journal of the churchill center and societies - Winston Churchill

Light Souffle...
celebrity as President of the Oxford
Union in 1911, and was described by
David Walter, one of his successors, as
one of the all-time greats in that office:
"He was so well-known and admired as
an undergraduate that people stared at
him as he walked down the High
Street. His epigrams are said to have rivalled
Oscar Wilde's. He was the ultimate
champion of style over content."
Guedalla found later that the polished
style he had honed at the Oxford
Union did not always go down well at
the hustings. He failed in four attempts
to win election to the House of Commons
from 1922 to 1931. As Lord
Elton observed, "Working-class audiences...were
sometimes mystified by
speeches which retained all the epigrammatic
glitter of his Oxford Union
days."
The glitter still shines. Consider
Guedalla's comment on the events of
1915: "The cause of national unity demanded
the elimination of Lord Haldane,
who had made the Army, and of
Winston Churchill, who had mobilized
the Navy." Or consider this very Oxonian
picture of Churchill in political isolation
in the early 1920s: "Life as an
anti-Socialist Stylite on a lonely pillar
in the political Thebaid would lead
nowhere." (There is nothing wrong
with dispatching the reader to consult
the dictionary now and again.)
It is striking to contrast Mr.
Churchill With the very different picture
the author drew back in 1924, in a
collection of portraits entitled A
Gallery. There, one is startled to read
that "High up on the short waiting-list
of English Mussolinis one finds the
name of Winston Spencer Churchill."
Seventeen years later Churchill had not
changed—but Guedalla had. Instead of
comparing him to Mussolini, Guedalla
in 1941 likened Churchill to British
leaders who had faced and defeated
continental autocrats who had tried to
dominate the whole of Europe, placing
him alongside Cecil, Marlborough and
Pitt, and concluding, "Mr. Churchill is
not far from Chatham."
Mr. Churchill was written at a
time that was terrible and yet stirring.
It has within it the glow of that momentous
hour, and this is the best reason
for reading it. Here is Churchill in
his prime, taking his place with the
other great leaders of British history,
from the days of the Spanish Armada
onward, defying the tyrants, standing
guard to protect the heritage of freedom
that is the birthright of the English-Speaking
Peoples. This is the
Churchill the world remembers best.
Guedalla offers a snapshot of the man
taken at the pinnacle of fame, a fact
that gives his book a certain drama absent
from more detached and detailed
studies drawn long after the storm was
over. Philip Guedalla tried to write a
portrait of a man; he succeeded better
in preserving the special flavor of a remarkable
epoch.
Sir Winston's Other Wmd—and Jack LeVien's
It's Higk Time for a New Video on Churchill's Paintings
The Other World of Winston
Churchill. Produced by Jack LeVien,
1964. Videotape, 54 minutes
Film maker Jack LeVien, a Churchill
fan who produced the favorable
documentary "The Finest Hours," is
less well known for his "The Other
World of Winston Churchill," a documentary
about Churchill's pastime of
painting in oils.
Unfortunately, not all of its 54
minutes are devoted to its proclaimed
subject, and there is some pretty corny
stuff: extensive stock footage showing
what people do for leisure—everything
except paint, it seems—while the voice
of Churchill, provided by an actor,
talks about the need for hobbies (or
doesn't talk at all). On the positive side,
there is a touching if halting testimony
by Churchill's artist friend Paul Maze,
author of A Frenchman in Khaki, for
which Churchill wrote the foreword in
1934. Maze, who was one of
Churchill's artist-coaches, doesn't tell
us much about his technique, but is
eloquent on what Churchill meant to
patriotic Frenchmen.
; There is also some superb footage
of Churchill, especially that from his
earlier years, although a still of him in
1901 is used to portray him during the
Dardanelles crisis of 1915. Some of the
later illustrations are haphazardly captioned.
A shot of WSC in the 1951
election is said to be from 1945;
panned shots of the brick walls at
Chartwell built by himself include
much higher walls he did not build;
the sign on the wall he did construct,
"...built by Winston with his own
FINEST HOUR 108/40