate around the same time as Durst. The commentator Hugh Hewitt had asked CK whether  the present-day United States is the same one Churchill described in 1943 at Harvard: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

Was America still up to that? Hewitt asked. Attitudes about America’s role in the world are far different today than in Churchill’s time.

Of course they are. And Charles Krauthammer, sage as ever, cautioned against comparing modern situations like Syria (we might now add Ukraine or Gaza) to the Second World War, or modern political leaders to Churchill.

There is a difference of scale…. The Second World War was an existential struggle where the future of civilization was in the balance. It could be that Syria, or these other trouble spots, will develop into a World War-like conflict. But that is fairly unlikely right now. It is not a conflict in which the existence of ways of life is at stake. [Remember, this was in 2013.]

Syria and Assad are (or were) supported by Russia—at least ostensibly. That makes what happens there more important than it might otherwise be. There is no shortage of opinions as to what the U.S. or the West or free peoples should do about Syria and its leading ally. That is a ft subject for debate. But as to what Winston Churchill would do….please.

Strength and weakness

We may, however, learn from a piece of Churchillian advice from 1946, which may still be applicable. He was talking about the Russians, but it applies very broadly as a guide for general policy:

A name we all knew

Motorcar designers rarely become household names. Harley Earl, who invented the styling profession at General Motors in the 1920s, was better known after he retired. His successor, Bill Mitchell, more widely recognized, loved the limelight. He was always ready to be photographed riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in his chrome leather jacket.

Pininfarina’s name got round in America because it appeared on everything from Nashes to Ferraris, but relatively few knew of Nuccio Bertone, or even, later, Giorgio Giugiaro. The name Raymond Loewy was known to some through his gifted self-promotion. But Howard Darrin—similarly talented—was more famous as a 1930s custom body builder than a 1950s car designer.

Yet every kid in late-Fifties America knew of Virgil Exner. Through them, their parents knew of him, and bought his cars. To become as famous as Ex was by, say, 1958, a designer has to create something singular—something that heralds a new epoch. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Ex did just that. He was the “father of the tailfin.” And the tailfin (copyright Chrysler Corporation, 1956) was as recognized a symbol of late Fifties America as Elvis Presley.

Young Virgil

Like many automotive designers, Exner grew up with cars in his blood, transfused from the places he frequented. He was born and immediately adopted by German-American parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1909. Barely 17, he enrolled at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, near the busy factories of Studebaker. He dropped out of university for lack of money after 2 1/2 years and applied for work at a local firm, Advertising Artists, which produced Studebaker catalogues.

Michael Lamm and David Holls, in their seminal book, A Century of Automotive Style, tell us that Exner began by painting picture backgrounds: “But when his boss noticed how good he was, he gave Ex the task of illustrating Studebaker cars and trucks…. He also developed a knack for sculpting in clay, all of which later helped him as a car designer.”

In 1934, hearing about Harley Earl’s Art & Colour Studio at GM, Ex hied to Detroit and his first design position, at Frank Hershey’s Pontiac department. An early assignment was contributing to the visual unity of 1935 Pontiacs with the iconic “Silver Streak.” This was a broad band of grooved bright metal that ran from the grille down the hood and repeated on the deck. The Silver Streak was a Pontiac hallmark through 1956. When Frank Hershey was transferred to Opel in 1937, Exner became Pontiac’s chief stylist. But by that time he was already being courted by the famous Franco-American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy.

Ex meets Ray

Loewy, who had secured the Studebaker account in 1936, was in serious need for design talent. His eye soon lit on Virgil Exner. Harley Earl liked and admired Ex and wanted him to stay at GM. But Loewy offered a big salary increase and a New York location. Virgil moved his family to Long Island, only to find himself back in familiar South Bend in 1941, after Studebaker insisted that Loewy locate his design team at its factory.

In Indiana, Exner and clay modeler Frank Ahlroth were soon joined by Robert Bourke, who would later create Studebaker’s famous 1953 “Loewy coupe.” Following Pearl Harbor, Studebaker designers and engineers were harnessed to the war effort. Exner, Bourke and Ahlroth found themselves designing air-cooled turbocharged aircraft engines. In their spare time, the trio worked on ideas for the eventual postwar Studebakers. Meanwhile, as Bourke remembered, “Raymond Loewy was busy convincing management to accept these radical designs for the postwar era.”

“Weight is the Enemy”

Given the size of the design department and the minimal time for cars, Exner’s group had revolutionary ideas. Integral fenders were unheard of in those days. So were vast areas of curved glass, or doors cut into the roof. Loewy detested the use of chrome as embellishment. He preferred slim, tapered shapes, and practical devices like glass or clear plastic headlamp covers to improve streamlining.

