A new Phrase Index to Churchill quotes is available.

My Churchill quotations book, Churchill By Himself, is being updated and corrected for a new edition called Churchill in His Own Words, with an eventual e-book version as well. It contains a new Key Phrase Index that will greatly assist readers in finding the quotation they require.

Since the pagination of the new book will not change (we found only one quote which had to be removed as fictitious), the Phrase Index can also be used by present owners of Churchill By Himself. For a copy please contact me.

This new index contains close to 500 Churchill phrases entries from “Abdullah is in Transjordania where I put him” to “Zionism, my heart is full of sympathy for,” and the most famous lines from the immortal World War II speeches.

Churchill By Himself contains a 15-page index which includes quite a few key phrases, while leaving many out. There was no room to add more pages, but the publishers kindly agreed to let me replace the least-used Appendix  (“The Biblical Churchill”) with a Phrase Index that offers many familiar lines readers are likely to seek.

The list also doubles as a handy quick-read for Churchill’s wit and wisdom. Browse through the entries and you’re sure to find some that are either familiar enough, or intriguing enough, that you’ll want to look up the exact words, date and place in the book.

If, even with this tool, you still can’t find what you are looking for, send me a Tweet (@rmlangworth) or an email.

“The Biblical Churchill” is not lost. It has been posted in three parts on this website, starting here.

Churchill in His Own Words will be published by Ebury Press/Random House in September 2012.

Pocohantas (Wikimedia Commons)

A colleague forwards Mark Steyn’s hilarious rant on Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts politician who passed herself off as a native American (because she has “high cheekbones”) in order get invited to lunch (and not, understand, for any career advantage).

“A friend got his son into a better public school by saying he was a native American,” my colleague writes. “Unfortunately they didn’t tell the kid, so he was quite bewildered when the principal approached him one day about an after-school meeting for those interested in Indians. He also told me that this city you can change your racial identification, but only once.”

During a recent encounter with the medical world I was handed one of those questionnaires with the inevitable question “Race.” I checked, “Other” and then wrote in “Human,” hoping for a repercussion—but alas no one noticed.

I was inspired by Randolph Churchill, son of Sir Winston, who used a parallel but obviously different tactic when confronting the Race Question on a South African landing card in the old days of Apartheid:

“Damned cheek!,” said Randolph, and he began writing furiously:

Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case, the object of this enquiry is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocohontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe …

The story goes that the authorities did not take this too well. Upon landing Randolph was denied admission to the Republic of South Africa and put on the next plane out….

_____________

Historical note: A leading Churchill myth is that Winston was descended in part from an Iroquois Indian. Even the myth does not claim Pocohantas, who has been linked as an ancestor to two American First Ladies, Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan, but not to the Churchills. I suspect Randolph knew this, but with his usual zeal was adding to the legend to express his outrage.

“Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour…”

Continued from Part 2…

On 19 June 1940, Churchill made his first broadcast as Prime Minister, a speech which lifted the hearts even of his former and current critics. “A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders,” he said, adding forthrightly that the Germans, “by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks, have broken through the French defences.”

In assuring his listeners that Britain would fight on, Churchill chose a majestic coda, an obscure Biblical allusion, for the first and only time in all his writings and speeches. It proved to be exactly right for the occasion:

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the Outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.[1]

Even some Biblical scholars were uncertain about the origins of this phrase, and with good reason. It is from I Maccabees 3:58-60, a text not found in every Bible. Further, Churchill altered the quotation. Evidently the writer in him could not resist an editorial improvement. The original words were:

 58. And Judas said, Arm yourselves, and be valiant men, and see that ye be in readiness against the morning, that ye may fight with these nations, that are assembled together against us to destroy us and our sanctuary: 59. For it is better for us to die in battle, than to behold the calamities of our people and our sanctuary. 60. Nevertheless, as the will of God is in heaven, so let him do.

There are two Books of the Maccabees, also spelled “Machabbes,” none of which is in the Hebrew Bible but all of which appear in some manuscripts of the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, since they are canonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. They are also included in the Protestant Apocrypha, which is probably where Churchill read them.

Churchill’s first broadcast as Prime Minister caught the imagination of millions. Sir Martin Gilbert has collected some of those reactions that very evening, Trinity Sunday, 19 May, in Volume VI of the official biography.