Loewy also preached lightness, warning of the cost of excess weight in fuel consumption and performance. Throughout the studio, on walls, floors and ceilings, he posted signs reading: WEIGHT IS THE ENEMY.

Loewy told this writer: “I tried to convince management that there existed among Americans a segment, profitable to Studebaker, that could not find the kind of car they wanted among GM, Ford and Chrysler offerings. What these consumers wanted was a sleeker, compact automobile with European-type roadability and good acceleration.” A leading newspaper, he added, “credited me with being first to use the word ‘compact.’”

Raymond Loewy in those years was no longer a hands-on designer. Having brought his company to prominence, he preferred now to hire good talent, supervise their work, approve what they produced, and sell it to clients. Thus Loewy was rarely at South Bend. Virgil Exner became his point-man with Studebaker management. Inevitably, an antipathy developed between Loewy and Exner—and, more seriously, between Loewy and Studebaker chief engineer Roy Cole, a stolid Midwesterner who had never cared for the flamboyant Frenchman.

A certain discontent

Ex, who was doing a lot of the work, easily bought Cole’s argument that Loewy was more figurehead than contributor. “The problem was basically a disagreement in philosophy,” the evenhanded Bob Bourke remembered:

Ex felt that a man was either a designer or a promoter, but not both. To make matters worse, he felt Loewy received all the credit from management and the public.

Although I understood Ex’s viewpoint, I still held R.L. in high regard. I recognized the necessity of being a good salesman in this profession. Mr. Loewy also had a great “eye.” While he may not have created a certain line or contour, he knew instinctively when a designer had better than average talent and drive, and he would always bring out the best that designer had to offer the client.

While Ex and Cole nursed discontent, the Loewy team began evolving postwar Studebakers. They began slowly, but with more urgency as the war neared its end. More personnel came on board. Exner found himself heading a distinguished circle: Bourke, Gordon Buehrig, Holden Koto, Ted Brennan, John Cuccio, John Reinhart, Vince Gardner and Jack Aldrich.

Reinhart would later design the image-shattering 1951 Packards and direct styling for the 1956 Continental Mark II. Gardner would contribute to the Mark II and other Ford designs. Buehrig was noted for his rakish prewar Auburns and Cords. Koto would aid Bourke on Studebakers through the ‘53, and he and Bourke freelanced the front clip of the ‘49 Ford. Loewy considered this team the best in the industry.

Studebaker’s radical postwar plans

The 1947 Studebakers were the first all-new designs from a prewar car company. They were conceived by the Loewy Studios under Virgil Exner. As early as 1942, they had settled on a full-width body rather than freestanding fenders. Later they integrated the fenders with the body sides, but left enough of a bulge to avoid a slab-sided appearance. They developed a curved one-piece windshield; a wrap-around backlight (for what became the 1947-52 Starlight coupe) and a long, tapered rear deck. Although many rival companies developed similar ideas, Studebaker put them into production at years before anyone else.

The break between Raymond Loewy and his ambitious young designer came in the spring of 1944. As Exner recalled, one morning Roy Cole walked into his office, accompanied by Studebaker President Harold Vance. Cole had a proposal. Would Ex undertake secretly to design a production car, independent of the Loewy Studios?

He didn’t trust Loewy to come up with anything practical, Cole explained, but couldn’t prove he was right without competition. Vance nodded agreement, but cautioned that Ex would have to work on his own time at home. Neither he nor Cole were willing at that point to risk confrontation with Loewy, who was still under contract.

Exner told this writer that he didn’t take much persuading:

I agreed to start immediately. I cleared out one of my bedrooms at home and they sent me an eight-foot drafting board. Then we went into my basement, and they built me a quarter-scale clay modeling table. Eugene Hardig, who was then chief of chassis drafting, came out every day…. We worked on seating and chassis layouts…. This lasted about three to four months. On completion the rival design was still a pretty good secret, even at Studebaker.

Ex knew that his actions would seal his fate with Loewy, but he was young and ambitious, determined to show what he could do. Many can imagine how he felt, working against tight deadlines at home, visions of a revolutionary new car dancing in his head.

Dimensional shuffle

A curious error now came to Exner’s assistance. The initial dimensions Cole gave him for the new Studebaker Champion, like those handed to the Loewy team, were impractical. They called for a wheelbase of only 110 inches and a width of just 67 inches–much too small for a “family car.”

Ex remembered: “Roy Cole had a thing: His philosophy was that a car cost so much a pound. He stuck to that rigidly, and these were the dimensions he laid down. They were a little tough to work with.” That was an understatement. Cole’s proposed chassis was too narrow, the car too short, the entire geometry unworkable.

Exner pleaded for more generous dimensions. Surely they could allow 70 inches of width and open the Champion wheelbase to 113? (It expanded to 120 inches on the senior Commander, 124 on the stretched-out Land Cruiser.) Anxious to please his favorite stylist, Cole relented. Exner continues:

We then built an all-new wooden mock-up. The body drawings were simply opened up and a three-inch strip put down the center without changing the profile, and the wheels were moved back. Then the front end looked too short [so] I convinced Mr. Cole that we should add three inches to the fenders and two inches to the hood.

An inch here, an inch there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real changes. There was one other factor: Roy Cole didn’t bother to advise the competition. The “official” Loewy Studios team, still ostensibly under Exner, laboured on with a foreordained loser—“sort of an underhanded deal on the part of Cole,” Bob Bourke recalled…

because he was trying to get Loewy out of there. We did two full-sized plaster automobiles, and when management viewed them, they said they were just too narrow. In a matter of a week, we cut them right down the middle and expanded them out to where the Exner jobs were, but by then the Exner model was being tooled for production.

The break with Loewy

When Studebaker selected Exner’s rival model, Loewy exploded, jumped aboard the Twentieth Century Limited (which made him no happier because the train was designed by his arch rival Henry Dreyfus), and headed in high dudgeon for South Bend. There he fired Exner for disloyalty and insubordination. This had been foreseen: Ex was immediately rehired by Roy Cole as chief body engineer.

From a study of his design ideas and subsequent career, as well as the prototypes, it is virtually certain that the high hood and complicated stainless steel grille were Exner contributions to the original Loewy shapes. These were in some contrast to Loewy’s preferred sloping hood and minimal chrome. But Exner’s idea was probably more in keeping with contemporary tastes. “Ex favoured this type of hood more than I did,” Bourke said. “I was equally to blame, however, as I had done many studies for Ex along these lines.”

With Exner out, Bob Bourke became the head of the Loewy Studios at Studebaker. Through Roy Cole, Exner enjoyed job security, competing (unsuccessfully) with the Loewy team for the 1950-51 facelift with its famous “bullet-nose.” But Ex’s disloyalty to Loewy, and moreover to the likeable Bourke, did not endear him to many.

Nearing retirement, Cole realized he couldn’t protect Exner forever, and canvassed industry friends in need of a stylist. He found a berth at Ford, and the Exner family was about to move to Dearborn when Ford signed a design contract with George Walker. Cole then called his friend K.T. Keller, President of Chrysler. The rest, as they say, is history.

Continued in Part 2…

Related reading

“Why Studebaker Failed,” 2020.

“Why Packard Failed,” 2022.

“‘All the Luck’—Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017.

“Indie Auto: Did Detroit Give Us the Dinosaurs?” 2023.

“Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” 2019.

On 18 February 1900, young Winston Churchill rose for his maiden speech in the House of Commons. At its end, acknowledging his thanks to the House for having listened to him, he invoked the memory of his father:

I cannot sit down without saying how very grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me, and which have been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account, but because of a certain splendid memory which many Hon. Members still preserve.

In 1990 I made my own maiden speech at Westminster—not in the Chamber, if course, but nearby. Unlike Churchill’s, it was not followed by two or three thousand more. It was the only one. I was aware that such honors are fleeting. Once Churchill was shooting pheasants on the estate of his friend Bendor, the Duke of Westminster. “How many did you shoot?” the Duke asked him. “Two brace,” he replied. “Indeed,” said the Duke, “then you’ve shot enough, and I will have your carriage ordered for tomorrow morning.”

So before my carriage was summoned I managed to invoke a memory, or three So many superlatives have already been issued about Winston Churchill, it is scarcely necessary to create more. This occasion long ago sticks in my memory—not because of what I said, but what three people I quoted said. All of them knew him well. Here is the transcript….

Earl Alexander of Tunis

2 June 1990— Tonight marks the fiftieth anniversary of the final evacuations at Dunkirk. Fifty years ago at 3am tomorrow morning, General Sir Harold Alexander was the last soldier to leave, having patrolled the beaches to be sure there were none left behind.

“Alex” as Churchill called him was one of the great generals of the war. Who can forget the famous exchange between the Prime Minister and Alexander as the latter prepared to take command in North Africa?

“Your prime & main duty,” Churchill wrote, “will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt & Libya.

“2. You will discharge, or cause to be discharged, such other duties as pertain to your command without prejudice to the task described in paragraph 1.”

That order in Churchill’s own hand was given Alexander on 10 August 1942. And lodged in his memory was Alexander’s reply in 1943:

“Sir: The orders you gave me on August 10th, 1942 have been fulfilled. His Majesty’s enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitania. I now await your further instructions.”