Anthony Eden wrote: “You have never done anything as good or as great. Thank you, and thank God for you.” Lord Halifax, who nine days later would urge approaching the Germans for armistice terms, was momentarily bowled over: “It was worth a lot,” he wrote from the Foreign Office, “and we owe you much for that, as for a great deal else, in these dark days.” The Evening Standard declared the broadcast a speech of “imperishable resolve.”[2]

Stanley Baldwin

Perhaps the most unexpected, a note that must have encouraged Churchill, came from his old chief Stanley Baldwin, who had done more than any other British leader to put the country in so perilous a state of readiness, but who on 19 June was moved more perhaps than at any other time:

My dear PM, I listened to your well known voice last night and I should have liked to have shaken your hand for a brief moment and to tell you that from the bottom of my heart I wish you all that is good—health and strength of mind and body—for the intolerable burden that now lies on you. Yours always sincerely, SB[3]

“A House of Many Mansions”

Continued from Part 1…

The New Testament Gospel according to St. John, Chapter 14, contains an inspiring passage that the young Winston must have read and re-read as a boy:

1. Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. 4. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

Churchill particularly liked verse 2, “a house of many mansions,” and used it during five important moments in his career. The first apparent instance was in Dundee, Scotland in May 1908, which he won and would hold for fourteen years. Here he spoke of the broadness and diversity of the British Commonwealth:

Cologne Cathedral took 600 years to build. Generations of architects and builders lived and died while the work was in progress….So let it be with the British Commonwealth. Let us build wisely, let us build surely, let us build faithfully, let us build, not for the moment but for future years, seeking to establish here below what we hope to find above—a house of many mansions, where there shall be room for all.[1]

The thought remained with him three years later, when as Home Secretary he said in London:

The British Empire must be a house of many mansions, in which there shall be room for each and all to develop to the fullest his personal or national contribution to the common united welfare and to the strength of the indivisible whole.[2]

The words from St. John lodged comfortably in his commodious memory for almost thirty years before Churchill found need of them again, this time to assure peoples under the Nazi boot that their ultimate liberation was sure:

The day will come when the joybells will ring again throughout Europe, and when victorious nations, masters not only of their foes, but of themselves, will plan and build in justice, in tradition, and in freedom, a house of many mansions where there will be room for all.[3]

Teheran, 1943: Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill

He certainly thought this a serviceable line, because he invoked it to President Roosevelt in 1943, quoting only the chapter and verse—since he knew FDR kept a Bible handy. The President had cabled that Cairo, their proposed meeting place before the Teheran Conference with Stalin, was vulnerable to German air attack, and had wondered if they should choose another rendezvous. Churchill replied in nine words: “See St. John, chapter 14, verses 1 to 4.”[4]

The text of those verses was typed on the message by his Map Room staff. “On reading this through more carefully after it had gone,” Churchill wrote, “I was a little concerned lest, apart from a shadow of unintended profanity, it should be thought I was taking too much upon myself and thus giving offence. However, the President brushed all objections aside and our plans were continued, unchanged.”[5]

Again at Fulton in 1946, in perhaps his most crucial speech of the postwar years, Churchill argued for a continuation of the Anglo-American “special relationship” born in World War II. There was nothing in the United Nations Charter, he said, that precluded any special relationships between countries:

None of these clash with the general interest of a world agreement, or a world organisation; on the contrary they help it. ‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’ Special associations between members of the United Nations which have no aggressive point against any other country, which harbour no design incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations, far from being harmful, are beneficial and, as I believe, indispensable.[6]

“In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” —St. John 14:2[1]

“Arm yourselves, and be valiant men, and see that ye be in readiness against the morning…For it is better for us to die in battle, than to behold the calamities of our people and our sanctuary. Nevertheless, as the will of God is in heaven, so let him do.” —I Maccabees 3:58-60[2]

“More than to any other book or group of books, Churchill alludes to the King James Bible,” wrote Darrell Holley in Churchill’s Literary Allusions:

It is for him the primary source of interesting illustrations, descriptive images, and stirring phrases. His knowledge of the Bible manifests itself in direct quotations, in paraphrased retellings of Biblical stories, and in his frequent, perhaps even unconscious, use of Biblical terms and phrases. The Tower of Babel, Belshazzar’s feast…the millstone around the neck, the “great gulf fixed” between Paradise and Hell [from Luke 16:26] the last great Battle of Armageddon—these occur often in Churchill’s writing.”[3]

All this may come as a surprise to casual observers, since it is well known that Churchill was not a religious man. Having read the leading anti-religious tracts of the late 19th century, weighing them against the Anglican teachings of his boyhood, he held a pragmatic attitude toward spiritual questions: “I adopted quite early in life a system of believing what I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.”[4]

What moved Churchill was the beauty of the King James English, badly mutilated by “new revised” Bibles ostensibly designed to make them more “relevant.” He had an ear for the memorable phrase, and he never hesitated to deploy Biblical allusions both famous and obscure. One of each is sufficient to demonstrate his expertise. See Part 2….