It was typical of Alex, a man of few words, who in a calm, orderly and unflashy way simply got the job done. Churchill of course replied in kind: “Well, obviously we shall have to think of something else.”

Churchill’s singleminded obsession with victory typified his order to Alexander. And that reminds me of a similar memory recounted by a former naval person.

Earl Mountbattten of Burma

In October 1941, after being nearly drowned in the sinking of his ship, HMS Kelly,  Mountbatten was invited to Pearl Harbor. His task, he said, “was to address the American Pacific Fleet on what the war was like.” (This prompted laughter among his audience, at Edmonton, Canada. “Come on, come on!” he grinned. “That was before they came in.”)

“While there,” he continued, “the Prime Minister recalled me. He said he wanted me for another job. I was horrified, took my time getting back, and was immediately summoned.

“‘Why have you taken so long to answer my summons?’ he demanded. ‘You realise what I want you for? You are to relieve Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, who is in charge of Combined Operations.’

“I said: ‘Sir, if this means a desk in Whitehall, I would sooner be back at sea.’

“He retorted: ‘Have you no sense of glory? What could you do at sea, except to be sunk in a larger and more expensive vessel?’

*

“Now just think of this for a moment. It was October 1941. Our backs were to the wall, all our allies knocked out, Russia apparently on the point of defeat, no sign of the United States coming in. He went on:

“‘You will devise the appliances, the appurtenances, and the techniques necessary to get back onto the continent. You will get the greatest brains among the three services as your planners. In Combined Operations you will plan as one service. The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion against invasion from the Germans. You will turn this bastion into a springboard for our invasion!

“‘Unless we can land on the continent and beat the Germans in battle, we shall never win the war. All our headquarters are thinking defensively, except yours. Yours will think only offensively. You will go ahead and plan the invasion of Germany and you will let me know as soon as may be convenient when you will be ready to invade.’”

Grace Hamblin

My final memory is by Grace Hamblin. From 1932, she was his secretary, and then Lady Churchill’s. Later she became the first administrator of Chartwell under the National Trust. Grace’s memory was of January 1965, and the graveside ceremony at Bladon for his family and closest friends:

“At the end I went down with the family, and to me that quiet, humble service in the country churchyard was much more moving than had been the tremendous pomp and glory of the state ceremony in London.

“And I pondered what had made this dynamic but gentle character so beloved and respected, and such a wonderful person to work for. I think one found first of all that there was courage. He had no fear of anything, moral or physical. There was sincerity, truth and integrity, for he couldn’t knowingly deceive a cabinet minister or a bricklayer or a secretary. There was forgiveness, warmth, affection, loyalty and, perhaps most important of all in the demanding life we all lived, there was humour, which he had in abundance.

“One of those many, many letters Lady Churchill received in 1965 came from America, and it has always been in my mind: ‘That he died is unimportant, for we must all pass away. That he lived is momentous to the destiny of all. He is not gone. He lives wherever men are free.’”

To the greatest man in the world

The story goes (confirmed by Lady Soames) that a small boy eluded all security and arrived in Churchill’s bedroom at Chartwell. There he found The Presence, in bed riffling the newspapers and smoking an outsize cigar.

“My dad says you’re the greatest man in the world,” the precocious nipper said. “Is it true?”

“Certainly,” returned Sir Winston. “Now buzz off.”

That too sticks in the memory. (Actually, Lady Soames said, he used an earthier phrase, but in deference to my surroundings I edited it.)

And so we toast the heroic memory of the Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Knight of the Garter, Companion of Honour, Order of Merit, Fellow of the Royal Society. Never in the history of the Twentieth Century was so much owed, by so many, to one man.

Living in memory

“Grace Hamblin, Total Churchillian,” 2015.

“At Bladon: Echoes and Memories,” 2024.

Bradley Tolppanen, “Harold Alexander: Churchill’s Favorite General,” 2020.

Q: Smuggling Lenin

I listened to Larry Arnn and Hugh Hewitt in the Hillsdale Dialogue on Churchill’s The World Crisis, Part 25. I was shocked to hear that Germany instigated or engineered the Bolshevik Revolution by sending Vladimir Ilyich Lenin like a plague virus into Russia. Did I hear this correctly? What reading do you recommend on the subject? —J.P., Arkansas

A: A “mad, wild-eyed scheme”

Dr. Arnn is quite right: The Imperial German government purposely allowed Lenin to pass through occupied territory to Finland, en route to Russia Mitch Williamson, in Weapons and Warfare, provided a good summary:

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had found a safe refuge in Switzerland, where he continued to coordinate the underground activities of his small Bolshevik Party…. Contact was reduced to occasional courier messages and coded telegrams. So he was stuck, seething with frustration as the hated Czarist government collapsed in March 1917….

Finally, he struck on a plan that had a certain surreal quality to it…. Meeting with the German minister in Bern, Lenin laid out his proposal…that Germany would provide transport across their country and help to smuggle him into Finland. From there he would go into Russia, raise a revolution, seize control of the government, and pull Russia out of the war, freeing Germany to turn its full power to the Western Front.

The German minister in Bern, along with his intelligence advisors, must have had a difficult time concealing his grin of amusement over this mad, wild-eyed scheme…. Nevertheless the decision was made to approve it. At the very least it would provide a bit of consternation for the Western Allies, who were terrified that Russia might bail out of the war and it might even help to trigger further revolts in the Russian army, which was already disintegrating in the confusion resulting from the overthrow of the Czar.

For reference I recommend Martin Gilbert’s Official Biography, volume 4, World in Torment 1916-1922 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008). Also, Sir Martin’s one-volume work, Churchill: A Life (1991, just reissued), adds details not in his biographic volumes.

“A culture of typhoid”

The plan was authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. In a sealed railway car, Lenin and eighteen cohorts traveled over German-occupied or neutral territory to Helsinki. From Vyborg, then on the Finnish side of the border, they entered Russia. Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 16 April 1917. Churchill completes the story:

Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.

No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow, in Bern, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief.

With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.

Ten years later in The Aftermath, Churchill sharpened his analogy:

Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were already committed…. Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

Poet of Marxism

No less a wordsmith than Churchill could better describe what happened. In a few short months, the obscure dissident became master of the new Soviet state:

Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time…invented the Communist plan of campaign…gave the signal and he led the attack.

Implacable vengeance, rising from a frozen pity in a tranquil, sensible, matter-of-fact, good-humoured integument! His weapon logic; his mood opportunist; his sympathies cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean; his hatreds tight as the hangman’s noose. His purpose to save the world: his method to blow it up. Absolute principles, but readiness to change them.

Apt at once to kill or learn: dooms and afterthoughts: ruffianism and philanthropy. But a good husband; a gentle guest; happy, his biographers assure us, to wash up the dishes or dandle the baby; as mildly amused to stalk a capercailzie as to butcher an Emperor.

“The Grand Repudiator”

His old colleague Sir Colin Coote thought Churchill privately respected Lenin, believing that had he lived, Russia’s fate might have been different. This indeed was suggested in The Aftermath. Lenin, WSC writes,

repudiated God, King, Country, morals, treaties, debts, rents, interest, the laws and customs of centuries, all contracts written or implied, the whole structure—such as it is—of human society. In the end he repudiated himself.

He repudiated the Communist system…. proclaimed the New Economic Policy and recognized private trade. He repudiated what he had slaughtered so many for not believing…and how great is the man who acknowledges his mistake! Back again to wash the dishes and give the child a sweetmeat. Thence once more to the rescue of mankind….

When the subtle acids he had secreted ate through the physical texture of his brain, Lenin mowed the ground…. His body lingered for a space to mock the vanished soul. It is still preserved in pickle for the curiosity of the Moscow public and for the consolation of the faithful.

Lenin’s intellect failed at the moment when its destructive force was exhausted, and when sovereign remedial functions were its quest. He alone could have led Russia into the enchanted quagmire; he alone could have found the way back to the causeway. He saw; he turned; he perished. The strong illuminant that guided him was cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth: their next worst—his death.

Was Churchill right?

“Plague bacillus” is a chilling description, and Churchill’s view has been contested by historians. John Charmley quoted Lloyd George’s remark that Churchill’s “ducal blood revolted at the wholesale slaughter of Grand Dukes” in Russia. But Charmley also thought that

Churchill’s instincts were perhaps sounder than the legions of the good and the great who imagined that there was necessarily some relationship between Communist rhetoric and practice….

Churchill’s description of [Lenin] is certainly a trifle overblown: “His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs.” But it is hard to quarrel with [Churchill’s] comment that “in the cutting off of the lives of men and women, no Asiatic conqueror, not Tamerlane, not Jengiz Khan, can match his fame.”

The revolution stirred some of Churchill’s deepest instincts: his sense of history was touched by the fall of an ancient empire; the repudiation of treaties by the Bolsheviks and their withdrawal from the war aroused his indignation at treachery, whilst the overthrow of established authority affronted his deeply conservative sense of social order.

Second thoughts

Dr. Charmley offers a fair assessment, but there is one adjunct worth adding. It illustrates a lifetime Churchillian characteristic: magnanimity.

In March 1918, to Allied consternation, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, taking Russia out of the war. A month later, Churchill and Lloyd George were in France, pondering with the French how to bring Russia back in. In 1991 Martin Gilbert revealed WSC’s astounding proposal:

Churchill felt that if the former American President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was then in Paris, or the former French Minister of War, Albert Thomas, “were with [Soviet Military Commissar Leon] Trotsky at the inevitable moment when war is again declared between Germany and Russia, a rallying point might be created sufficiently prominent for all Russians to fix their gaze upon.

“Some general formula, such as ‘safeguarding the permanent fruits of the Revolution,’ might be devised which would render common action possible having regard to the cruel and increasing pressure of the Germans.” The Entente representative might become “an integral part of the Russian Government.”

Sir Martin learned of Churchill’s surprise suggestion after writing the Official Biography. Though WSC made it long before he learned of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s later depredations, it was still remarkable. Yet it was not atypical of Churchill’s attitude.

“I first revealed this in the late 1980s, to a roomful of Soviet dignitaries at a Moscow lecture,” Sir Martin told me. “You could have heard a pin drop.”

Related reading

“The Zinoviev Letter and the Red Scare, 1924: Was Churchill Involved?” 2024.

“Zionism, Bolshevism, and Enemies of Civilization: What Churchill Said,” 2021.

“Churchill, Henry Ford and Sidney Reilly: Anti-Bolshevik Collaborators?” 2022.

“Churchill and the White Russians: The Russian Civil War, 1919,” 2019.

The revolving door bust belongs to the British Embassy. It has twice resided on loan in the Oval Office. Ipso facto, it has twice returned to the Embassy. It is now making its third visit to the White House. Perhaps it should hang on a Zip line between the two buildings to convenience the spirit of the moment.

Whenever the Epstein makes a trip back or forth, the media explodes in speculation. Does this signify the end [renewal] of the Anglo-American Special Relationship? Is it a gesture of disdain [admiration] by the new president? Does this mean there won’t [will] be a trade deal between America and the post-Brexit United Kingdom?

There is much ignorance and confusion over this subject. So here is the latest revision of a story that began in 2009, was amended in 2017 and 2021, and needs amending again.

Tale of two busts

It is necessary to explain that there is more than one Epstein bust. The renowned sculptor cast eight or ten from his original mold. Naturally, they are highly prized. One is at Windsor Castle, another at Blenheim. A few are in private hands. I sold one myself to a collector in Connecticut when I was a Churchill bookseller.

(Epstein himself lived opposite the Churchills in Hyde Park Gate, London. Puttering in his garden, he took delight in answering visitors’ questions about his neighbors: “People thought I was the gardener.”)

Epstein #1: in the White House since 1965

There has been a Jacob Epstein bust of Sir Winston in the Executive Mansion since 1965. It was presented to the Johnson White House by wartime friends of WSC led by Averell Harriman.

This is “Epstein #1,” distinguished by a brass plaque, normally displayed outside the Treaty Room near the family quarters. Angela Baker provided a detailed history of this first Epstein in 2021.

This bust is frequently confused with a second Epstein (see below). In 2009, critics complained that Mr. Obama had replaced it with a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. He responded that had just changed its location, outside the Treaty Room near his private quarters.

Thus President Obama passed Epstein #1 every time he entered the Treaty Room on his way to watch a basketball game. So it can hardly be asserted that he was determined to rid the house of Churchill images.  Indeed, he made a point of showing Epstein #1 to Prime Minister David Cameron on his visit to the White House. (See photo above.) In describing this bust and his daily encounters with it, Obama said of Sir Winston, “I love the guy.”

Epstein #2: the revolving door bust

After 9/11, the British Embassy loaned President George W. Bush its own Epstein Churchill bust as a gesture of solidarity. It is, of course, identical to other Epsteins. The only difference from Epstein #1 is that its plinth bears a white-on-black, not a brass, plaque.

In 2009, before Mr. Obama arrived, Epstein #2 was returned to the Embassy. It was not returned specifically by Obama, although he received blame. There are stories that he rejected the image out of hatred toward the former prime minister, British colonialism, or something. This is incorrect. If he felt that way. he would not have kept Epstein #1 on prominent display upstairs.

In 2017 President Trump asked the Embassy to loan back the second bust—let’s call it “Epstein #2″—which had adorned the Oval Office under George W. Bush (2001-09). Pending its arrival, Trump temporarily moved Epstein #1 downstairs from its previous position outside the Treaty Room. When Epstein #2 arrived from the Embassy, Epstein #1 went back upstairs.

Epstein #2 is on loan

James Barbour, British Embassy press secretary, explained: Epstein #2 was “lent to the George W. Bush Administration from the UK’s government art collection, for the duration of the presidency.” White House curator William Allman said in 2010 that the decision to return Epstein #2 had been made before Mr. Obama arrived. “It was already scheduled to go back.”

It is true that the incoming Obama administration was offered Epstein #2 on extended loan out of courtesy, but wanted to make room for a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. They might well have known the White House had another Epstein Churchill already. Trump did not remove the King bust when he brought back Epstein #2. “I would never do that,” he said, “because I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Now in 2024, the Daily Mail reported:

The bronze bust was removed by “woke” Joe Biden when he defeated Trump in 2020 and was replaced by one of Hispanic union leader Cesar Chavez. Trump, a self-professed Anglophile whose mother was Scottish, has described the wartime leader as his “idol” and called the Oscar-winning 2017 film Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman as Churchill, “my favourite film ever.” Last night a source close to Trump said: “One of the first things he will do is bring the Churchill bust back into the Oval Office as a mark of respect. Donald idolises Churchill and believes he’s the greatest leader the world has ever seen. He will restore him to a position of honour.”

All this may be accurate but the Mail seems not to realize that Epsstein #1 has been there all along.

Teapot tempest

I greeted the 2009 return of Epstein #2 to the British Embassy with facts, then with reductio ad absurdum. The Obama White House, I reported, had more Churchilliana than the Bush White House, since Epstein #2 was replaced with Winston S. Churchill, Martin Gilbert’s majestic biography, which weighs almost as much and takes up more space.

In 2012, journalist Jake Tapper blasted out the fact that Epstein #1 had been there all along. Tapper wrote: “How did I figure out what was really going on? I never gave in—never, never, never, never. In nothing great or small, large or petty.” Very droll, Jake.

Some modest proposals…

Now that Epstein #2 is going back on loan to the Oval Office, another kerfuffle has arisen on predictable lines. On which, a few observations:

1) Together with the Official Biography, presented to President Obama by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the White House is brimming with Churchilliana. Churchill admirers must regard this as a fine thing.

2) As to its alleged symbolism for the Anglo-American Special Relationship, I recommend a rather broader perspective offered a few years ago by the American Embassy in London. Click here and scroll to the video.

Totems of their choice

While Churchillians are glad to see WSC’s bust in the Oval Office, all presidents have the right to the totems of their choice. A correspondent with whom I rarely agree about anything hit the nail on the head when he cited Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in one of the flag salute cases in 1943:

Related articles

“President Obama and the Churchill Bust-Out,” 2009.

“More Obama and the Churchill Bust,” 2009.

“The Great Oval Office Bust Swap,” 2017.

The perfect subject

Tim Benson, Churchill: A Life in Cartoons (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024), 224 pages, Amazon $32.99, Kindle $14.99.

Tim Benson, of London’s Political Cartoon Gallery and Café, now turns his attention to a figure cartoonists loved to praise, ridicule and lampoon. Sometimes Churchill received all those treatments at once—notably by the great David Low. In 1954 Low penned a magnificent tribute showing the eighty-year-old Prime Minister being congratulated by all his previous incarnations. The caption was sincere: “To Winston, from his old friend and castigator, Low.”

Significantly, Churchill never resented the negative attention. His daughter Mary told Mr. Benson that in her youth she was “mystified” by what she deemed cruel and callous drawings of her father hanging around Chartwell. Indeed, he often bought and framed some.

Praising Low in his essay “Cartoons and Cartoonists,” Churchill asserted that politicians feared neglect more than ridicule. They were “offended and downcast” when the cartoons stopped: “We are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days are ended.”

Churchill was irresistible to scribblers. His many characteristics and “props” were gifts to them: the stooped posture, tiny hats and balding locks of the young MP; the spotted bow tie, siren suit, cigar and V-sign of the seasoned statesman. All that, and his political prominence, made Churchill a central cartoon character for half a century.

A wartime chronicle

Given the vast Churchill cartoon universe, Tim Benson concentrated on greatest events. Thus the division into nine sections: “1914-20” covers the Great War and its aftermath; “1931-39” is entirely devoted to Appeasement and rearmament. The Second World War occupies six sections, 1940-45; and there is a brief postwar coda.

The book skips the young war correspondent and Conservative-turned-Liberal, who provided much grist for early cartoonists. Nor do we glimpse the Colonial Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer cartoonists lampooned in the 1920s. What we do get is a cartoon account of the years of Churchill’s greatest impact. Here Tim Benson is in his depth, providing many drawings few readers will have seen.

With the exception of the omitted periods, this is as comprehensive a reference as one could imagine. Early in the Great War, Churchill is pictured alongside an English bulldog. As First Lord of the Admiralty in Nelsonian garb, he hurls defiance at the Germans—who hurl it back. (Lüstige Blatter, the German humor magazine that mocked him in the Second World War, was already targeting him in the First.)

The Benson collection

The depth of this book can only be appreciated by owning a copy. Despite the cost (more on that later), no Churchillian should be without it. It is a kaleidoscope of WSC’s life and times.

For instance, I wrote of Churchill’s friend Hilaire Belloc, who toasted WSC’s departure from the government to fight in Flanders in 1915: “They drank Winston’s health and sang the French children’s song ‘Malbrouck s’en vat’en guerre’ (Marlborough goes off to war). They congratulated Churchill for “breaking loose from his official bondage to the gang of incapables….”

What fun to be reminded of Belloc’s tribute by the great cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed, on page 18! Deftly, Benson accompanies the drawing with Churchill’s remarks after his first twelve days in the trenches: “I always get on with soldiers…. Do you know I am quite young again?”

Finest hours

A Life in Cartoons devotes itself mainly to the Second World War. The uplifting spirit of British cartoonists in the black days of 1940-41 is at once evident. A glow of resolve swept Britain; there were no carping media midgets such as we hear from today. That was a time, as Churchill put it, “when it was equally good to live or die.” Benson’s coverage invokes the spirit of thorse hard, glorious times.

Enemy cartoonists feature prominently. Early in 1940, the Daily Worker trumpets Churchill leading the poor little neutrals into war. Benson balances this with Leslie Illingworth’s drawing of a Nazi crocodile sprawled across Europe. Underneath it is Churchill’s quip: “Each [neutral] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

The pace picks up as Hitler invades Russia. Now German cartoonists wonder whether Stalin or Churchill will betray the other first. But the alliance holds. The Daily Sketch pictures Roosevelt leading a sailing race in a boat marked “Lend-Lease.” Melbourne’s Herald adds a dose of Aussie humor: Tojo being fed a cigar (lit end first), and wrestler Churchill putting a toe-hold on a screaming Mussolini.

Soon after Russia is invaded, the enemy-become-ally protests the lack of a “Second Front.” Pravda’s Boris Efimov regularly ridiculed Churchill’s “stalling,” Benson notes. As D-Day approaches, the Daily Sketch shows southern England bristling with tanks, guns, Americans, and a cigar-equipped figure saying: “First of all, gentlemen, welcome to our right little, tight little island.”

Depth and erudition

The array of rarely- or never-seen cartoons shows that this book could only be assembled by someone with a vast reach for material. For instance, Benson relies on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (where else?) for Hal Coffman’s wry drawing of May 1940, when Churchill replaced Chamberlain. As Neville bails out of the government aircraft, Winston quips: “I always did wonder why you carried that umbrella.”

It is important also to note Benson’s narrative richness. He carefully explains the meaning of each cartoon, which today can be obscure. A typical example is “The Obstruction” by Jimmy Friell, in a 1944 edition of the Daily Worker: The Curzon Line being blocked by a soldier representing the exiled Warsaw government. Poland, Benson explains, objected to having its borders shifted. This high-quality research adds a vital dimension rarely found in art books.

An indispensable work

A small bone to pick has nothing to do with the author’s work. The cramped, horizontal, 8×7-inch format is disappointing in such a work. Yet the small pages contain a vast amount of white space that could have housed larger type and images. Many cartoons are too small to be fully appreciated without a magnifying glass.

Such a volume deserves a larger format and the option of a hardback, since it is not likely to gather dust. Readers will repeatedly pull it out for reference, and hardbacks hold up better.

The author’s erudition and vast resources deserved more from his publishers, who, though distinguished, do him a disservice. (I remember Heinemann, thirty years ago, refusing a minimal commitment to continue the companion volumes of the official biography. Martin Gilbert’s supporters went cap in hand to an old friend of Sir Winston for a donation that produced three more. Ultimately and thankfully, Hillsdale College took over and finished the job.)

Tim Benson (full disclosure) is an old friend who has aided this writer countless times over the years. Knowing in advance of his expertise, I expected the high quality of his work. Perusing the book is a never-ending revelation, and it quickly grows on you. A Life in Cartoons deserves a place in every serious Churchill library.

More on cartoons and cartoonists

“‘The Charlie Chaplin of Caricature’: Churchill on David Low,” 2020.

“Poy (Percy Fearon): The Classic Churchill Cartoonist,” 2022.

“Echoes and Memories: Foreword to Gary Stiles’s Churchill in Punch,” 2022.

“In Search of Winston Churchill’s First Political Cartoon,” 2021.

William John Shepherd, “Gary Stiles Offers a Brilliant Catalogue of Mr. Punch’s Churchill,” 2022.